February 2016

I Lead from the Library

Join our #ileadfromthelibrary campaign and share with us what you are doing to re-envision leadership in the library! Email ([email protected]) or Tweet (@librarianslead) us your leadership quote and we will beautify it and share it out with the world!

Welcome aboard, library friends!!

From Let the Librarians Lead – Home

I Lead from the Library

Join our #ileadfromthelibrary campaign and share with us what you are doing to re-envision leadership in the library! Email ([email protected]) or Tweet (@librarianslead) us your leadership quote and we will beautify it and share it out with the world!

Welcome aboard, library friends!!

From Let the Librarians Lead – Home

The ability of a library board to act free of political influence is imperative in maintaining the local public library as a trusted community institution, one that provides information without discrimination. Libraries and their independent boards work diligently to protect the rights of confidentiality, privacy and the freedom to read.

From Midlands Voices: Library boards need independence – Omaha.com: Opinion

The ability of a library board to act free of political influence is imperative in maintaining the local public library as a trusted community institution, one that provides information without discrimination. Libraries and their independent boards work diligently to protect the rights of confidentiality, privacy and the freedom to read.

From Midlands Voices: Library boards need independence – Omaha.com: Opinion

Take a seed, give a seed.

In a twist on penny cups at cash registers, folks at the Little Turtle branch of the Allen County Public Library are hoping to encourage urban gardening with a new feature – a seed library.

From Check out seeds at library | Home and Garden | www.journalgazette.net

Take a seed, give a seed.

In a twist on penny cups at cash registers, folks at the Little Turtle branch of the Allen County Public Library are hoping to encourage urban gardening with a new feature – a seed library.

From Check out seeds at library | Home and Garden | www.journalgazette.net

The current User Agreement is too complicated, which allows large companies to take advantage of user ignorance. What can be done to change it?

The hard answer to this question is – there is no panacea for this issue.
That being said, we can always attempt to minimize the issues arising out of such complexities by trying to make it more succinct and understanding of users’ hopes and expectations. For that, one solution I have in mind is what I would call a Terms of Service Commons, or TOS Commons for short. The main aim of ToS Commons would be to create a middle ground between organisations and users, by attempting the following:

From Offprint

Librarians: Stop the Book Shaming

Today, librarians who are passionate about books are increasingly like the smokers you see outside office buildings: apart, a little embarrassed, and slightly defensive. It’s hardly a surprise. Book collections? A vestige of our past, like the appendix. At conference after conference, keynote speakers argue that public libraries should be community centers, agents of innovation, knowledge creators, and makerspaces. It’s a trend made worse when LIS faculty (who really should know better) lead the charge.

From Three Ways Publishers and Libraries Can Work Better Together

Today, in an unfortunate example of the overreach of the United States’ current copyright law, the Wikimedia Foundation removed the Dutch-language text of The Diary of a Young Girl—more commonly known in English as the Diary of Anne Frank—from Wikisource.[1]
We took this action to comply with the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as we believe the diary is still under US copyright protection under the law as it is currently written. Nevertheless, our removal serves as an excellent example of why the law should be changed to prevent repeated extensions of copyright terms, an issue that has plagued our communities for years.

From Wikimedia Foundation removes The Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law requirements « Wikimedia blog

John Palfrey, founding president of the Digital Public Library of America and a director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, recently told the Deseret News that he has “been struck by the number of times people tell [him] that they think libraries are less important than they were before, now that we have the Internet and Google. He says he thinks “just the opposite: Libraries are more important, not less important, and both as physical and virtual entities, than they’ve been in the past.” John Palfrey, author of the new book  “BiblioTECH: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google,” joins Tom Williams to discuss the future of the library on Thursday’s Access Utah.

From “The Future of Libraries” On Thursday’s Access Utah | UPR Utah Public Radio

Two big-name legal research companies are battling in federal court over the right to exclusively publish the law—in this case, the Georgia Administrative Rules and Regulations.

The lawsuit (PDF) comes as states across the nation partner with legal research companies to offer exclusive publishing and licensing deals for digitizing and making available online the states’ reams of laws and regulations. The only problem is that the law is not copyrightable—or so says one of the publishers involved in the Georgia litigation.

From Online legal publishers squabble over the right to copyright the law | Ars Technica

Librarianship is a funny profession–the day is often a mixture of hokey jokes from people who haven’t been in a library in years, and strategizing ways to implement robotics and computer coding into programs for everybody from preschoolers to seniors. When people see what libraries actually get up to these days, they’re almost always surprised. So many people in America depend on their libraries to help them forward when it comes to technology, and lots of libraries have answered that call with aplomb, learning as they go.

From Maker kit program turns libraries into places for content creation, not just consumption | KnightBlog

An early adopter of open source textbooks, Neth said he turned to the new technology out of frustration with spiraling prices of commercial textbooks.
“It’s seeing the costs go up every semester and almost feeling powerless,” Neth said.
Universities and state governments are lining up behind the cause as a way to make college more affordable. The open textbooks, produced with publicly available material, are issued to students for free or a small fraction of the hundreds of dollars they typically spend annually on books.

From Open-source textbooks gain in push for college affordability