Journals & Magazines

After a story earlier this week about Due Date stamps, Florida's own effing-librarian wrote to Washington Post columnist John Kelly with his thoughts.

Kelly added most of effing's email to his follow-up column, "Okay, So End of Library Stamps Isn't the End of the World.". Effing's stuff is found here fyi, along with opinions from other readers. Isn't it nice when you can start a dialogue?

Want "high-impact reviews of street lit, genre fiction, graphic novels, audio, and DVDs, along with edgy RA, in-depth prepub info, and industry buzz" direct from seasoned library-type editors?

Then you'll want to sign up for Library Journal's new twice-monthly newsletter BOOK SMACK (where did they get that edgy edgy name??).
Here's where to subscribe.

A principal's decision to remove a magazine from a middle-school library has drawn criticism for the Cleveland Heights-University Heights school board from the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU said the First Amendment was violated when Brian Sharosky, principal of Roxboro Middle School, confiscated the November issue of Nintendo Power magazine. The magazine covers the world of Nintendo video games, from previews and ratings to secret codes and short cuts.

"Literature should not be removed from a school library simply because one person may find it inappropriate," said Christine Link, ACLU of Ohio executive director, in a statement last week. She called for the board to "immediately order that the magazine be reinstated."

Sharosky deemed that particular issue unsuitable for students in grades six to eight because of a "violent figure" on the cover and content about a game that's rated for mature audiences, according to district spokesman Michael Dougherty

The librarian objected, maintaining that staff members -- including the principal -- are supposed to follow the policy for challenging a publication. That starts with submitting a form to the superintendent and ends with a decision by the school board.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper will produce its last printed edition on Tuesday and become an Internet-only news source, the Hearst Corporation said on Monday, making it by far the largest American newspaper to take that leap. Thus ends a 146-year run.

But the P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it has had, and a site consisting mostly of commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting. NYTimes and video and commentary from the P.I. itself .

David Carr of the NYT imagines a secret meeting of top newspaper people complete with cigars and cognac. On the Agenda:

The librarian who operates The Wall Street Journal's news research library -- which is set to close with the elimination of her job and another staffer's -- said in a memo to other librarians that the shutdown is both a personal difficulty and a hit to news coverage.

"When I asked who will do research for the reporters, I was told, 'No one,'" the memo from Leslie A. Norman, posted on a librarian list serve last week, stated. "The reporters will probably be using a Lexis product called Due Diligence Dashboard (you know how your moms told you 'if you can't say something nice...')" Editor & Publishers reports.

She later adds that it cannot replace the "knowledge about how to research using all the tricks we've learned over the years. We figure that the reporters will probably spend 10 times our compensation trying to do their own research."

Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard library system, writes in a lengthy article in the February 12th issue of the New York Review of Books:

"Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly--a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers."

He also discusses the economics of professional journals and how the system has changed over the past hundred years. A portion of his commentary:

"The result stands out on the acquisitions budget of every research library: the Journal of Comparative Neurology now costs $25,910 for a year's subscription; Tetrahedron costs $17,969 (or $39,739, if bundled with related publications as a Tetrahedron package); the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning. Owing to the skyrocketing cost of serials, libraries that used to spend 50 percent of their acquisitions budget on monographs now spend 25 percent or less. University presses, which depend on sales to libraries, cannot cover their costs by publishing monographs. And young scholars who depend on publishing to advance their careers are now in danger of perishing."

The Washington Post reported today that it plans to close its stand-alone magazine Book World as of mid-February.

In dropping one of the few remaining stand-alone book sections in American newspapers, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said that the coverage will be shifted to the Style section and a revamped Outlook section. Shea said that The Post would publish about three-quarters of the roughly 900 reviews it has carried each year. The change will take effect Feb. 22.

Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, the main trade magazine for the book industry, has been laid off in a restructuring by the publication’s parent company, Reed Business Information.

According to a statement from Reed, which operates a broad range of trade publications, the layoffs affect about 7 percent of the staff (including executive editor Daisy Maryles, bookselling editor Kevin Howell, children's reviews editor Elizabeth Devereaux and director of business development Rachel Dicker ...Shelf-Awareness) .

As a result of the restructuring, Brian Kenney, editor in chief of School Library Journal, will now be editorial director of three magazines: Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and Library Journal. NYTimes.

It wouldn't be the first time the Bible was censored.

But it is probably the first time that the Bible has been published serially, in a sort of magazine format, with somewhat sexually explicit pictures. Then there was the homoerotica...

Yeah, it should surprise no one that this didn't work out too well in the "land of the free."

More from The Local.se.

Americans are doing less well than global competitors on a key index of literacy, according to a literacy survey by Central Connecticut State University.

From All Headline News: This study attempts to capture one critical index of our nation's well-being -- the literacy of its major cities--by focusing on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources. The information is compared against population rates in each city to develop a per capita profile of the city's "long-term literacy"-a set of factors measuring the ways people use their literacy-and thus presents a large-scale portrait of our nation's cultural vitality," Dr. Jack Miller, CCSU President says.

Ebony and Jet Magazines have joined the 21st Century (and Google), and have gone digital.

According to the Chicago Tribune, prior to this deal, the magazine's have kept their past issues in bound volumes and on microfilm, so if anyone needed to look up an old article, librarians would have to search through the company's archives.

However, with a new deal in place, both Ebony and Jet will be made searchable on the technology giant's growing database of publications. Johnson Publishing's partnership with Google gives readers access to more than nine magazine titles and 20 million photographs documenting 63 years, reports the paper.

But, issues prior to 1960, they're having a problem with because of the issues' fragility or limited availability. So, the company is asking for help from their readers and librarians? "to pull stuff from the basement" to aid with the archiving.