Library Stuff

Surrey News – “Libraries and museums will become “pop-up” tourist information points for the 2012 Games to help cater for the influx of tourists. The move was inspired by the “pop-up” phenomenon, which has seen temporary restaurants and retail stores appear in homes, businesses and street corners across the world.”

KALW – “The bad news is that state funding for California libraries has been completely eliminated. There’s not really any good news about that except that it was expected. This past July, state library funding was sliced in half, and there was a trigger amendment attached to the budget that would eliminate state funding for public libraries at midyear if the state’s revenue projections were not met. Needless to say, they weren’t.”

The Next Web – “The highest court in the UK has launched a Twitter account and will begin tweeting news about its latest judgements imminently. The @UKSupremeCourt account has yet to tweet, but the court’s Twitter ‘broadcast service’ will kick-off by tweeting live coverage of the new justice Lord Reed being sworn in at the Supreme Court later today. It will tweet updates during the brief ceremony at the building in Parliament Square, London, to explain proceedings to those watching via a live Web stream. The ceremony start at 11.30am.”

LA Times – “”Cuckoo’s Nest.” Sure, everyone’s heard of it. But is it worth reading? Before Jack Nicholson won his first Oscar, before there was a bus full of merry pranksters, there was a writing student with a swing-shift job in a mental ward. It’s the Ken Kesey of that era who stares from the jacket flap of the 50th anniversary edition of his debut novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: His curly hair is cropped short, he wears a cotton work shirt and his gaze is steady.”

Columbia Spectator – “For most Columbia undergraduates, making bibliographic citations boils down to a few formatting styles, like MLA and Chicago, to learn in University Writing. But for professors, researchers, and graduate students, there are over 1900 different styles to contend with. Their lives might be about to get a little bit easier—the Columbia University Libraries received a $125,000 grant last month to build a new digital tool to help manage existing styles and make new ones. In collaboration with Mendeley, a private developer of reference management software, the Libraries hope to develop a simple, graphical interface with which authors can navigate the maze of styles available, and modify them to create their own.”

Bloomberg – “A Federal Communications Commission effort to bring digital textbooks to U.S. students faces resistance from schools with limited budgets for buying devices such as Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad tablet computer. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced plans yesterday to get all U.S. students from kindergarten through the 12th grade using electronic titles within five years. The initiative, which doesn’t involve any additional U.S. government funding, is meant to speed adoption of e-textbooks. The U.S. spends $7 billion a year on textbooks, and digital versions are the exception, rather than the rule, Genachowski said.”

Relief Web – “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon celebrated the benefits that books can bring to young people as he opened a library at an Ethiopian primary school that has been established under an innovative United Nations scheme.
At a ceremony yesterday in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Mr. Ban took part in the hand over of a “Thank You Small Library (TYSL),” which will now be used by the roughly 1,200 pupils attending Keykokeb primary school. At least 110 separate libraries have been created in 15 countries – mostly in sub-Saharan Africa – since 2007, when the so-called TYSL initiative began.” (Thanks Kathleen)

NPR – “Jonathan Franzen’s in the news again, this time talking about how e-books are chiseling away at the foundations of civilization as we know it. Absurd, isn’t it? That the author of two of the better regarded novels of the past decade (give or take) would be concerned about how you read his books.”

Press Release – “The WestlawNext iPad app now features enhanced folder sharing capabilities. Users can save their research results, including notes and KeyCite® warning flags, in folders that can be instantly shared with others. For instance, an attorney or researcher in an office can share research with an attorney in a court setting or collaborate with a client on a specific matter. Users can also tap into previous research across departments and organizational boundaries, allowing them to access and share a vast repository of increasingly valuable knowledge anywhere, anytime.”

Paris Review – “Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf.” (some images NSFW)