July 2013

Simon Bisson
What the UK government should be concentrating on is an effort to break the financial ties that hold the darknets together. Finding who holds the purse strings is a complex task, but it’s a technique that’s been proven to work time and time again. And perhaps it should also be noted that it’s an approach that’s well within the capabilities of the powerful surveillance tools that government security agencies have put in place to monitor social connections and financial traffic online as part of their efforts to combat terrorism.

While most of us see librarians sitting and talking to people or moving quietly about the facility, they are, in fact, quite an active group. One is training as a competitive barrel racer. Others are belly dancers. There are several long-distance runners. These individuals are committed to improving their fitness, which will help them maintain their focus on the demands of research and data management that are part of a modern librarian’s daily life.

The secret lives of librarians

New research finds an association between lower body weight and participation in cultural and intellectual activities, including reading.

A scale that measures interest in ideas, art, and knowledge—by surveying the amount of time spent reading, attending cultural events, going to movies, and using the Internet—is associated as strongly as exercise with a lower body-mass index, or BMI (a measure of weight relative to height). In other words, reading and exercise appear similarly beneficial in terms of BMI.

Amazon versus your public library:
“E-books are becoming more important and we do expect them to grow going forward,” said Christopher Platt, director of the joint technology team for the New York and Brooklyn public libraries. “Digital is not a boutique service. It’s part of the future of the library.”

Book checked out in 1828 returned to Centre College
book checked out from a Centre College library in 1828 has resurfaced in a desk on the campus of the Kentucky School for the Deaf in Danville.

Unofficially, the book is 185 years overdue. At the current rate of 10 cents per day for late fees, the fine for the volume exceeds $6,000.

Neat! Starting Sunday, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston will make the content of five Hemingway scrapbooks available online for the first time, giving fans and scholars the chance to follow the life of one of the 20th century’s literary greats from diapers to high school degree.

Hemingway Collection curator Susan Wrynn said much of the content hasn’t been made available to the public before and only a few researchers have seen it in its entirety. The fragile leather-bound volumes have been kept in a dark vault for about four decades to keep them from falling apart.

INteresting Reddit Discussion… Does listening to an audiobook provide the same intellectual advantages or rewards as actually reading the book?

One comment points to this:
“The way this is usually interpreted is that once you are good at decoding letters into sound, which most of us are by the time we’re in 5th or 6th grade, the comprehension is the same whether it’s spoken or written,” explained University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham

Phishing attacks targeting academia aren’t the most high-profile of attacks, though they’re more common than you might think. Student populations in themselves constitute a sizeable pool of potential victims for money mule recruitment and other job scams, in fact anything that promises an easy supplemental income, unfeasibly cheap or free trendy gadgetry, and so on. But I’m talking about attacks against the institutions, rather than their ‘customers’: for example, targeted social engineering attacks as a means of accessing intellectual property. Some academic research has appreciable monetary value in its own right, and much of it is developed in partnership with and funded by businesses with a direct interest in monetizing it: that makes it of interest to people with an interest in getting in first.

Article at Omaha.com written by Gary Wasdin (executive director of the Omaha Public Library)

I think librarians in other cities will find this article interesting. How does your per capita cost compare?

In an effort to avoid a major calamity, police temporarily closed a library in Bend, OR yesterday.

Police report that a woman found an item that looked like a hand grenade in bushes near the Deschutes Public Library Thursday morning, put it in a garbage can and called police.

Turns out it was a bicycle lock, fashioned to look like a grenade.

KTVZ-TV reports that Sgt. Dan Ritchie says the building was evacuated as a precaution.

An explosives expert was called and determined the object was not dangerous.