Our library got our settlement CDs today. This is, of course, particularly poignant because we do not have a music collection, we have a book on tape/CD collection. Now we have a music collection and it is bad, very bad indeed. Andrei Codrescu has an essay on the wrongness of this settlement for public libraries. Music industry, shame on you for dumping your unwanted products on the public libraries of the country in an effort to clear your warehouses and supposedly make good on what you did wrong. Remember when they were calling this CD dumping a computer glitch? What ever happened to that defense? [thanks robert]
Category: pr, hype & bs
accessories for the well dressed librarian
these books are free, don’t be a doofus and PAY for them
Attention librarians, please do not buy any compilations of overpriced public domain titles from the likes of e-reader unless you really, serioously, want someone to charge you four dollars to copy a free text onto a CD for you.
I wake up every morning thinking “how can I keep my job from going to the robots?”
I would be happy to see robots in libraries fetching and shelving the books for me, though I think the term “mechanical husher” [see the actual URL name] may not catch on.
reading “at risk”
Please keep in mind that any non-fiction you read last year would not have been counted as “literary reading” for the purposes of the NEA’s Reading at Risk report that has been getting a lot of discussion lately. While I think it’s really important to try to raise a nation of readers, creating distinctions like “literary reading” and then handwringing over its decline as if it were reflecting an actual drop in literacy [it isn’t] seems disingenous and divisive. I’d like to see the NEA take on the incredible backwardness of No Child Left Behind to see what effect incredible testing pressure in schools has on kids’ interest in reading for fun. Or do some statistical analysis into how many Americans feel they have time to do anything for fun lately. [thanks eoin]