July 2011
91 posts
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“Obviously, there is piracy that is quite destructive but again I think the data...”
– Former Google CIO: LimeWire Pirates Were iTunes’ Best Customers | TorrentFreak (via infoneer-pulse)
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Stephen King on 'Lord of the Flies' [and the... →
thelifeguardlibrarian:
I grew up in a small northern New England farming community where most of the roads were dirt, there were more cows than people, and the school was a single room heated by a woodstove. Kids who were bad didn’t get detention; they had to stay after school and either chop stovelengths or sprinkle lime in the privies.
Of course there was no town library, but in the...
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In the Library with the Lead Pipe: Are you reading... →
(I don’t always read much YA -it’s not necessary for my job and I’m still trying to read classics I didn’t get to in school- but many of the popular ones I do eventually read…)
Outside of YA circles, I sometimes find myself having to justify my tastes to others. Yes, a lot of why I read YA lit is because I work with teens. But even if I were to switch careers, I...
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John Boehner’s “blank check” lie →
wilwheaton:
This is a straight-up lie. Not the everyday, casual fudging that politicians do, but a straight up lie. As the Government Accountability Office explains: “The debt limit does not control or limit the ability of the federal government to run deficits or incur obligations. Rather, it is a limit on the ability to pay obligations already incurred.”
This isn’t a perfect metaphor, but...
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The Atlantic: Rethinking Government: Why We Need... →
The suggestions in this article are so wrong in so many ways… For example, I can guarantee that if fees were assessed by how many items you checked out, the number of items being checked out would rapidly drop, so the amount of money raised will not match the expectation. So even though his town circulated 600,000 items in 2010, there is no way the library would be able to raise $300,000 by...
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Chronicle of Higher Ed.: On Mistakenly Shredding a... →
Shortly after I began my career as a librarian, the Web made its appearance to the general public. Even with the broad scope afforded me through my educational background, I didn’tbelieve the Web would amount to much. I could not imagine that this unimpressive resource would shake the very concept of the library as it had been known for hundreds of years.
The shaking hasn’t...
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Hack Education: Should Students Use Pseudonyms... →
I have been using pseudonyms online for years, for a variety of reasons (and while Cali is not my real name, sometimes it feels like it is, with how much I have done online under that name instead of my given name).
…We’re all supposed to cultivate our online personae nowadays — albeit carefully — right? But there remains a long list of reasons why people might prefer to use pseudonym...
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Boston Globe: As stores die, so does book culture →
This article has its merits but quite obviously overlooks libraries… why is it that articles like this never mention libraries?
But the whole saga of books across these decades is a cautionary tale of loss. Once, bookstores were not unlike churches. In cities and university towns, they were ubiquitous, and readers moved along the endless rows of shelves as if along communion rails. The...
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Swiss Army Librarian: Another Take on the End of... →
Last week, the owner of Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH, sent a message to all his customers about the closing of Borders. There are primarily only two big bookstores in Concord, Gibson’s and a Borders, so you might think this would be a celebratory message.
It’s not. It’s a very somber analysis of how the closing of Borders has the potential to have a widespread negative impact on the...
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Censored Genius: The Future for the Library is... →
Some interesting thoughts, though having all-digital offerings doesn’t necessarily mean people will be able to successfully find/use them (I get reference questions that I can answer just by Googling, but evidently the person asking doesn’t know how to retrieve the same information).
And if the title of the post isn’t enough of an indication (it’s uncensored in the...
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DIY Librarian: What is a commercial use? →
Last week, both the New Yorker and Wired used one of my photos to illustrate an article about the Aaron Swartz JSTOR downloading case.
I had posted the photo to Flickr with a Creative Commons-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I believe that the use by the New Yorker and Wired is commercial in nature and therefore a violation of my license, and I have contacted both publications… .
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Words of Wisdom: 101 Tips from the World’s Most... →
If you’ve ever wanted to sit down with your favorite writer and ask advice, then you should take a look at these tips from some of the most famous authors in the world. These valuable bits of information provide guidance on strengthening your writing skills, becoming a better fiction writer or poet, learning to tap into your creativity, advice on education and school, and even a few...
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Blogcritics Books: Books Are Dead; Now What About... →
An interesting perspective. I don’t agree with the conclusions (I don’t think we’ll ever be completely rid of printed books, for one), but things are certainly changing.
Despite those old purists stopping their ears and clinging to their dog-eared, yellowed tomes of yore, the end of the printed word is nearing. It may take a few decades, it may take a few years, but the ...
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“And I try not to get worked up about pirates because, back before the internet...”
– Charlie Stross, commenting on Metafilter (via infoneer-pulse) (via librarianista)
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The Consumerist: Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of... →
This is truly frightening.
Something happened to Dylan’s Google account, and it’s been disabled. He doesn’t know what happened to the account, and no one at Google with the power to help him is interested in acknowledging the problem or letting him back in to the cloud-based services where all of his correspondence and much of the digital trail from the last few years of ...
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NY Times: Social Media History Becomes a New Job... →
Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.
A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the...
