June 2013

On The Death Of Google Reader And The Future Of Reading

You can’t say they didn’t warn you. On Monday, Google Reader will no longer be available. The search behemoth is putting its RSS reader to rest, leaving millions of dedicated users scrambling to find other platforms for organization of their news feeds and content exploration.

One of the leading contenders in the race to replace Google Reader is the recently relaunched Digg Reader. The man behind the effort is CEO Andrew McLaughlin. A former vice president of Tumblr, he also served as the White House’s deputy chief technology officer and headed up global public policy at Google. As Wired magazine puts it in a recent profile, “Dude has bona fides.”

Full piece

High School Library Trashed

With the majority of a high school library’s irreplaceable book collection documenting African-American history lost, the ire of the community grows.

Highland Park residents will hold a public meeting at 6 p.m. Monday at the city’s Nandi’s Knowledge Café on Woodward Avenue to discuss the loss and what, if anything, can be done.

“Our history was stolen, it was trashed,” said Linda Wheeler, a former special education teacher for the Highland Park School District said of the tossed books. “It rivaled the collections of many community colleges. You can’t put a value on that. It is malicious destruction, it’s a crime.”

Earlier this month thousands of books from the library of Highland Park Renaissance Academy were thrown in the trash. Wheeler said the collection consisted of 10,000 books.

Wheeler’s father and longtime resident Earl Wheeler said a parent volunteer in the district told him the library’s books were thrown out.

“There were at least four (trash bins) and two were left before we discovered what was happening,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler called historian Paul Lee, who rallied a group of volunteers. The group went at night with flashlights, climbed into two bins and retrieved 1,000 books.

Wheeler said he was told the library was being rehabilitated by the Leona Group, a charter management company that operates schools in Highland Park.

From The Detroit News.

The Taksim Square Book Club

Protest is taking a new form in Istanbul where I was fortunate enough to visit about a month ago. Individuals are standing in their beloved square and reading books of their choice.

Violent scenes are still occurring around Turkey, including in Istanbul once again this past weekend, but the Standing Man protests continue unabated.

The images in this article explore one aspect of the protest in Taksim Square, ongoing since before the communal standing took off. Public reading and informal education has been notable since the earliest days of the protest, but has since merged with the Standing Man to form “The Taksim Square Book Club”.

The chosen reading material of many of those who take their stand is reflective, in part, of the thoughtfulness of those who have chosen this motionless protest to express their discontent.

Weird Stuff You Can Check Out @ Your Library

From NPR (doesn’t that make me sound like Carl Kasell): weird stuff that can be borrowed from different public libraries.

Items include fishing poles, snow shoes, garden seeds, pictures for your walls and bridal magazines. Anyone out there in LISNews-land lend other non-book items? If so, please comment below.

The Future of Libraries: Short on Books, Long on Tech

June 25th article in Time.

Usual mishmash of an article that manages to use shushing and stern librarians.

Has this great typo – “I think there’s some value to the ability to hold a book in one’s hand,” said Maureen Sullivan, president of the American Library Association. “There’s something very special about the tactical experience, a personal connection that happens there.”

I assume they were trying to use tactile. If the article now has the word tactile it is a correction because the word used above was directly out of the article.

Full piece.

Younger Americans Want Great Library Programs and Spaces More Than E-Books

If there’s one thing older generations like to complain about today’s young people, it’s their devotion to electronic devices. What kind of world will we end up with if kids these days are all reading books on their smart phones? Which leads to the question of the future of libraries, the public’s brick-and-mortar meccas for the printed word, which despite increased usage post-recession are still struggling to keep their doors open.

A Pew Research Center report released today offers some insight into the minds of the very same younger Americans who will grow up to define what our libraries will become.

Full piece

Librarians and the communication revolution

In the book Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media author McChesney explains why we are in the midst of a communication revolution that is at the center of twenty-first-century life. Yet this profound juncture is not well understood, in part, because our media criticism and media scholarship have not been up to the task. Why is media not at the center of political debate? Why are students of the media considered second-class scholars?

This book provides strong evidence of how and why the American media system is failing to fulfill its role as an institution of American constitutional democracy, but it goes further to argue that we are living in a uniquely opportune moment – a “critical juncture” – during which we have the chance to make changes to the system.

Librarians whose profession is intertwined with media and communications should understand the policies and structures of the media landscape and be active participants in creating policies and structures that benefit the free flow of useful information to all groups of people.