June 2012
60 posts
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“A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about...”
– William James, quoted on page 205 of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
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Library Journal: Louisiana Eliminates State... →
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The Louisiana budget signed by Governor Bobby Jindal on June 15 eliminates almost $1 million in state aid to libraries, according to The Advocate. Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne said Jindal excluded the $896,000 when he presented his proposed spending plan, and legislators failed to find funding for libraries during the regular session.
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Rebecca Hamilton, State Librarian of Louisiana, told...
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Publishers Weekly: Authors: say yes to libraries! →
Earlier this week, Smashwords announced a groundbreaking agreement with Califa, the California public library consortium, in which they would agree to sell up to 10,000 books for lending by California libraries. The CEO of Mark Coker had gone direct to his authors and asked them if they wanted to make their books available for lending; the answer was clear. Of the surveyed authors, 82 percent...
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Why Libraries Are a Smart Investment for the... →
libraryadvocates:
Today America’s library system sits at a critical juncture. The Library of Congress alone has lost some 1300 staff since the onset of the digital media age two decades ago. Until last week, four of the six largest American publishing houses did not lend digital books to libraries, president of the New York Public Library Anthony Marx noted. And last month, the NYPL’s move to...
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Annoyed Librarian: Libraries: For the Poor and the... →
For a lot of people, if they can’t get it cheap or free, they just won’t get it. For some people, it’s that they don’t have any money. The Discount Diva profiles the thinking of the cheap middle class, those who have some money, but don’t want to part with what they have. Just watch people haggle over library fines to see how cheap they are.
Libraries are helping both of them, and providing...
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Huffington Post: Making E-books Is Harder Than It... →
An interesting perspective, though the comments have some quibbles with the argument put forward.
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Digital Shift: All Hat, No Cattle: A Call for... →
I think there are three, maybe four key principles that libraries must adopt to deal with ebooks. All of them are finding resistance from the Big Six. Ownership: if we pay public dollars for content, then we need to be able to take possession of the copies. Anything else is sheer vendor lock-in, and shirks our obligation to preserve the public record. Discounts: volume purchasers (that would be...
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boingboing: Scout: get notified every time... →
It is nearly impossible to follow all the activity in state and federal laws, regulations and speeches in Congress without a significant policy team or an army of lobbyists. Now you can. For free. The Sunlight Foundation’s new tool called Scout allows you to create customized keyword alerts to notify you whenever issues you care about are included in legislative or regulatory actions.
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“Naked mole-rats, unlike other mammals, tolerate variable body temperatures,...”
– The Scientist - Underground Supermodels
(Yes, this is totally and completely unrelated to libraries. Naked mole-rats are just that awesome.)
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Time: A Book Lover's Guide to Reading and Walking... →
I don’t need a guide—I’ve been doing it since, oh, middle school or so. My commute includes walking nearly a mile, and I read the whole way (I’ve only almost run into people twice, I think). Great way to pass what would otherwise get to be a very familiar/boring route. :)
But I always put the book down to cross the street. I live in the DC metro area—to do otherwise...
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Library Babel Fish: What's Right With Publishing →
Ten years ago, when preparing for a panel on the future of book publishing, I jotted down some quotes from Publishers Weekly that still sound fresh, a decade and a technology revolution later. “Too few children are raised in houses with books,” one worried publishing professional declared. “The emphasis on bestsellers,” another wrote, “has lately been carried too far” and harmed the chances for...
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The Atlantic: Nota Bene: If You 'Discover'... →
“It’s important to remember,” said my colleague John Overholt, a rare-book and manuscript curator at the Houghton Library at Harvard, “that in most cases what’s termed an archival ‘discovery’ was possible only because of the years or decades of effort a repository invested in arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to the materials in its...
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IndieReader: How Amazon Saved My Life →
Indie writers owe Amazon big time for what they’ve given us. Are they perfect? No. Do they make mistakes? Yep. And they’ll continue to make mistakes. But I promise you that traditional publishers never call up their authors and ask what they can do better. I nearly wet my author pants when I got a call from someone in the Kindle publishing department who wanted to know what publishing and...
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J Shore: An Open Apology for Twitter Behavior... →
This post illustrates some of the downsides of Twitter (and social media in general), particularly when there are disagreements between participants about what is acceptable behavior. And text can leave a lot to be desired in terms of conveying intended meaning and emoticons and LOLs only do so much.
Personally, I’m pretty careful about what I say when it’s not directly work-related...
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Public Libraries Online: Community Centered: 23... →
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The Catalogger Blogger: OCLC Experimental Site →
thecataloggerblogger:
OCLC has created a new experimental site called Classify. This new OCLC site is a catalogers dream no matter what the experience level. The site allows you to classify items by entering one of the following pieces of information: standard number, title, author, or subject heading. Once the information has been inputted the system then provides multiple classification...
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“This is the best time in history to be a creative person, because all you need...”
– Working “2nd Watch” With Wil Wheaton « Nerdist (via wilwheaton)
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WSJ: The Weird World of Fan Fiction →
The publishing industry’s current overnight sensation, erotica author E.L. James, began writing her best-selling book “Fifty Shades of Grey” as “Twilight” fan fiction. She began posting her X-rated take on Ms. Meyer’s tame paranormal romance online three years ago. Her “Twilight” homage, titled “Master of the Universe,” evolved into a...
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The fanfic debate, in summary
Various Authors: Fanfic has no literary merit!
Wide Sargasso Sea: Actually . . .
Peter and The Starcatcher: Actually . . .
The Wind Done Gone: Actually . . .
