Library Stuff

AP – “Administrators lifted the ban on Friday, citing an increasing amount of educational material on the popular video-sharing site, university spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said. YouTube has its own filters for porn, but BYU added it to the list of Web sites blocked by campus online filters in 2006 because administrators felt there was too much content that could violate the school’s strict, conservative standards.”

PC World – “A key feature of the browser is the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which boosts performance and stability. Indeed, speed has been stressed as a key attraction of the upgrade.”

Utne Reader – “Lately, discussions of reading and literacy tend to devolve into polarized positions and alarmist rhetoric. On one side, fogey-nostalgist-book-loving types argue that the web is bad for reading, dumbing us down, destroying our attention spans, distracting us from classic texts. On the other, hip young techies excitedly point to the good things about digital reading, positing text-message novels and participatory media as new forms of storytelling with lower barriers to entry.” (via)

Cleveland Leader – “Comedian Drew Carey, who grew up in Cleveland, is a proud supporter of public libraries in Ohio. In 2000 he donated all his winnings ($500,000) from an appearance on a special celebrity edition of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to Ohio public libraries, and was also at the same time working on a series of public service announcements for the Ohio Library Council. While these days he is living out in California and working on “The Price is Right”, Carey still keeps up with the goings-on back in his hometown. Needless to say he was rather disheartened when he heard about Governor Ted Strickland’s plans to slash library budgets by nearly 50 percent.”

Reuters – “The heads of the top U.S. companies might be engaged in the boardroom, but they’re switched off when it comes to social media, according to a new study that said CEOs should be more connected to their customers. Research conducted by the blog UberCEO.com looked at Fortune’s 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs to determine how many were using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or had a blog — and found they were mostly absent from the rapidly growing social media community.”