Supreme Court sides with gay bookstore

Cabot writes \" CBC has a Story
on how
The Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a small Vancouver bookstore, ending its longstanding battle over Canada Customs\' power to seize material it considered obscene. \"


Since 1984, Canada Customs had confiscated 262 items destined for the Little Sister\'s Book and Art Emporium, because officers said the material was obscene.

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Divide and rule out

Helga Cronje was kind enought to suggest This Story from The Gaurdian on the not-so vast reach of the internet. They say not even 2% of the world\'s population is linked to the net, most people on the planet have not even made a telephone call and there are more telephone lines in a big city like Tokyo than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Looks like we have a long way to go.

The 1st eMail Ever

I found this one over on Slashdot.org.Pretext.com has an Interview and Story on the very first eMail ever sent.

\"Sometime in late 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message.\"

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Freedom from choice

Bob Cox sent in This Story from Salon on all those \"best of\" books. You know the ones, \"Best Short Stories\", \"Best Long Stories\", \"Best Boring Stories\".....


\"Preselection is one of those organizing principles -- like Oedipal conflict or right-wing conspiracy -- that seem, the minute you hear them, to make disparate phenomena fall into an understandable pattern. Oprah\'s Book Club, for instance, has had more influence on American literature than Lionel Trilling and Ralph Waldo Emerson combined. It\'s so popular because Winfrey is saying, \"This is a good book. Go and read it.\" \"

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eBook Quickies

A couple of eBook stories-


One from Techweb.com that says the future is looking eBook-less.
\"My feeling now is that unless they improve their platforms, nobody\'s going to be reading these damn books,\"

And This One from The Atlantic Unbound on the eBooks of the 90\'s that were produced on CD-ROM.

Dubbya on the \'Net

Wired has a Story on how the new administration here in the USA will be handling the internet. Check out the National Academy of Sciences report -
Tools and Strategies for Protecting Kids from Pornography and
Their Applicability to Other Inappropriate Internet Content
. Dubbya is likely to come down on internet free speech.

\"If you\'re a child, have a computer and know how to type, you can access anything you want on the Internet,\" Donnerstein said. \"The question is, what does this material do? What effects does it have?\"

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Friday Updates

The Friday updates for this week include industrial action down under, tower collapse, Internet book lending, books about books, University cuts resources, library visions, outdaded books, and much, much, much more. Have a nice weekend.

Dogpile Saves Lives

Search Engine Guide has this really strange article about a man who was having a heart attack, jumped on Dogpile did a boolean search, and saved his own life. Who said that Internet was bad for you.\"While doing homework for a class at Sinclair Community College, Mr. Russell found himself facing an adversary even more dangerous than Simon Bar Sinister; chest pains. As the pains quickly became severe and a terrible pressure grew in his chest, Mr. Russell became concerned. He decided to launch a search on Dogpile to help him track down a list of heart attack symptoms to see if they matched what he was feeling. Relying on Dogpile\'s ability to handle Boolean search commands, Mr. Russell typed \'symptoms and \"heart attack\"\' to help him pinpoint the life saving information he needed fast.\"

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Amazon fights union activity

Just in case you needed another reason not to use Amazon, here is an article in the New York Times about their efforts to prevent their workers from unionizing. (You may have to register to read the article, but that\'s free.) The article is a couple of weeks old, and newer stories are probably available, but I liked this one. If you want to get your books from a union shop, the place to go is Powell\'s, a great bookstore with a huge physical presence in Portland, OR. (Largest used book store west of the Mississippi, with lots of new books too.) You can get most things there. It\'s always my first stop when I\'m looking for a book.

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The New Wireless Nation

Teri Ross Embrey writes \"It is becoming an increasingly wireless nation with recent reports predicting wireless growth to be significant for 14-25 years olds. So it is no suprise that for an article on wireless for IT Executives Information Week that the highlighted IT executive came from an Orland Park high school. Are libraries next? \"

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UCITA: A Guide to Understanding and Action

December 13, 2000 (That\'s TODAY!)


1:00-4:00 p.m. EST

UCITA, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, is a proposed
state law that seeks to create a unified approach to the licensing of
software and information. Two states--Maryland and Virginia--have passed
UCITA, and it will be under consideration in many other states in the near
future. Several aspects of UCITA pose problems for higher education and
libraries.