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Information Tyrannosaur: The Tao of Librarianship →
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Librarian by Day: Books: A Love Letter →
Like many people my memories of books and libraries are intermingled. The public library in my hometown was small and I can remember spending hours scouring the shelves for something I hadn’t read that I was interested in reading. Most of my life the majority of books I read come from the public library, if it weren’t for libraries I wouldn’t have bought more books, I would have read less.
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“44 million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a...”
– National Adult Literacy Survey (via firstbook)
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Finding Heroes: 3 Things To Add To Your Library’s... →
To help you accomplish more with less, I regularly suggest to clients that they consider a “stop doing” list rather than a “to do” list. A “to do” list lists all the things that you need to get done. A “stop doing” list is just the opposite. A “stop doing” list lists all the things that you need to stop doing.
So how do you decide what to add to your “stop doing” list? Here are three...
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Washington Post: Old Dominion U. professor is... →
What if you woke up tomorrow and all of your painstakingly edited YouTube videos were gone, your 4,000-entry Twitter feed erased and your lovingly tended Facebook page deleted?
Michael Nelson, a computer science professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, is thinking those terrible thoughts. His research team has spent the past couple of years studying how much of the Internet is...
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ReadWriteWeb: Textbook Rentals Come to the Kindle:... →
The Kindle Textbook Rental program also lets students configure the length of the rental, from 30 days to 360 days. Of course, the longer you rent, the more expensive it becomes. A $100 Kindle purchase can be rented for $40 for a month, but that quickly increases the longer you keep the book - and most students will keep it for at least a semester. It’s still cheaper to buy used...
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What does it mean to be an active reader? →
ebookporn:
Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Or do they utterly oppose it? A typical reading tool, such as a book or website, displays the author’s argument, and nothing else. The reader’s line of thought remains internal and invisible, vague and speculative. We form questions, but can’t answer them. We consider alternatives, but can’t explore them. We question assumptions,...
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What we're reading: Who are the e-reader readers? →
pewinternet:
In a three-part series in the Boston Globe, Amanda Katz is looking at the past, present, and future of reading. Here, in the second part of the series, she asks: As e-book sales surge and those of paper peers struggle, how far will transition to digital go?
Related research: E-reader ownership doubles in six months (2011)
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LoC Blog, Digital Preservation: What Skills Does a... →
Let me say that expertise with programming, formats and standards is, of course, very important. It’s just that I happen to think several other talents have a greater bearing on success in today’s workplace. Such as an ability to understand and adapt to new ways of using technology, for example. It’s music to my ears when job-seeker shows awareness of how quickly the way we work can...
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Business Insider: When Your Online Presence Hurts... →
…However, although some people believe all publicity is good publicity, the same doesn’t apply towards things like your online reputation and presence. Why? Since your online presence may make or break your online brand—something that may get you to where you want to be—it’s important to avoid posting certain things.
Here are a few of them:
Negative opinions of your...
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Censored Genius: The Public Library Social Network →
But no one took any pictures. And no one blogged it or tweeted it or liked it. Because the public library is the social network that keeps your secrets. Even when your thong is completely out there. So if you want a real social network that includes other people like you who read the same books and watch the same movies, then support your local public library.
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Boston Globe: Illuminating texts →
As the screen overtakes the solid page, and the ground floors of libraries have begun to look like the decks of starships, and the page has become its own lamp, as millions of books become available at the click of a key, and a simple search will turn up almost anything one needs to recall, surely the memory of what is read is dissolving all that much faster. As a stalwart reader of printed...
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Getting the words right
Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Ernest Hemingway: I rewrote the ending of "Farewell to Arms", the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you?
Ernest Hemingway: Getting the words right.
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Liter of Light →
This is super cool.
A bottled liter of water with a few teaspoons of bleach is proving to be a successful recipe for dwellers in the light-deprived slums of the Philippines. The simple technology is spreading sunlight in places where it has never been, and saving residents money at the same time. Gemma Haines reports.
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The Paris Review: Ray Bradbury Interview →
All sorts of great stuff in this interview, including this:
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this...
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11 Things the Richest U.S. Households Can Buy That... →
ghardin:
The 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. aren’t just filthy rich, they are downright dirty. Collectively, these households own $1.37 trillion dollars; a number so high that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend.
Here are 11 shocking things $1.37 trillion can buy that you can’t.
The richest 400 households can pay off every student loan for every single student in the entire United...
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Beth Kanter: Are You Going To Adopt Google+ for... →
What is interesting to me is the public/personal sharing options as Dave Gray shared in this post. This diagram is great, but in real life my own networks are blurry between personal, professional, and public sharing and learning. What ever platform you are on, there are best practices for using social networks for professional learning. Here’s a few:
Listen
Learn
Curate what you...
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Library Babel Fish: Nothing Personal: How Database... →
This is standard database license language, though most databases don’t thrust it in your face every time you search. I understand discouraging people from downloading massive amounts of articles and doing evil things with them, like posting them online for anyone to read or putting them up on torrent sites. I get it. I wouldn’t do that.
But even though I had clicked through that annoying...
