12.28.99 Need another word for fornication but can't find it in your conventional thesauri? You need The Crude Thesaurus. [memepool] Two more authoritative Amazon-y sites: GNU Project's Boycott Amamzon page and the Salon article on the whole deal. Weblogger and weirdo Godfrey Daniels has a fun booklist. 12.27.99 You know how newspapers often try to hide problematic news in the day after Christmas edition of the paper, so that fewer people will read it? Well, ALA has invited comment on their core values statement in about this same time window. Read it, then comment on it. Meanwhile, ALA's corporate memberships are up 19% while individual memberships are up a scant 5%. Are you picking up what I'm laying down here? [lisnews] Bored at work this week? worry about whether your library is Y2K compliant. Here's an FAQ. [reprinted link] Library Juice's Y2K page is still up, too. Remember, books are Y2K compliant. 12.26.99 dorks at Newsweek wax poetic about the end of the book: "and by then, I'll have made so much off of my stock options, that I won't care that I'm out of a job..." [liblog] Every Librarian Should Know: Ineffective Methods of Promoting Silence online indie bookseller network abebooks.com has a smashing new look. 12.25.99 no sarcasm, it's Christmas. rhymes with orange is a hilarious comic. [liblog] I updated my links page to be more current -- and include all those great new weblogs -- and found the really useful oss4lib weblog about open source systems for libraries. 12.24.99 Librarian activism now merits its own category on Yahoo. Librarian-as-remote-photographer Christmas card from the south pole. Any good reference librarian needs to be clear on Christmas urban legends. My favorite: "For more than 20 years two brothers-in-law found traded the same pair of gift pants back and forth between them, each time finding more inventive ways to wrap the beasties." 12.23.99 One way to be a librarian and get paid real money..... Fricks freak over Pittsburgh's patrimony. A debate on what to do with extensive family archives. If you still have to work on the 23rd, you might appreciate some goofy dejanews postings: lonely librarian, head librarian, get it? , lesbian librarian erotica, part 1, librarian monkey song Just one cat in the bookdrop story.[lisnews] 12.22.99 Canadian? Librarian? Don't miss the 1/3 deadline on the call for papers from the Canadaian Association for Information Science. Topic: "The Diverse Domain of Information Science" [how's t hat for a grant-landing topic?]. More upcoming deadlines over at DLib. First people from Eugene blow up Seattle, then they start complaining about carpets! AcqWeb has a munga email directory of publishers, vendors and etc on their site now. Suitable for Amazon-boycott spamming or whatever your little heart desires. Harry Potter has an owl. Cool. 12.21.99 Is this what makes you a world class city? Scary wedding cake library planned for Seattle. "Career choices for girls at the time were teacher, nurse or librarian. She chose library science." A profile of Twinsburg Public Library Director Karen Tschudy. Jeff Bezos named Time's person of the year while the Amazon boycott picks up steam... In London, Malcolm McLaren suggests fighting cappucino culture by offering free Guinness in public libraries. Note: I am reading a Harry Potter book, just in time for the Solstice. 12.16.99 This article exists solely so the author can use the words Brobdingnagians and Houyhnhnms. Though it does involved a tied-up librarian... It's not just Jesus and Dewey who celebrate birthdays in December -- Happy Birthday First Amendment! Brought to you by huge corporate media: The Gannett Foundation! New issue of Progressive Librarian has an anarchism & libraries supplement. 12.15.99 If you don't already read Library Juice religiously, go check out their post-WTO supplement. What is the web equivalent of "run, don't walk!". Whatever it is, do that and take a peek at the Wilton Library Assocaition's Innovative Internet Applications list. Archivists as fetishists. Happy Birthday LoC. Jerry Hall is a judge for this year's Whitbread Prize. Here's a look at what she reads. 12.13.99 Seen netlibrary yet? After listening to cloying radio ads for it for the last week or two, I checked it out. While I would be predisposed to hate anything called a library that didn't have an actual book or two, this place is interesting. Here are my top eight things to say about it: $30/year sounds reasonable if their collection is any good there are many many Christian books in the public domain, enough so that I added an AND NOT God string to all my searches the help file is aggressively unhelpful power search vs. advanced search, this is silly nomenclature. Like, which is bigger, super or jumbo? keyword searches on "private collection" books give you no idea how you got that book in your list of hits slow. slow like watching grass grow "public collection" books claim to be improved over the standard Gutenberg texts that they came from, but a quick scan did not impress me. use of frames renders some books completely unreadable, I had to scroll left to right some features still in beta, I do hate that Here's a drooling editorial on netlibrary if you're looking for a different perspective. 12.12.99 When someone says "adventure in your pocket" what do you think of? Books on tape, of course. Retired librarian Carole Dagg lists her best books of the century, with a quiz at the end. "Those librarians do a great job, we just don't like to look at them..." Harvard contemplates relocating their librarians. 12.10.99 Happy Birthday Melvil Dewey, creator of efficient spelling! Remember, he advocated hiring women because you could pay them less. Speaking of low wages, New York public library workers are hacked off about low pay and lack of wage parity. 12.9.99 I'm heading out for the weekend. Use ths time to familiarize yourself with LIS News Finally, a worthwhile anti-Amazon page. Marx Memorial Library spruced up: "Discredited leaders still find a home here." Good with Words: a review of Encarta compared to those old bricks-n-mortar enclyclopediae. 12.8.99 Seen on a personals website at jamaicans.com: "I want a dark-skinned man with full lips, a beard, short nails, real teeth, with a library card." Steve works in a library and sometimes weird things happen to him there. 12.7.99 Back in the twenties, it wasn't just drinking fountains and restaurants that were segregated. Free library, indeed! A strange on-line game about the library. Food for Fines, a good idea from Douglas Public Library director James LaRue in his weekly library column. 12.6.99 Even bad boy James Dean had a library card. Can you say distinguished interlibrary loan librarian award three times fast? Does everyone know the library cheer besides me? Not to be confused with the cheer library... 12.3.99 Yay! Another library-oriented weblog from Redwood City Public Library [sorry I was so slow in finding it...] A reference librarian takes an 8K pay cut and a new job so she can continue to work with the people. Vendor woes: UCLA adds itself to the list of libraries who will not use DRA's Taos automation software. [note mispelled headline, oops!] 12.2.99 Do you know who the first dinosaur character on a children's TV show was? Sacramento librarians do. Are bad books better than no books at all? "I would rather have nothing, or close the library, than have children exposed to these kinds of books" says Philadelphia principal Shively Willingham. Is it the search engine, or the searcher that results in being unable to find factual information on the web? A new study from Ohio State University. 12.1.99 AIDS resources from the UC Berkeley Library.

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