Librarian And Information Science News

View From ALA Midwinter

I have my exciting ALA Midwinter Photos posted.

Some of the highlights include:

Stupid Panda Tricks

The First OCLC Terminal [I was suprised to find at the Smithsonian].

The First Apple Computer.

A view of the trade show floor.

And Stupid Vendor Tricks, yes that is a real person.

Topic: 

Study finds errors rife in U.S. science textbooks

CNN is one place with The Story on how bad science textbooks seem to be. Twelve of the most popular science textbooks used at middle schools across the United States are riddled with 500 pages worth of errors. The part that scared me was They tried to contact textbook authors with questions but in many cases the people listed said they didn\'t write the book, some didn\'t even know their names were listed!

\"The books have a very large number of errors, many irrelevant photographs, complicated illustrations, experiments that could not possibly work, and drawings that represented impossible situations,\"

Topic: 

The Old-Fangled Search Engine

Lois Fundis writes \"The Washington Post, covering ALA Midwinter, interviews ALA President Nancy Kranich and explains that not only do libraries still count, \"Libraries may get hot\" -- not only because the incoming First Lady is a former librarian, but because \"Libraries are like the ultimate 3-D web sites.\" \"

From the story:
\"Good question. Whom do we ask? AltaVista? Google? Ask Jeeves.com? Nahhh. Let\'s ask a librarian.\"

This is the kind of story I just love to read!

Topic: 

ALA Award Winners

Richard Peck, author of \"A Year Down Yonder,\" and David Small, illustrator of \"So You Want To Be President?\" are the 2001 winners of the John Newbery and Randolph Caldecott Medals, the most prestigious awards in children\'s literature.

Topic: 

Library Movie Review

Irene Wood sent this along originallyAnn Ferrari has written a nice movie review and was kind enough to share it with us:

I few weeks ago I watched a great British movie called \"Shooting the Past\"
which was a Mobil Masterpiece Theater production in 1999. It\'s the best
and most suspenseful portrayal of a library that I\'ve ever seen in a movie, so
I thought I\'d write up a review. (By the way, it\'s available for sale from
Amazon.com, and I managed to borrow it through my local library).

Shooting the Past is the story of a British photographic library housed on
an old estate......

Topic: 

The Wireless Library

Sharon Giles Writes:

\"From the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library (from their alert service LibLines)
With the opening of Sophie\'s Agora and Internet Café the HAM-TMC Library will have wireless capabilities. This means that our patrons with laptops and other portable computers may gain access to the internet without being constricted to the computer labs.

There will be 6 access points in the library\'s café, each capable of supporting 250 users anywhere in the library. However, to ensure that signals reach every level of the library, access points will be installed on each floor, allowing laptop users internet access from the stacks, study carrells and study rooms.

Whether you use a laptop or a handheld device all that is needed to access the wireless ports is a wireless PC card adapter.


Click here for more information on wireless technology.

\"

Topic: 

Seth Finkelstein\'s Free Speech Pages - Censorware

Don Saklad writes \"Seth Finkelstein\'s Free Speech Pages - Censorware Essays are available online at
sethf.com/freespeech/censorware/essays
\"
In case you don\'t know who he is, Seth says:

\"I was one of the very first people arguing against censorware and pointing out the deeps flaws, as early as 1995. Now, that\'s free-speech gospel. But it was a lonely stance back then.

I co-Founded Censorware Project, and spent a lot of time volunteering my skills as chief programmer. Unfortunately, increasing legal risk and lack of desperately needed defense/support for me ended my participation.

With all that programming, I still managed to write some early essays criticizing censorware.

Topic: 

Getch\'er Vatican Library reproductions here!

Brian writes \"business2.com

has a Story on the Vatican Library (established in 1451), \"Long closed to those outside the church, the world\'s oldest library has staked out a storefront on the Web.\"
\"

Topic: 

Librarians wanted to switch jobs with a Las Vegas

Brock writes \"
Here´s something funny if you need a story for your next edition...Inside Edition is looking for a librarian between 21 and 35 to switch lives
with a Las Vegas showgirl for their \"Switch\" segment. Don\'t ask me why.

The site is flash-only so you to click the link from the homepage \"

How many librarians does it take......?

Whoa!! Two humor pieces in a row! A friend (thanks Denise) sent me this story from Yahoo a few days ago, but I forgot to post it here. It seems that a library in the UK had to close for a bit while they changed some 300 lightbulbs. I guess we now know the answer to that long asked question.\"The answer is five days and a team of electricians if the bulbs that need changing happen to be in Peckham Library.

