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Academic libraries & presses: collaborating to improve scholarly communication

From December’s First Monday:

Scholarly communication is evolving to meet the challenges and opportunities of the current technological era. Research universities expect academic libraries and presses to overcome cultural differences and collaborate to improve the production and dissemination of scholarship. This paper examines the separate worlds of libraries and presses and explores the common ground between the two where collaborations occur, particularly those related to monographic publications.

Complete article.

January 2, 2005 by Libraries

Sound advice for working librarians (and MLIS students)

A sound summary of the library job market and how to survive in it from Dorthea Salo of Caveat Lector:

I’ll be blunt. If you’re thinking about it because of all this hoopla about the librarian shortage, forget it. There’s no librarian shortage, and there isn’t going to be, either. The uproar is based on unexamined assumptions about retirement numbers and about what will replace retiring library personnel, assumptions that hold about as much water as a pasta colander …

… if you don’t have anything to offer but your MLS, you’re dead in the water. You’re competing with people with second master’s degrees and even doctorates, people with paraprofessional library experience, people with teaching or publishing experience—self-made geeks like me you’re competing with, even. I don’t know how my job search is going to go, seeing as how it’s barely begun, but I can tell you this: what makes me a good hiring prospect has next to nothing to do with my MLS. It’s what I brought to the table before I even started school.

Complete post. Prompted by an equally worthwhile post over at Information Wants to be Free.

January 2, 2005 by Librarians Libraries School Libraries

A DIY Library in Iraq

Un-“imbedded” reporter Dahr Jamail describes one man’s effort to bring books and literacy to his Baghdad neighborhood:

While billions of US taxpayer dollars have been awarded in lucrative contracts to companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root, there are few signs that any reconstruction has actually taken place in war torn Iraq …

Fadl Abid Oda, 30 years old, has taken it upon himself to do something that western companies in Iraq have failed to do. In a tiny room off a busy street in the Orfali district of Baghdad, Fadl stands in his small library.

“Anyone can take a book from here,� he says, “People can take smaller books for three days, six days for larger books. But anyone who wants to read here in the library, it’s ok, he can get any book he wants.�

More from Jamail’s blog, via librarian.net.

December 17, 2004 by Librarians Libraries

The art of classifying by color

From McSweeney’s:

For one amazing week in November, Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco has agreed to allow its estimated 20,000 books to be reclassified by color. Shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, the books will follow the spectrum continuously, changing Adobe from a neighborhood bookshop into a magical library—but only for one week …

This temporary public installation will be assembled by the San Francisco artist Chris Cobb and a staff of volunteers, who will reorder all the books in one night and, when the week is over, return them to their original locations.

Full press release. Here are some pictures documenting the piece, and an interview with the man behind it. Via Metafilter.

November 18, 2004 by Libraries

Shredding books with Lynne Cheney

An opinion piece from University of Southern California History Dept. chair Steven J. Ross:

In 1933, Nazi sympathizers in Berlin burned 20,000 “degenerate” books, many of them written by Jews and anti-fascists such as Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. Here at home, slaveholders were so frightened by the power of the word that throughout the antebellum South legislatures made it a crime to teach slaves to read and write.

Now, Lynne Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife and the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has placed herself in the company of dictators and slaveholders. At her urging, the Education Department destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed to help parents and children learn more about America’s past

Cheney objected to the booklet’s reference to the National Standards for History, guidelines for teaching history in secondary schools that were developed at UCLA in the 1990s and that suggest that American history should be taught with an eye not only to America’s successes but to its struggles and dark moments as well …

Complete article (registration required). A bit histrionic, obviously, but the whole episode is more evidence of Cheney’s distaste for academic freedom.

