August 2013

NPR is just bringing out the library related stories left and right. Yesterday was the bicycle story that Birdie posted and today we have another.

For Disaster Preparedness: Pack A Library Card?

Excerpt: And it’s not just New Yorkers. Across the country, in places like Louisiana and Oklahoma, libraries have served as crucial hubs for information and help in the aftermath of hurricanes and tornadoes. And federal emergency planners have noticed. “The Federal Emergency Management Agency classified libraries as an essential service — like one of the things that would get early funding so that communities could recover,” says Jessamyn West a librarian in Vermont and a moderator of the popular blog, Metafilter.

Hiring Librarians (www.hiringlibrarians.com), the blog about hiring librarians, is working with Hack Library School (http://hacklibschool.wordpress.com/) to attempt to settle that age-old question, “do library schools actually teach what librarians need to know?”

If you’re someone who hires librarians and would like to weigh in, please take the survey at http://tinyurl.com/hiringlibschoolsurvey

Keep an eye on Hiring Librarians for initial results, which will be posted in the next week or so.

From NPR, a new program to deliver books to Seattlites via bike.

By the loading dock of Seattle’s downtown library, librarian Jared Mills checks his tire pressure, secures his iPads and locks down about 100 books to an aluminum trailer the size of a steamer trunk. The scene is reminiscent of something you’d see in an action movie, when the hero is gearing up for a big fight, but Mills is gearing up for something very different.

“If you’re not prepared and don’t have a lot of experience hauling a trailer, it can be kind of dangerous,” Mills says, especially when you’re going downhill. “The trailer can hold up to 500 pounds.”

Mills is part of Seattle Public Library’s Books on Bikes program, which aims to keep the library nimble and relevant by sending librarians and their bicycles to popular community events around Seattle.

After a hilly, 5-mile bike ride to a local farmers market, Mills sets up shop among the fruit and vegetable booths. The bright orange trailer is custom-made with bookshelves and an umbrella holder (it is Seattle, after all).

Malena Harrang, in her early 20s, is visiting the market with a friend. She says Mills’ book station is “like [a] carbon-neutral library on wheels — doesn’t get better than that.”

This past Wednesday, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood–an organization best-known for “taking down” Baby Einstein videos a few years ago–urged the FEC to look into the marketing of apps for babies. The CCFC is both looking particularly at apps by Fisher-Price and Open Solutions, and more generally arguing that apps have no educational merit whatsoever when it comes to young children. There’s been heavy media coverage (Mashable, NYT, Slate, HuffPo, etc). At School Library Journal, Rachel G. Payne, coordinator of early childhood services at Brooklyn Public Library, offers her take in Are Learning Apps Good for Babies? At Little eLit, I offer mine in Apps & Babies: Keeping Our Heads (and our iPads).

A brief discussion is posted about Schnail Mail and how it might not be such a good thing yet how it relates to the deal presented by GMail.

(h/t Glyn Moody)

From The New York Times: WE ARE FAMILY:

When a book saturates the culture as pervasively as Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” — at No. 15 on the combined nonfiction list after 56 weeks — it can be hard to imagine there are readers left who haven’t encountered it. But when a Pennsylvania woman checked “Wild” out of her local library recently, she was surprised to find far more than the travel adventure she was expecting.

“I often get e-mails,” Strayed wrote on Facebook last month, “from readers who tell me we’re connected because their lives are so very much like mine — similar childhoods, similar losses, similar struggles. This experience has been a great reminder to me how very connected we are, in spite of our differences. As I read one such e-mail recently I thought I was reading the usual until I came to the part about how the e-mailer sat bolt upright in bed as she read ‘Wild’ because halfway into Chapter 1 she realized we have the same father. My half sister, who came upon my book by chance, who knew of my existence but not my name, found me.”

Strayed told me she had made efforts over the years to locate her half sister and -brother, but online searches turned up nothing. But when her half sister started “Wild,” she “knew just enough about me and my siblings that she put it together. She read the rest of the book and then she wrote to me. She was stunned. I was, too, and yet I always knew our paths would cross. Life is like that. There’s always more, always a reveal.”

From Doctor Who to Buffy to Borges’ Babel, we visit some notable libraries in popular culture.

Piece on NPR

From Wired, “When Josef Albers published Interaction of Color in 1963, it was nothing less than the gateway to an entire way of thinking…But the physical version of the book, which has been circulated primarily in paperback for the last four decades, needed an update. Yale University Press has just done that, by releasing a new iPad version of Albers’ famous texts and color studies. Designed by New York City-based Potion Design, the Interaction of Color app is about as close as most of us will get to the original version of Albers’ masterpiece, which today primarily lives in special collections and museums. The app is nearly an exact digital replica of the 1963 version of the book, down to the original Baskerville typeface and layout of the text columns—but with some 21st century upgrades. “We were really thinking, how can we go back to the original intent of Albers’ book, and make something that he would’ve made today,” says Phillip Tiongson, one of the founders of Potion.”

Unexpected breaking news on a late Monday afternoon right before markets close in New York City:

Washington Post to be sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos http://t.co/v84m9ImVy5

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 5, 2013

Jeff Bezos To Buy Washington Post And Its Publishing Assets For $250 Million http://t.co/IFpwPuHEty

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 5, 2013

#BREAKING: Amazon’s Bezos buys Washington Post for $250 mn

— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) August 5, 2013

Washington Post to be sold to http://t.co/EDD1mjvTV2 founder Jeff Bezos – @washingtonpost

— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) August 5, 2013

The @washingtonpost newspaper is being sold to Jeff Bezos, founder of online department store Amazon, for $250 million

— Radio Australia News (@RANews) August 5, 2013

NPR piece that mentions the Amazon vs. Overstock price war. In addition it mentions the American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson bought a ring owned by Jane Austen last year for about $228,000. Also mentioned is a school in Queens, N.Y., dropped Sherman Alexie’s National Book Award-winning young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.