Library Stuff

This article bothers me in so many ways, I don’t even know what to quote. I’ll go with this:

“The 10-year-old is being held responsible by the Allen County Public Library for $778 in fines and replacement costs of items checked out in his name. The 5-year-old is also facing fines and replacement fees, although Mason isn’t sure how large those fees are. Mason says library officials won’t tell him. He’ll have to take the child to the library and have him ask how much he owes.

But how do a 5-year-old and a 10-year-old pay such hefty fines? Mason says he’s been told that when they are 18 they’ll be sued for it. Meanwhile, because they owe large fines, they can’t use the library.”

Not only that, but this stinks too:

“According to a 2005 report, in the previous 12 months, 82,000 items were borrowed from the library and not returned. Those items had a value of $1.4 million.”

A lose-lose situation. Sad.

I just subscribed to a bunch of customized news feeds and I’m seeing really interesting results coming into my aggregator.

For example, this piece discusses a survey on social networking software and college recruitment.

“The study also found that 63 percent of respondents said they would read a blog authored by a faculty member as a way to seek more information about students and faculty at a particular institution. While only 9 percent said they had participated in an online chat on a school Web site, 51 percent said they would if they could. Also, 9 percent of prospective students indicated that they had downloaded a podcast from a college or university, but 54 percent said they would if they had the opportunity.”

Also, 6% of prospective students subscribed to an RSS feed, 94% did not, and 45% “would if they could”.

Michael Sauers’s book came in the mail today (well, yesterday, but I didn’t see that Barbie had put it on the kitchen table – I arrived home really late). I saw a copy at Internet Librarian, but now I have my own. And Michael signed it, which was nice of him. Thanks buddy.

Speaking of books, Meredith Farkas has one coming out (published by ITI), called Social Software in Libraries. She has a “book blog” set up, but she told me via e-mail that it was very much “in beta”. Still, she gave me the thumbs up to link to it. I look forward to this book as Meredith is one of librarianships best writers. Ever!

And what about the book that Crystie R. Hill and I are working on for ALA Editions (on Community Building)? I must admit that I am not as far as I would want to be in the writing, but we have until March to get the first draft in and I think it will come together nicely.

A study on “Google Diagnosing”:

“They examined one year’s worth of case records published in the New England Journal of Medicine, without looking at the correct diagnoses. After they selected three to five search terms from the studies, Google came up with information that enabled the doctors to make the correct diagnoses, ones that matched what the journal had concluded in 58 percent of the cases. The computer got lymphoma and acute chest syndrome right, for example, but thought West Nile fever was graft vs. host disease.”

How about an The Espresso Book Machine:

“On Demand Books LLC. is planning to become the first company to globally deploy a low cost, totally automatic book machine (The Espresso Book Machine), which can produce 15 – 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention. This technology and process will produce one each of ten different books at the same speed and cost as it can produce ten copies of the same book. ODB has two machines currently deployed (one at the World Bank InfoShop in Washington DC, and one at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt).”

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