October 14, 2004 by Books School Libraries

Ethiopia demands UK return looted books

From today’s issue of the The Scotsman:

Tony Blair must return Ethiopian sacred objects and ancient artefacts looted by British troops more than a century ago and now locked up in museums and royal palaces, a leading scholar demanded today …

The prime minister – scheduled to arrive in Ethiopia tomorrow to explore new ways of helping Africa – should repatriate rare religious books and manuscripts and hundreds of other Ethiopian treasures, historian Richard Pankhurst said in Addis Ababa.

Many of the sacred objects and artefacts were looted by rampaging British troops after annihilating the Ethiopian army at the Battle of Maqdala in 1868 …

Complete article.

October 5, 2004 by Books

Librarians lobby for change in global copyright

From Library Journal:

Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) met in Geneva, and a group of librarians and other copyright advocates aimed to urge WIPO to change. WIPO, a global body that sets standards regulating the production, distribution and use of knowledge, has focused too much on enforcing the rights of copyright conglomerates in the digital age, critics argue, to the detriment of developing nations and individual creators. In a lengthy petition now circulating on library electronic discussion lists, advocates for more balance in world copyright enforcement blasted what they call “a global crisis in the governance of knowledge, technology and culture.” The petition has been endorsed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the American Library Association, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, the Special Libraries Association, among other groups …

Complete article. More information on the Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization is here.

October 2, 2004 by American Library Association Legal Issues Librarians Libraries

As patron base expands, a library crumbles

An article from yesterday’s Washington Post about D.C.’s Mount Pleasant Neighborhood Library that’s both heartwarming and discouraging:

Semret Yacob and her daughters, Herani, 7, and Alem, 8, sit at a table in the second-floor children’s section of the Mount Pleasant Neighborhood Library. They are engrossed in Alem’s math homework. Across the room, Joel Munoz sits by himself, reading “Escape From Earth, Voyages Through Time.” The fifth-grader, who wants to be an astronaut, likes books about space. “I just love reading,” he says …

Today, the library is like a fading Hollywood actress: her beauty impaired by a frail body, but her spirit vibrant as ever. Paint is peeling, pipes are leaking, windows don’t open, radiators are broken. The 20-year-old carpet in the children’s section is so rumpled that children trip on it. The water bubblers are shut off while officials await results of lead testing. The air conditioning leaks. Toilet doors don’t close properly. The basement floods periodically because of sewer backups in the street. Even so, Mount Pleasant is not on the city’s new renovation list. Despite its flaws, it is less decrepit than others in the system.

Complete article [registration required].

October 1, 2004 by Legal Issues Librarians Libraries

Local governments vs. PATRIOT

Harvard’s Elaine Scarry on resistance to the PATRIOT Act, with some library-related statistics that bear repeating:

Attorney General Ashcroft dismissed the idea that the Justice Department could conceivably care about librarians or library records, an act of jeering that echoed the earlier derision of FBI officers …

The derision is puzzling since it seems to imply that librarians do not have any history of serving as political actors, an implication starkly at odds with national and international history. More to the point, and perhaps as a result of their lack of interest in libraries, the attorney general and his assistants appear not to have read the University of Illinois study that found that by February of 2002 (four months after the Patriot Act was passed) 4 percent of all U.S. libraries, and 11 percent of all libraries in communities of more than 50,000 people had already been visited by FBI agents requesting information about their patrons’ reading habits.

Complete article from the Boston Review, via Metafilter.

May 4, 2004 by Libraries

Public libraries fading fast in Britain

From the Independent:

The blue paintwork is fading fast on its drab 1970s premises but there is no lack of innovation at the Heald Green public library as staff wage a daily battle to entice readers through their doors.

According to a new report on the future of the public lending library, it is a battle the librarians of south Manchester and the rest of Britain may not win. Libri, a new campaign group formed to save that most revered of national institutions, has warned there could be as little as 20 years left for Britain’s public lending libraries …

Complete article, with reflections by Nick Hornby, Billy Bragg and others. The BBC ran a related article yesterday. More information is available at Libri’s homepage.

April 28, 2004 by Libraries

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