Blogs

Attention Is the New Currency

With so many more distractions available to disrupt their attention, perhaps there is more academic librarians could do to help students achieve academic success.

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/08/opinion/steven-bell/attention-is-the-new-currency-from-...

David Rakoff

Essayist and humorist David Rakoff has died, novel to be published in 2013
http://books.usatoday.com/bookbuzz/post/2012-08-10/essayist-and-humorist-david-rakoff-has-di...

Finding the Price of Fairness

A new book by Kenneth Feinberg traces his years of work in assessing and paying victims’ claims after disasters, whether the 9/11 attacks, the Virginia Tech massacre or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Article in the NYT

A Message For Podcast Subscribers

No, the campaign for county commissioner isn't happening as of yet. A PDF message is still being forward to feed subscribers, though.

Cites & Insights August 2012 (12:7) available

Cites & Insights 12:7 (August 2012) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i7.pdf.

The 58-page issue is also available as a single-column 6x9 PDF designed for e-reading (at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i7on.pdf)-but please don't use that version for printing, as it's 119 pages long.

The Good News About the Future of Libraries

Librarians are only surpassed by religious fundamentalists in their dystopian view of their futures. The past week has shown to me that all this negativity may well be unwarranted. The sheer number of news sources and bloggers who picked up the story of the .Texas Wal Mart that was turned into a library demonstrates to me that when people really think about it, they want to see libraries succeed.

When I first dipped my foot into social media people would frequently ask me, "When will books go away? When will libraries disappear?" That was back when the e-book reader was born and the stock market crash started. The economy was shaken to its core. The fiscal libertarians salivated over the possibility of the possibility of eviscerating the government and slashing the social safety net to shreds. Conservatives and liberals looked at the internet as the ultimate replacement of everything library. Data phones, e-book readers and tablet computers seemed to point to a future when libraries and paper books could be viewed as irrelevant.

Cites & Insights July 2012 (12:6) available

The July 2012 issue of Cites & Insights (12:6) is now available at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i6.pdf.

The issue is 32 pages long. A single-column 6x9 version, designed for use on ereaders, is also available at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i6on.pdf. The single-column version is 62 pages long and intended only for ereading, not for printing.

The issue includes:
Libraries: Give Us a Dollar: A Case Study pp. 1-6

Would a refined version of Give Us a Dollar and We'll Give You Back Four be directly useful to a few hundred (or a few thousand) public libraries? This two-part example shows how a mythical New York library (directly based on two real libraries) might use a heavily revised version--and how it might use the current version. I'm still looking for reviewers and feedback before deciding how to proceed; these case studies might help.

Policy: Copyright: Fair Use, Part 2 pp. 6-29

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?

Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading.

Cell Tower Deaths

FRONTLINE and ProPublica investigate the hidden cost that comes with the demand for better and faster cell phone service. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cell-tower-deaths/

After Long Resistance, Pynchon Allows Novels to Be Sold as E-Books

Thomas Pynchon, author of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Crying of Lot 49,” characteristically declined to speak about his decision.

http://libwire.blogspot.com/2012/06/after-long-resistance-pynchon-allows.html

Cites & Insights 12:5 (June 2012) available

Cites & Insights 12:5 (June 2012) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i5.pdf

A single-column 6x9 version, suitable for ereaders, is available at http://citesandinsights.info/civ12i5on.pdf

The 24-page issue (43 pages in the single-column version) is PDF as usual. The individual essays are also available in HTML form at http://citesandinsights.info or use the essay name links below.

This issue includes:
The Front (pp. 1-4)

Announcing Give Us a Dollar and We'll Give You Back Four, a study of public library benefits and funding designed to help libraries see where they stand and work to improve funding.

Also noting "the books your library needs"--two recent books published by professional library-oriented publishers that I believe are essential for, respectively, every academic and most special (and some public) library and every public and some academic and special libraries.

The Middle: Forecasts (pp. 4-12)

Following up the May essay on futurism with a whole bunch of specific forecasts--the one-year kind that can be tested and usually found wanting.

Policy: Copyright: Fair Use, Part 1 (pp. 12-24)

Digital wars

A librarian friend of mine who makes thoughtful book recomendations said that - Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internetwas an excellent and timely read.

Pages

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