As we approach the end of 2015, we asked our Library book series editors Paul T. Jaeger, John Carlo Bertot and Samantha Hines to summarize the biggest changes in Librarianship this year and what they predict to be the main changes during 2016.
From Emerald | Looking Back, Looking Ahead with Jaeger, Bertot and Hines
KUER’s VideoWest/RadioWest’s intro to the video Ties the Room Together. “Josh Hanagarne is a writer and a librarian in Salt Lake City who’s written beautifully about his experiences with Tourette syndrome. We had him on RadioWest to talk about his 2013 book The World’s Strongest Librarian. We want to thank Josh for letting us tag along and pry into his life.”
Here’s a photo of Josh holding an “In My Book, you’re quite a character” card in the beautiful SLCPL 
.
Shipping is free during December, visit www.inmybook.com for more details.
Though Vladimir Nabokov was living in America when he wrote Lolita, the novel was first published in Paris in 1955—by Olympia Press, whose list included many pornographic titles. On the sixtieth anniversary of Lolita’s first publication, we asked ten writers to reflect on their changing experiences with the novel in the course of their reading lives. Each day for five days, we are posting two reflections, each revisiting a section of pages from the book—we are using Vintage’s 2005 edition, a complete, unexpurgated text.
Inside is an unprecedented collection that documents the inspiring and powerful history of movies and is available to researchers, students and movie fans.
It would be impossible to detail the millions of remarkable items found within our library, but to give you a sense of the scope of our collection, we’d like to share a small sampling of what we do there on a typical day.
From What Happens on a Typical Day in the Ultimate Movie Library — ART & SCIENCE — Medium
Good news: the NYPL’s Rose Reading Room will reopen in 2016. That will be nearly two years after it closed its doors when a foot-wide piece of plaster (one of the rosettes) fell from the ceiling, but still ahead of the previously scheduled reopening date in 2017.
From Inside The NYPL’s Eerily Empty Rose Reading Room: Gothamist
A rare example of the Rudimentum Novitiorum, a chronicle of the world printed in 1475, containing the world’s first printed maps, has been acquired by the James Ford Bell Trust for the benefit of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.
“The Rudimentum Novitiorum is one of the rarest and most significant pieces we have,” said Dr. Ford W. Bell, trustee and the grandson of James Ford Bell, who was the founder of General Mills. “We are thrilled to have acquired it and are looking forward to sharing it
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has published a set of consensus principles for the library, content-provider and software-provider communities to address privacy issues related to the use of library and library-related systems. This set of principles developed over the past 8 months focus on balancing the expectations library users have regarding their intellectual freedoms and their privacy with the operational needs of systems providers.
The NISO Privacy Principles, available at http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/patron_privacy/, set forth a core set of guidelines by which libraries, systems providers and publishers can foster respect for patron privacy throughout their operations. The Principles outline at a high level basic concepts and areas which need to be addressed to support a greater understanding for and respect of privacy-related concerns in systems development, deployment, and user interactions. The twelve principles covered in the document address the following topics: Shared Privacy Responsibilities; Transparency and Facilitating Privacy Awareness; Security; Data Collection and Use; Anonymization; Options and Informed Consent; Sharing Data with Others; Notification of Privacy Policies and Practices; Supporting Anonymous Use; Access to One’s Own User Data; Continuous Improvement and Accountability.
The Preamble of the Principles notes that, “Certain personal data are often required in order for digital systems to deliver information, particularly subscribed content. Additionally, user activity data can provide useful insights on how to improve collections and services. However, the gathering, storage, and use of these data must respect the trust users place in libraries and their partners. There are ways to address these operational needs while also respecting the user’s rights and expectations of privacy.”
“Working collaboratively through a set of open meetings and discussion forums, a team of librarians, publishers and systems providers crafted these principles,” said Todd Carpenter, NISO’s Executive Director. “This fact distinguishes this effort from other privacy-related efforts in our community. By working together to deeply grasp the foundational nature of respect for patron privacy among suppliers as well as to understand the operational needs and product development process among the library community, the team was able to come to a nuanced understanding of the related issues. This joint effort allowed for the creation of a balanced set of principles, which achieve the common goal of providing the best possible user experience built from its core with respect for privacy.”
Organizations and individuals are encouraged to provide public comments on the NISO Privacy Principles, as well as register their support for the principles, on the NISO website. Additional work in the coming year is envisioned to make these high-level principles operational for publishers, content-providers and software suppliers.
This project was generously supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More information about the project, including presentations, recordings of the virtual and in-person meetings, and other background information may be found at www.niso.org/topics/tl/privacy.
From NISO Press Release
It appears that the way that Kentucky libraries set their tax rates will stand, despite protest from people who say they’ve been doing it illegally for decades.
The Kentucky Supreme Court issued a decision Friday that it will not hear arguments in the 2012 lawsuit objecting to the way Campbell and Kenton county libraries set their tax rates.
The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.
These small formats from days of yore also help explain the stupendous productivity of many historic authors. I’ll often be reading about a nonfiction essayist from the 17th or 18th or 19th century and the bio will mention he or she wrote 56 books or some other ungodly number, and I’ll freak out: Man alive! How can anyone generate so much?
From collision detection: Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens
Today, Mark Twain’s classic – about a boy who flees his abusive father and travels down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave – is still sometimes challenged in American schools, but for nearly the opposite reason: its liberal use of the N-word and perceived racist portrayals of black characters.
This week, a Montgomery County school removed Huckleberry Finn from its curriculum after a group of students said the book made them uncomfortable.
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