Aaron

InfoWhale points us to some information about Cuban librarians from the ALA.

The page he points to is an announcement that an “ALA and IFLA
Access to Information and Intellectual Freedom
in Cuba” page has been created.

More Cuba than you can shake a big cigar at.

There ever lethargic Stevareeeno M. Cohen 😉 writes in with an article from the Daily Northwestern. It is about the local public library versus the school’s library.

In his four years at Northwestern, Weinberg senior Jeremy Weissmann said he has visited the Evanston Public Library only once.

“Twice, if you count voting,” Weissmann said.

Here’s the full story.

expresso2222 writes “A Web site showcasing more than 5 million aerial photos of World War II was crippled by demand on its first day. EvidenceinCamera (http://www.evidenceincamera.co.uk/) is being run by the University of Keele Library and features some of the most momentous events from the conflict, available for the public to see for the first time.

expresso2222 writes “A Web site showcasing more than 5 million aerial photos of World War II was crippled by demand on its first day. EvidenceinCamera (http://www.evidenceincamera.co.uk/) is being run by the University of Keele Library and features some of the most momentous events from the conflict, available for the public to see for the first time. Among the images captured are aerial shots of Auschwitz concentration camp and pictures of the US landings on Omaha beach. Allan William, head of the Evidence in Camera project, told Reuters: “These images allow us to see the real war at first hand. It is like a live-action replay. They were declassified years ago, but it takes days to find an individual image. Now they have been digitised and will be on the Internet, it takes seconds.” Source: War photos site hamstrung by demand, by Will Sturgeon; January 20, 2004: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,391192 03,00.htm“

wordy1 writes “The AP reports that Illinois has adopted Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program the country singer started to encourage parents to read to their children. Today, 206 communities in 35 states participate in Imagination Library, but Illinois is the first to promote it statewide.”

David Rothman writes “E-books and treadmills are a natural. I’ve just done a mile of “David Copperfield,” with a few more to go today. The treadmill technology is ancient, nothing more than a Vitamaster 7100 from the early ’90s, but it’s fully compatible in an old-fashioned way with my cheapie Sony Clie PDA. More at TeleRead.”

Fang-Face writes “Michael Isikoff, of Newsweek, has an article reprinted at Truthout.org about the feds using the PATRIOT Act to get financial records in a manner that would otherwise be clearly illegal. He wrote in part:

In Las Vegas, the Feds used a little-known provision in the Patriot Act that allows them to quickly obtain financial records of suspected terrorists or money launderers. Law-enforcement agencies can submit the name of any suspect to the Treasury Department, which then orders financial institutions across the country to search their records for any matches. If they get a “hit”—evidence that the person has an account—the financial institution is slapped with a subpoena for the person’s records.

The Feds might have gotten the same records even without the new law—but only if they had hard evidence that a suspect was doing business at a particular bank. In effect, the Patriot Act allows the Feds to search every financial institution in the country for the records of anybody they have suspicions about—the very definition, critics say, of a fishing expedition.

The deal gives Amazon the right to use the British Library’s bibliographic catalogue, which contains 2.55 million books. Crucially it includes 1.7 million produced before the introduction in 1970 of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN), a 10-character code that uniquely identifies any modern book.

Read the full story at The Independent.co.uk

Makers of RFID (or radio frequency identification) tags, along with the retailers and suppliers who plan to use them, are saying the technology they spent millions of dollars developing is too weak to threaten consumer privacy. Metals, plastics and liquids, they say, all block radio signals before they reach RFID reader devices.

Please, let’s not tell the patrons.

Read the full article from Wired