The Aeneid: Actually . . .
Amadis of Gaul (and its 14 or 15 medieval fan-written sequels): Actually...
Folklore: the fuck is wrong with you
Shakespeare: you think I came up with this shit on my own? HA HA HA no.
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Librarians and Archivists on Tumblr
thelifeguardlibrarian:
othemts:
I posted this the other day, but it’s worth sharing these two links again:
thelifeguardlibrarian’s list of libraries and librarians on tumblr
rch-commonplacebook’s list of archives and archivists on tumblr
I just went on a follow-frenzy so any librarians and archivists seeing me for the first time, hello!
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Great lists!
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Scholarly Communications @ Duke: How do you know? →
I know that public access is seldom, if ever, considered by librarians when dealing with subscription cancellations, first, because I have been a librarian for over twenty years and have been involved in or aware of a large number (larger than I would like) of cancellation processes. Never once have I heard a librarian say “we can cancel that one because all the contents are available on...
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Digitization 101: Should librarians be required to... →
It’s an excellent question. In the end I think it depends on the situation, which makes it hard to require of all librarians.
I’ve periodically wished I could read Russian due to certain materials in our collection, but the occasions are infrequent enough that actually learning Russian doesn’t seem like it would be worth the time I’d have to divert from other work-related...
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Chronicle of Higher Ed: Why Privacy Matters Even... →
Commentators often attempt to refute the nothing-to-hide argument by pointing to things people want to hide. But the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion about information that people would very likely want to hide. As the...
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Librarian By Day: Don’t Write Off ALA’s Work on... →
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A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy: Reading and... →
What really distanced me from the presentation and the promise was that readers advisory is for “people [who] have bad taste.”
No, no they don’t. Readers have a range of tastes and diets; and maybe back in 1950, or in some areas here and there, librarians still believe that people have bad taste and their job is to feed them the classics and literary fiction.
Not my librarian tribe. Not at the...
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the scholarly kitchen: Not Free, Not Easy, Not... →
Digital goods have costs.
I’m not talking here about just things like the cost of electricity, which should be enough on its own to disabuse idealists of their vacuous notions of what makes the world go around. I analyzed this at length in another post earlier this year. Even beyond just their power requirements, digital goods have particular traits that make them difficult to store...
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Agnostic, Maybe: The ALA/FCC/Digital Corps Debacle →
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Dear Author: The biggest threat to publishing... →
When you get a group of readers in a room, nearly every one of them will recount how their reading either started at a library or was fostered by a library. One of the slides from Bowker that I saw at BEA was that for individuals who have adopted a tablet, the number one thing that activities on the tablet have replaced is reading. Tablet adoption is on the rise and by 2015, tablet sales will...
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The Guardian: Open access to research is... →
Campbell [editor-in-chief of Nature], who was speaking on Friday at a briefing by academic publishers on open access at the Science Media Centre, related his recent experience of reading papers on psychology and psychiatric treatments. “It’s been a delight to find how many of those papers are published open access. I’ve been able to dip around into papers, get what I want, not...
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Libraries/Librarians on Tumblr →
thelifeguardlibrarian:
The list is now properly linked, updated, and alphabetized from my homepage. See “Tumblarians.”
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Agnostic, Maybe: How Oprah Might Help Out... →
However, it was the discovery of Wild’s publisher that brought up a much more pertinent question in this whole deal as it relates to libraries: what happens when Oprah picks a book that is from one of the Big Six publishers but is not from Random House or HarperCollins? In the case of a book choice from Hachette, MacMillan, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster (all of the publishers that do not allow...
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Academic Librarian (Princeton): Where Mobile Can’t... →
If you want a depressing exposition of what you can and can’t do as a college student armed only with a mobile phone, read this article: Smartphones Bring Hope, Frustration as Substitute for Computers. It details all the limitations with smartphones as computers, a situation many poorer students with either no computer or no Internet access face. And let’s face it, without Internet access, a...
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How many librarians does it take to change a...
How many public librarians does it take to change a light bulb?
Well, first we'll have to pass a bond measure to pay for the replacement.
How many academic librarians does it take to change a light bulb?
No fewer than three, acting as a committee to determine the best solutions and alternative practices, which, after a lengthy review process, will be presented to custodial staff.
How many catalog(ue) librarians does it take to change a light bulb?
I don't understand why we don't call it an 'Electric Lamp, Incandescent' any more. And in any case, I just changed that light bulb a few years ago.
How many library school students does it take to change a light bulb?
LED light bulbs are a far more efficient technology with a lot of applications in brick-and-mortar information facilities, but it would be even better if we just digitized the collections and put them into accessible silos.
How many emerging technologies librarians does it take to change a light bulb?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
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“As long as there are people who care about books and don’t know why, there will...”
– CultureLab: The book is dead, long live the book (via infoneer-pulse)
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Library Babel Fish: Intellectual Freedom and the... →
Even more unhealthy is the way that relationships within the library are so often handled along a factory floor model rather than on the basis of shared governance. This is really curious, considering the work done in libraries and the values we supposedly uphold. You’d be hard put to find a library director who didn’t support vigorously the concept of intellectual freedom. But you might be a...
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ebook Porn: Should we worry ebooks are becoming... →
ebookporn:
This is a very good piece from the WSJ on piracy and the difference between music and books when it comes to digital transition. http://on.wsj.com/JPYJ42
Of course both products are very different. Over the 400 years we have been trained to think of books as a self contained artifact and a physical product acquired and lovingly shelved in your home or library. Music’s “product” is...
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