Celine

This was posted to the newlib-l discussion list today and seems a very interesting idea that other institutions may want to look into:
\”The UGA Libraries’ Committee on Research and Professional Development is proud to announce the launch of The Mentor Program. Mentoring at the UGA Libraries encompasses counseling and guidance, collaboration,
research assistance, professional development needs and much more.
Feel free to look around and let us know what you think. We hope to have a well established and successful program in the near future.\”
Here\’s the link to the University of Georgia Libraries Mentor Program.

This story from BBC News is reporting that the Public Record Office has had to take the England and Wales 1901 Census offline for a week while they try to improve the computer systems in order to cope with the huge demand.
As this earlier story reported, it went live last week and promptly got an average of about 30 million hits per day while they had only designed the site for a \”generous estimate\” of 1 million per day. It\’ll be back in a week, hopefully sleeker and ready to face its users but until then, it\’s probably more helpful not to provide a link to it here!

There\’s an interesting discussion currently on the newlib-l mailing list that I subscribe to (and strongly recommend to anyone in library school or recently graduated) about salaries. The archives are not available on the web, but this seems to be a current \”hot topic\” (I know, these things come round in cycles so it\’s hardly new). I noticed in my latest copy of the UK Library Association Record, that at the recent IFLA meeting in Boston someone from the UKLA was talking to ALA President-Elect Mitch Freedman about exactly this topic, since it formed part of his campaign platform. So for anyone who is interested, there is more information from Mitch\’s Better Salaries/Pay Equity Task Force website. There will also be an open meeting on the topic at ALA Midwinter in New Orleans next month.

The latest issue of Foreword Magazine focuses on the current state of book reviewing, including the views of a panel of publishers (hosted by the Small Press Center), the reasons that one independent publisher never sends her books out for review and an editorial on the \”mainstream opposition\” to paid reviews.

I don\’t remember seeing this on LISNews already, but this recent story from Search Engine Watch reports that Google is adding a new feature to its toolbar: little happy/sad faces to allow users to rate a page. Although it is not going to be used to affect search ranking, Google state that this rating process will alert them to which pages need \”human review\”.

The British Library is lending rare items, including manuscripts by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, to the National Library of Australia in Canberra. They will form part of an exhibition of literary treasures contributed by libraries from all over the world, the first of its kind. The full story from BBC News.

I\’m currently trying to plan a trip to Oz for next year but if I don\’t get there before February 24th, it looks like I\’ll miss out on this exhibition.

Search Engine Watch report in today\’s edition of the newsletter SearchDay that Google is making even greater inroads into the invisible web. Google is now indexing a number of file formats that most other search engines ignore, including Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Rich Text Format and PostScript files. This is in addition to PDF files, which Google started indexing earlier this year. Read the full story for more details. I couldn\’t find details on Google\’s own site yet, but no doubt they will be appearing soon.

Thanks to the ever interesting Internet Scout Weblog, details of James (Java MARC events):
\”a Java package that provides an event model for MARC records through Java callbacks […] Using James you can write programs that involve MARC records without knowing the details of the MARC record structure\”
It\’s a bit beyond my technical understanding but sounds intriguing. Find out more.

Over at LLRX there is an interesting feature by Cindy Curling, A Closer Look at Weblogs. It includes some background to the \’blog phenomenon, a look at different types of weblog as well as tips on creating your own. There is a list of recommended library-related weblogs (LISNews is not there but many of my other favourites are).

I\’ve been meaning to post this story for a while as it annoyed me so much when I first read it, I even contemplated writing a letter to the editor. In this recent story, The Stanford Daily describes Bookshare, an initiative set up by students last year. The students relate how they came up with the idea;
\”[we] were sitting in our room, staring at our full bookshelves and feeling depressed over the amount of money we had spent on textbooks for one quarter\”
So, they came up with a radical solution: create an alternative to buying books at the campus bookstore by setting up an online database of books available for students to loan out to one another for a fixed period of time.
Apparently other University campuses are interested in the system, which is described as being \”based on Napster\”. The system is being expanded to Movieshare, Gameshare and CDshare. Sound familiar? Can anyone say \”library\”? Argh! Anyone else feeling this frustration? Don\’t they realise what libraries are there for?