Archive for October, 2007
Clarification On LISNews Post About Weeding
October 25th, 2007The title of this post at LISNews is a bit misleading.
The Rabbi is not making weeding harder. Taking a book off the shelf is easy. The library doesn’t have to throw the books out or, god forbid, destroy them. Just put the books on the “for sale” cart or give them away [...]
Changes to Google Reader
October 25th, 2007When I used to get posts from shared items feeds that I subscribed to, Google Reader didn’t indicate that it was indeed from a shared reader feed. Now it does. I think this is new and I like it.
More on Blog Comments
October 25th, 2007To cut down on spam comments, I have decided to close comments after a post has been active for 90 days. It’s a very rare occasion that I get a comment on a story after 3 months.
The folks in the IT department at ITI installed a WordPress plug-in called Comment Timeout, which seems to [...]
More On The Missing Material At The LOC
October 25th, 2007Book Patrol - “Part of the problem is that the public still uses paper call slips to request material and apparently many of the paper slips are as difficult to read as the Palm Beach paper ballots of the 2000 election.”
Read the survey results here.
More on Filtering at SJPL
October 24th, 2007Editorial - “Responding to a minor nuisance at the downtown library by dampening the rights of inquiry and speech of all patrons at every city library is an unacceptable trade-off.”
Getting Boys To Crack Books
October 24th, 2007Jennifer Gish - “[M]ost experts agree that the best way to encourage boys to read is to have them see relatives and heroes doing the same.”
Who’s Legally Responsible
October 24th, 2007Eric J. Sinrod - “The stakes are enormous. The question is serious. Under what circumstances will the law hold interactive computer services liable for content posted by others on their sites?”
Uncle Larry Comes Through
October 23rd, 2007Here’s his blog post on the library domain incident.
He says, “[L]ibrary officials should use the experience to inform the public about domain names - how to get them, their cost and re-registration - and the people who might poach them. They now have firsthand knowledge.”
Good point. Librarians are great teachers.
So Much For The OPAC
October 23rd, 2007James V. Grimaldi and Jacqueline Trescott - “About one-sixth of the books, monographs and bound periodicals at the Library of Congress weren’t where they were supposed to be because of flaws in the systems for shelving and retrieving materials, according to a survey to be made public at a congressional hearing today.”
No sense in having [...]
Conference Blogging
October 23rd, 2007J - “Blogging at a library conference is a great way to avoid going outside and seeing exciting new places.”
READ Canpaign
October 23rd, 2007ALA has been adding more shots to their Flickr Set
Who Knew?
October 23rd, 2007US Magazine - “Believe it or not, those perfect white moustaches sported by celebs in “Got Milk?” ads are not the work of makeup artists.”
Two things:
1) Amanda Bynes looks incredible in that shot.
2) Has there ever been a “Got Books?” PR campiagn?
LibraryThing @ Bowdoin College
October 23rd, 2007Campus News - “When you think of online social networking, the “friending” that goes on among popular Web sites MySpace and Facebook may come to mind, but book lovers in particular are checking out a social network that has become a Web page turner of its own”
Update: Typo fixed. Thanks Alisia
LOC Collecting Blogs
October 23rd, 2007Discourse.net received a note from the LOC.
How is this different from the great work of the Internet Archive?
UK Site Must Reveal Anonymous Commenters Identity
October 23rd, 2007Clare Dyer - “Disgruntled fans of Sheffield Wednesday who vented their dissatisfaction with the football club’s bigwigs in anonymous internet postings may face expensive libel claims after the chairman, chief executive and five directors won a high-court ruling last week forcing the owner of a website to reveal their identity.”
Scary stuff.
More on Book Scanning
October 23rd, 2007Shaun Mullen - “I have more than a passing acquaintance with the question of whether electronic media will replace books because of my day job in a rare book and manuscript library that sits within a larger library with nearly 3 million bound volumes and millions of electronic resources.”
More on Harry Potter
October 23rd, 2007Raju Mudhar - “Writer J.K. Rowling’s revelation about the gay private life of a dead – and fictional – school headmaster in her popular Harry Potter series of books is conjuring both criticism from those who already wanted the books banned and calm acceptance from those who applaud her for not making it a big [...]
Don’t Let Your Domain Expire
October 23rd, 2007Lauren O. Kidd - “Type www.oceancountylibrary.org into your Web browser, and you no longer will be directed to the Web site for the Ocean County Library. That domain name — owned by the library system since 2000 — has been purchased by someone else. The library’s administration has been trying to reclaim the familiar name [...]
That Baby DVD
October 23rd, 2007I added a new album to my iPod. That Baby. If you are sick and tired of the same tired old kids shows and music, get this CD (and the DVD).
We have the other two creations (Oy Baby and Oy Baby 2), which focus more on Judaism, but the latest release is modernized [...]
Still Trying To Protect The Kids
October 23rd, 2007Angela Harrison - “The UK police body which works to stop child sex abuse has launched a new campaign aimed at helping young children to stay safe online.”
Keeping kids safe online starts with active parenting, not government intervention, but I’m sure it couldn’t hurt, as long as civil liberties are protected.
Browse The NYT By Subject
October 23rd, 2007Dave’s new tool is incredible. If you read certain sections of the New York Times and that still doesn’t drill it down enough for you, check it out. Ooh, and there’s an OPML feed.
Scoble says: “[T]he problem is that most people won’t understand this cause it looks too simple.”
Lots of Flickr Tools
October 23rd, 2007Programmable Web lists 275 of ‘em. Wowza!
OCLC Releases New Study
October 22nd, 2007Press Release - “OCLC, the world’s largest library research and service organization, has released the third in a series of reports that scan the information landscape to provide data, analyses and opinions about users’ behaviors and expectations in today’s networked world.”
Here’s a First
October 22nd, 2007KWTX - “An English teacher in Tuscola has been placed on paid leave and faces possible criminal charges in a book dispute. A student’s parents complained to law officers that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a 1974 book about a murderer who has sex with the bodies of his victims.
I’m sure there will be [...]
Jill <3’s Google Cache
October 22nd, 2007Jill Hurst-Wahl - “We can argue that the cache version should not exist because it violates copyright…but at the moment, I’m just glad it exists because it provided access to something that I needed.”
Willie Goes To The Library
October 22nd, 2007A Flickr set.
The Laughing Librarian is Offended
October 22nd, 2007Well, not really. Point taken Brian.
But Should We Cater To Them?
October 22nd, 2007G - “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is what the On Demand culture of the Internet has done to your kids. Can’t even walk twenty feet to the next room, anymore. Heaven forbid they ever have to do anything useful”
Behind the NYT Bestsellers List
October 22nd, 2007Clark Hoyt - “The New York Times best-seller list is a powerful and mysterious institution that both reports and drives the sales of books around the nation”
Numbers Games
October 21st, 2007Louise Story - “[T]he Internet has given publishers a new form of ammunition: raw server data with precise numbers of site visits and page views. This data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors, but it does give them ballpark figures that they say are far more accurate than the extrapolations drawn by [...]