Journals & Magazines

The LSW Zine: A Call for Rants, Manifestos, Articles, and Artwork: Announcing the Library Society of the World Zine, a planned dead-tree compilation of writing about libraries by library people.

If all goes well, when librarians gather in Chicago in July of 2009 for the American Library Association Annual Meeting, LSW agents will be packing copies of the first ever issue of the LSW zine along with their “FRBR? I hardly knew her!” t-shirts and Roy Tennant thongs. We will then sell or otherwise distribute the zines to an unwary population of humid, bus-riding librarians.

Everyone loves a winner, and here are the winners of the New York Times "I Love My Librarian" contest (profiles and photos). They are:

The Washington Post features an international perspective of the people's choice of Barack Obama as America's next president.

Slideshow and reporting from Britain, Kenya, Japan, Lebanon and Indonesia.

Additional reactions from abroad via the New York Times.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A conservative organization that helped start a new student newspaper at West Virginia University claims a biased school librarian confiscated a stack of the papers earlier this month for political reasons.

The Wise Library employee took 250 copies of the Oct. 14 issue of the Mountaineer Jeffersonian even though the group had permission to distribute them, according to a press release from the Leadership Institute.

WVU spokeswoman Janey Cink said Thursday that the librarian took the papers because the student group hadn't provided a rack to contain them. She added that library staff thought the issue had been resolved.

"The university certainly welcomes different opinions and wants different student voices to be heard," Cink said. "If there's any misunderstanding, that's unfortunate." West Virginia Gazette.

George Eberhart passed along some news from American Libraries

1. Our weekly e-newsletter, American Libraries Direct, is now available to
anyone who wants to sign up for it, not just ALA members. The sign-up form,
as well as the FAQ, are here

2. American Libraries has launched its own blog, AL Inside Scoop,
http://www.al.ala.org/insidescoop/ . Editor-in-chief Leonard Kniffel
offers an insider’s view of goings-on at ALA headquarters and what hot
topics ALA staffers are talking about in the hallways. Associate Editor
Greg Landgraf offers his perspective from “the lower floors” of what
many see as the ALA ivory tower.

3. Login is no longer required to view the current issue of the American
Libraries print magazine online (in PDF format), or to view the archives,
which date back to the January 2003 issue. Go directly Here .
First-time viewers will need to install the ebrary reader to view issues.
To download, go to http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ala/Download . Firefox 3
users installing the reader for the first time will need a workaround,
http://www.ebrary.com/kb/users/ff3install.jsp , to make the ebrary reader
work with their browser.

The Distant Librarian points out that the Journal of Distance Education has made its complete run of archives (1986-2008) available online. Here's the link from to the posting by The Distant Librarian. There's no mention on whether or not the archive is free, but a browse through shows the option of clicking on HTML full text or PDF for many of the articles.

Social Science Statistics Blog In a working paper entitled "Can We Test for Bias in Scientific Peer Review?", Andrew Oswald proposes a method of detecting whether journal editors discriminate against certain kinds of authors. His approach, in a nutshell, is to look for discrepancies between the editor's comparison of two papers and how those papers were ultimately compared by the scholarly community (based on citations). In tests he runs on two high-ranking American economics journals, he doesn't find a bias by QJE editors against authors from England or Europe (or in favor of Harvard authors), but he does find that JPE editors appear to discriminate against their Chicago colleagues.

The Western New York Library Resources Council is pleased to announce plans to publish The Journal of Library Innovation, one of the first journals devoted explicitly to innovation and creativity in libraries. This peer reviewed, electronic journal will publish original research, literature reviews, commentaries, case studies, reports on innovative practices, letters, as well as book and product reviews. The journal will also welcome provocative essays that will stimulate thought on the current and future role of libraries in an Internet Age.

The inaugural issue will be published in January 2010. Please watch for a call for papers in the near future. For more information, please contact Editor-in-Chief Sheryl Knab ([email protected]) or Managing Editor Pamela Jones ([email protected]le.edu).

Brian Kenney: "librarians are the most vocal advocates for open access to journal content—except, apparently, when it’s their own publications. I suspect this is because of ALA’s outdated, carrot-on-the-end-of-the-stick, publishing model: keep the publications locked away as the supreme benefit of membership. "

Finally, there is common sense. If you want your content to be used, then readers need to be able to discover it through a search engine and read it in a click. Or find it in their feed aggregator. We need to be able to forward it, post our disagreements with it, blog about it, and have it pushed to us on Facebook. It must, in short, be integrated into our professional lives. Or else it becomes irrelevant, no matter how good it might be.

A league table of journals: The Australian government is revising its research assessment system, and is in the process of setting up ERA, Excellence in Research for Australia. This new system was an early commitment of the Labor Government elected in November of last year, and is replacing the Research Quality Framework (RQF) which the previous Government had started to develop in 2006, and which was intended to carve up AU$600 million in block grant research funding. That system did not reach fruition, despite (and partly because of) being very costly. The new system is designed to benchmark Australian research better within an international context, and is - for the moment - not intended to lead to a ranking-based carve-up of the research funding pot, though that option has been left in for the future.

On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan rests a tribute to Esquire’s glory years — a collection of 92 covers from the 1960s and early 1970s that have become, in the museum’s words, “essential to the iconography of American culture.”

That illustrious history hangs over the magazine’s effort to celebrate its 75th year. Its attempt to add to the annals of museum-worthy covers includes a nod to the digital age: an electronic cover, using admittedly rudimentary technology, that will flash “the 21st Century Begins Now,” when it appears on newsstands in September.

Read full story of how e-ink will be used on the cover of Esquire at the New York Times.