The question which has amused generations of schoolchildren and adults alike has finally been answered by Southwark council. It has closed the £4.5 million library - which opened last May - while its 300 light bulbs are replaced by a team of four workers.\"

Topic: 

Shhhh...don\'t you know this is a bar

I put this one from the National Post in the humor category, because it put a smile on my face. There is a bar in Toronto called the Munster Hall Pub where talking is not allowed for two hours on Sundays because they watch a British Soap Opera. It\'s pretty ironic that libraries are getting more and more loud and pubs/bars are getting quiet.\"No one does talk, or even whispers, during the show. It\'s like being in a library. \'\'It is strange,\'\' says Mr. Hamilton. \'\'But in my family -- there\'s eight of us -- you just know not to call during Coronation Street.\"

Topic: 

NPR Audio on Philadelphia Schools

From member station WHYY, Martin Wells reports Philadelphia schools are making an effort to get rid of library books that are tattered, inappropriate, or just plain wrong. Some decades old books talk about how man may one day land on the moon, another wrongly says that South African leader Nelson Mandela was executed.

You can listen to the Real Audio report on The NPR Site.

Congressional Web Learning Report

The NY Times has a Story on The Commission on Web-based Education. They had
identified seven key points in its report on harnessing the learning power of the Internet.

\"If you throw a rock in Washington, D.C., you\'re bound to hit someone in favor of wide expansion of broadband -- there are lots of people pulling for it,\"

Topic: 

Google of Archives Stories

Library of Congress has 5 million U.S. history items online. The 5 million images belong to a project called \"American Memory,\" available at loc.gov.

Meanwhile, USC has nearly $2 million worth of Ernest Hemingway\'s letters. Now the USC where students and researchers can study how authors develop their ideas and their works. \"I\'m still giddy about it,\" professor Matthew Bruccoli said. Denver Post Story

Also, More than 150 copies of the complete legal papers of Abraham Lincoln will soon be going out to law schools across the country, thanks to a grant received recently by The Lincoln Legal Papers research project. Full Story.

Thanks to Bob Cox for most of these.

Laura Bush is no Jackie O

Bob Cox sent this one in.

I can\'t remember for sure if This Story started it, but there has been a very spirited discussion on LM_NET about Laura Bush, and her \"Librarian Like\" appearance.

\"Mrs. Bush\'s look is pretty, practical and proper, but it lacks the flair to spark any major fashion following - except perhaps, in those parts of the South where fashion seems stuck in the 1980s,\" one reporter wrote in an article for the Orlando Sentinel.

Topic: 

E-Book Forecast: Cloudy

This Story from Wired takes more than a little of the wind out of the eBook hype. They say some are forecasting the death of e-books, already. A recent study says textbooks and print-on-demand publishing will do well. With sites like Baen Free Library giving them away, I wonder how strong sales will be.

\"Forecasts may vary, but everything points to a very attractive and growing market that\'s a mix of print and electronic formats existing with each other,\" Sadler said. \"Over time, e-books will be a great value proposition.\"

Squelching Campus Dissent

Some colleges are creating free-speech zones and allowing students to protest only in \"the zone\". No more rights to post a flier on the wall of the student union or anywhere else. Speech policies have been adopted at GWU and KSU, the UC at Berkeley, and the U of Mississippi and discussed at Oklahoma State U. and Notre Dame.

The Chronicle has the Full Story.

Topic: 

Fun Book Links

I found a couple interesting book links on Memepool this morning.

The is a Yahoo! Club called Book Hell, \"It\'s Where Bad Books Go When they DIE!!!\", devoted to the collecting of obscure, esoteric and otherwise weird books.

Then there is the BOOK HAPPY World of Weird Books (the former site of the Kooks Museum).

Topic: 

How Many Librarians Does It Take....

A couple months ago we ran This Story on the Peckham Library in London. It won the Stirling Prize for architecture.

Well, today I ran across This Story on the library. Now they say they need to close the building for five days and have a team of electricians change 300 light bulbs. The new bulbs are a \"gargantuan exercise\", they need to set up platforms, and even move books around to change the bulbs.

\"This means every six to seven months the building will be forced to close whilst staff remove the books, workmen move the shelves and erect the tower platforms and electricians come in to unscrew and replace the light bulbs.\"

Topic: 

UCITA: What Does it Mean for Libraries?

Online has a nice Feature on UCITA and what it means for you as a librarian.

\"Copyright laws have always provided for fair use exceptions for nonprofit educational and research use, and criticism, to name just a few exceptional areas. Opponents of UCITA fear the effective extinction of such fair use rights under UCITA. Librarians also fear they will have imposed on them contract clauses that prohibit lending materials or that prohibit activities or uses that libraries may make in carrying out their preservation efforts.\"

Topic: 

Pages

Subscribe to LISNews: RSS
http://lisnews.org/node?page=1602
lisnews.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-11
47274
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:42B3EXCN7GUW6X4R3MLSUBYVARCOMBQ6
<urn:uuid:f2ab6540-0378-42a3-9924-07b49740ebcd>
2015-03-04T17:54:49Z
104.27.171.130
sha1:3XH46IRMHCADNUMW6LGWPRBS46BW7ZKB
<urn:uuid:8286b300-85c9-444f-9983-ea74be51fe69>
http://lisnews.org/node?page=1602
length
response
<urn:uuid:3ba685de-53a9-474e-8da3-b3512ba366d2>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-28-5-156.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-11
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for February 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf