|
"Books are food ... libraries so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates ... We eat them from love or necessity, as other foods, but most from love."
- Holbrook Jackson work stuff
NY & LA Times login
user: corporatemedia
pass: stillsucks |
Karen Schneider chimes in about ALA's new Communications Preferences.
Toman the Seeker: the story of an extraordinary reference librarian.
PATRIOT Watch: Looks like the ACLU may have found a way to go forward with a PATRIOT Act lawsuit. Meanwhile, libraries are still finding ways around it. [ thanks all ]
I'm not sure if I already linked to this excellent CIPA FAQ. [ thanks chris ]
Hi. Two small notes. One, I forgot the caveman librarian [more adjective librarians on LISNews]. Two, librarian.org is not run by LITA, just someone using their logo.
Some Minneapolis Public Library branches now closed more days than they are open. [ thanks chris ]
NY libraries putting out donation boxes in an attempt to offset deep budget cuts. Some commentary from the Daily Kos.
"this is a perfect example of where conservative dogma falls flat ... the fact that that nation's largest library system has to beg for money should indicate the bankruptcy of current economic policy."
[ thanks carolyn & eric ]
Rural community library is more of a book bank.
What kind of a cool job title is Information Core Director? That's the position of the DIY librarian.
The Warrior Librarian shares some First Aid for Libraries.
CHECK CIRCULATION : Very dependent on your library management software. If in doubt, check the manual or help files. Print out weekly and monthly statistics, collate, bind and file. Dust once a year.
We're all a bit behind on this, but don't forget, the FCC has now given libraries until Summer of next year to get in compliance with CIPA and install censorware. [ lisnews ]
Every now and again I troll the domain registry lists to see what's new and different in domains with the word 'librarian' in them. Here are a few interesting sites I found this time around... education librarian, eclecticlibrarian, witty librarian, immortal librarian, teen librarian.
I love LITA, but they seem to be not making the best use of a snappy domain like librarian.org. And who is the smart library that registered librarian.us?
Administrative decisions that misappropriate the role of books by marginalizing their presence deprive students of a means of inquiry and intellectual growth with attributes and effects all its own and necessary for the sustenance of a balanced and considered life of the mind. When substance is traded away for a popular perception of relevance, both substance and relevance are lost.
[ thanks jonathan ]
Hi. For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath let me tell you: I got the job at the Rutland Free Library! It's a half-time, 20 month job that starts September 1st doing mostly outreach and some reference. I'm pretty excited but now I need to do some real planning to get ready. If anyone has any tips about the Rutland housing market, please let me know.
Blue Highways has gone bloggy! Say hello to Karen Schneider's new CMS.
Big library fire at UGA, where Katia works, also the 31st largest library in the world. [ thanks mac ]
Why library catalogs fail - comments from SLA sessions. [ catalogablog ]
Hi. ALA claims they sent out an email to membership yesterday telling people about the Communications Preferences page, and giving members until August first to log in and change their settings. If you do not log in, and have not previously registered your preferences with ALA, your preferences will be set to "keep me in the know" which is shorthand for "put my personal information on mailing lists and sell it". More info in this article I wrote for LISNews. Please contact ALA to let them know how you feel about this.
Your librarian hates you. Ascerbic library humor from an unlikely place. [ lisnews ]
A few readers have pointed out that mandatory filtering doesn't have to break the bank at your library. SquidGuard is open source, and free, with no proprietary blacklist. If you are forced to use censorware, you may as well not let it bankrupt you too. [ thanks russell ]
Library map theft flourishes in a culture of shame and silence.
"the men ... succeeded in stealing more than 200 maps from libraries as far afield as Aberystwyth and Helsinki. To date only a handful of these maps has been recovered, and in the case of the National Library of Wales official embarrassment at the scale of Bellwood's crimes means that the library still refuses to discuss what is, or isn't, missing. It is precisely this culture of secrecy that, argue dealers concerned to clean up the trade, enabled Bellwood and Perry to get away with their crimes for so long" [ thanks phil ]
What some communities are doing about the library funding crisis. Austin asks its community to help out the library. [ thanks julie ]
There's nothing like a good bookstore, especially if your bookstore is a library.
Hi. I think most of you have seen the librarian action figure now. I think you have all also probably read the follow-up story in which Times readers wrote in responding to allegations that if they didn't think a shushing librarian action figure was funny, then they lacked a sense of humor. While I have a lot of respect for Nancy Pearl and think the action figure is sort of neat, let me just say that it's easier to have "a sense of humor" about the profession if you're not unemployed and looking for work and trying to comtemplate -- as I have -- whether you can really make a go at it with a job that requires an MLS and yet pays $12/hour. Or one that would prefer an MLS but is 16 hours a week and pays $8/hour. Who thinks they can hire people for jobs like this? And is working for peanuts in your chosen profession better than scoring tests for ETS for real money? Maybe the stereotypes have nothing to do with all of this, but what if they do?
Hi. I have an information need. I need [probably] to find a place to store some junk in Seattle and maybe a way to get my car from there to here. Ideas?
Like booksales? The one at the GPO is going to be a doozy.
By September 1, 2003, the U.S. Government Printing Office will be closing all of its bookstores nationwide, except for the main bookstore in Washington, DC, which will undergo reconfiguration. [ thanks lis ]
one of the dumber things about CIPA is that all it's making libraries do, before anything else, is math. If filters cost more than the e-rate monies they get, screw filters. There are so many better reasons to not get censorware on your computer. [ thanks tom ]
While libraries try to portray themselves as value neutral on hot button issues like gay rights, their employees don't always feel the same way. What happens when your librarian is a gay rights spokesperson, and someone at work tells her to keep her lip zipped? [ thanks bill ]
L.A.C.K. is back, with a newsblog, yet!
The United Nations has proclaimed 2003-2012 a Literacy Decade. IFLA has some practical suggestions for library staff who would like to help with literacy. [ thanks eoin ]
Along the same lines as my CIPA signs, libraryprivacy.org encourages library users to ask their library to educate other library users about library privacy.
Retroffited Librarian: News and Information for San Francisco Bay Area Library Workers.
What do you suppose is going to be going on at the World Summit on the Information Society? Some commentary from metamute.
You might be forgiven for imagining that one of the first imperatives of an
occasion such as the World Summit on Information Society ... would be to address the social terrors being
carried out in the defence of intellectual property. Unfortunately such
topics are firmly off the agenda. [ infocommons ]
Irish Library News is available online or via email subscription.
Hi. I had a neat job interview today at a library with some people who actually read this website; a first in my history of interviewing. This is good news and bad news. Good news for me because I might be working with people who understand the Web. Bad news for you because I won't write a thing more about it online until I know more. I've been working on my links page, so found some good stuff from sources I don't check as often as I should.
The simple printed book is much more conducive to promoting thinking than the sophisticated Web. If a book does not provide all the information that one needs, some of the information has to be deduced and some of it has to be imagined. [ currcites ]
Some positive and some negative feedback over the CIPA signs at LISNews.
Columbus Metropolitan Library lets kids "read off their fines" instead of coming up with the cash. Plus, the summer reading project has a snappy URL. [ what's gnu ]
David gets a library card.
I really kept waiting for the librarian to ask for my checking account number. "Now, it's only $80 for the first three months, and after that we deduct $45 from your checking account every month." Nope. Books for free. [ stuff ]
Hi. I wrote an article about the ALA's Communications Preferences section of the new website over at LISNews today. Also, I don't want to get a reputation as "that lady with the signs" but I've had some ideas about CIPA which I've put on a page here.
For a good long chewy read on CIPA, please download, print and keep handy Walt Crawford's current issue of Cites & Insights entitled Coping with CIPA: A Censorware Special [ pdf, totally worth it ]
Meanwhile the nation's largest filtering companies are being invited to ALA's Washington offices to discuss the new "library market" for their products. ALA Council is wondering what this is all about. [ lisnews ]
PATRIOT Watch: Belfast Maine gets into the anti-USAPA act, and into USA Today. [ thanks chris ]
What has been your most exciting discovery?
Few people may believe this, but my most exciting discoveries have all come in the library, long after the diving was over... [ thanks penny ] Weapons of Mass Instruction: a multilingual list of Anti-War/Pro-peace books for young people.
Are you a librarian who has married a librarian? If so, Library Stuff's Steven Cohen wants to hear from you. [ bibliolatry ]
Hi. I'll be writing something longer on LISNews about this next week, but the contact address for rants and raves about the ALA website is webmaster[at]ala.org.
Librarians Against the WTO will be meeting in Montreal on July 27th. See you there?
Bookcart brigade in the pride parade. [ thanks sandy ]
Toronto hospital librarian suing over being pressed into service as a SARS screener & losing her job when she refused.
"I'm a librarian by training, and I'm certainly not a heal rofessional. Health professionals take an oath, and when they begin their training, they realize they're going to be putting themselves in high-risk situations. I'm not a health-care worker, I'm a librarian, and that was the first time I'd ever worked in a hospital," [ thanks bill ]
Hi. If you get a chance today could you drop the ALA Web Team a line and let them know that if they set your communications preference to "opt-out" by default [i.e. you need to take a specific action in order to not have your name sold to mailing lists] you may reconsider your ALA Membership? Some things I can't do alone.
I have completely mixed feelings about this. Nancy Pearl from Seattle Public Library's Center for the Book is now going to be an action figure. Want to guess what she is doing, as her "action"?
"The ejectable hair bun had many technical hurdles to overcome and we thought doing two cliches was over the top," he said. "So, we went with the shushing action. It gives the figure a certain dignity." [ thanks bill ]
Meanwhile, Mo from Dykes to Watch out for, is starting to become one of those "always on" reference librarians we all seem to become. [ thanks david ]
Chris Dodge wants to close libraries? Perhaps only as a wake up call to affluent communities.
PATRIOT Watch: I guess it takes something as lame as the PATRIOT Act to get libraries in bed with Barnes & Noble. [ thanks jonathan ]
"Ha ha, you said 'penis'!" "No you idiot, I said Toppenish!" Guess what, filters don't work! As if any hardcore porn site uses the word penis anyhow. Guess this site will now be blocked as well. [ thanks katia ]
Librarian Avengers is at a slightly new URL. Less flash, more bloggy content, go say hi to Erica.
US Supreme Court appoints new librarian, Judith Gaskell, only the third woman to ever hold the position.
Hi. The Revolting Librarians Redux page is up It has ordering information, links to reviews and the ToC, and a contributor list. I've also added a sitemap, finally.
In the Great Minds Think Alike department, Aaron Swartz has proposed [semi seriously] and created an open source filter that only blocks URLs that start with http://www.microsoft.com. Remember, even the Supremes said that no filters are perfect, but how imperfect are they legally allowed to be? Are we starting to see some civil disobedience over CIPA? [ lisnews ]
more sane talk about CIPA in the letters to the editor section.
Internet porn is foul and disgusting, but filters change nothing. I had to deal with porn before filters and I will have to deal with it after. And dumping the problem on libraries is just as foul and the most foul porn.... The idiot supporters of the Child Internet Protection Act made it very difficult to be both a conservative Republican and a librarian. Could we please try some common sense?
[ thanks taylor ]
Bear found in old college library.[ thanks crystal ]
Hi. Please forgive my absence. The party went an extra few days and I'm sure you know how nice it can be to go without email for a few days [if you don't, let this be your wake up call]. I've made a separate page for Revolting Librarians Redux as we start to see reviews [thanks marylaine] which will be up in a day or two.
Denver Public starts its reduced weekday hours this week. Suck. When did they get that new big beautful library again? [ thanks t ]
More philanthropists helping out needy libraries. David Mazor is a peach, help him out if you can, then go visit your own library. What kind of people reduce a library's budget by 92%? [ thanks john ]
Extending the metaphor perhaps too far, it's the film The Librarians, starring Burt Reynolds.
They're called The Librarians ... because they collect overdue people, just like a librarian collects overdue books.
[ thanks penny ]
"Who would've thought they could still find ways to make public libraries even less appealing to young people?" A Boondocks CIPA commentary. [ th n ]
|
thanks to eskimo.com for hosting librarian.net. |