If anyone else is going, and would like to report in the conference, please let us know!


I would love to hear what people think of this!

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I Saw You in the Paper

Here is an interesting little tidbit by Ananova about a public library in Tennessee publishing the names of patrons who have overdue materials in the local paper. Now, I have always wanted to see my name in the newspaper, but not this way. I hope they are not printing the names of the books that these delinquents have out\"The Lawrence County Public Library, in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, published a notice containing more than 100 names of people who have failed to bring their books back.

And the strategy appears to be working, because some books which had been out of circulation for up to two years, have been returned.\"

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Questia discussed on COLLIB-L

COLLIB-L, the listserv of the ACRL College Libraries Section, is giving us a lot of good material here at LISNews. As a sort of a sequel to my article in Library Juice 3:27, Questioning Questia, I published (with permission) a thread of discussion on that listserv about Questia, the virtual library product that will bypass academic libraries themselves and go straight to the student. (You don\'t need a musty, crusty old institution, fork over your beer money and get your books in e-form, all set for cutting and pasting!) I\'m worried about Questia and I hope they change their business plan and become a vendor to libraries.

What do you think?

Are There Too Many Librarians?

COLLIB had an interesting discussion recently that was set off by a simple job announcement. Someone was having a bad day and responded to the announcement with a rather spirited series of questions that set off the usual \"librarians are underpaid\" thread that we\'ve all seen about a million times now, but this one was interesting because people started to discuss not the lack of pay, but the lack of candidates for job openings. With articles like Where have all the Librarians gone shedding some light into the new world of the MLS, it seems obvious we are in the midst of a change in our profession, or at the very least, we are faced with an increase in career options. I started to think, are library schools spitting out too many librarians? With fewer graduates wouldn\'t salaries go up?

Librarians are underpaid, we all know that, is this causing graduates to move into other areas of work with an MLS?


More...

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Internet2: What does it mean for Libraries

Here is a summary of a speech given by Clifford Lynch entitled \"Internet2: What does it mean for Libraries and Librarians?\". If you don\'t know what the I2 is, this is a good place to start to learn about it. You can also learn more at Whatis.com

\"Internet2 is a collaboration among more than 100 U.S. universities to develop networking and advanced applications for learning and research. Since much teaching, learning, and collaborative research may require real-time multimedia and high-bandwidth interconnection, a major aspect of Internet2 is adding sufficient network infrastructure to support such applications.\"

Topic: 

Librarian Career Info

Library Censors Pro-Life Book

There is no date on This article at ProLifeInfo but at some point in the past the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library rejected the book \"Killer Angel\" on the grounds it is \"Too Political\". They say the ALA stood behind this decision.

\"When told of the ALA\'s stand on the controversy, Grant responded, \"Their position is simply Orwellian. In the name of intellectual freedom, they man the barricades anytime someone suggests the removal of child pornography from a library, but if anything conflicts with their political agenda, then censorship imposed by the library hierarchy is completely acceptable. They\'re encouraging libraries to set up their own Politburo to test books for political correctness.\"

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Reader\'s Digest Librarian Jokes

Readers Digest Laughline has 10 Librarian Jokes that are funny.

Feel free to add your own here.

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Librarians and Gifted Readers

Another google find is Librarians and Gifted Readers by Debbie Abilock.

\"Gifted readers comprise a unique population whose advocates should be librarians. Influenced to some extent by both biology and culture, gifted readers display a complex understanding of written language, knowledge of one or more subjects, and masterful control of a number of skills that allow them to navigate effectively through various texts. While gifted readers always show linguistic intelligence, other intelligences are invoked in response to the demands of particular texts. The cognitive characteristics associated with gifted children interact with specific aptitudes, intelligences, and strategies to create a \"final, integrated performance,\" much like that of a gifted violinist, that can bestow life-long pleasure and rewards to both the performer and our society.\"

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Librarians as Enemies of Books

I was Googling this morning, looking for Librarian Gifts and I stumbled upon Librarians as Enemies of Books by Randolph G. Adams. It\'s an old \"Library Quarterly\" article on a number of issues in librarianship. It\'s worth the read just for the style of writing.

\"There is no need to view with alarm the evolution of the modern librarian.\"

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