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Perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory
products of American civilization are the librarian on
the one hand and the cocktail in the other.
NYT & Trib login
user: payyourauthors
pass: abouttime
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'01dec02
Hi. Today is World
AIDS Day and librarian.net is participating in Link & Think as a way of raising
awareness about AIDS. AIDS has, in the past, been stigmatized
because
of being a "gay
disease", but due to advancements in medical technology
it is also quickly becoming a "poor disease" and you know how much we care about the poor in this country. Stay informed, link & think.
Harvard's anti-gay tribunal from the 20's only uncovered thanks to a committee set-up by the library director.
Mr. Paley's request to see the documents was denied by the dean of the college, Harry R. Lewis, on the ground that they involved private student disciplinary hearings. But Mr. Paley turned to the director of the University Library, Sidney Verba, who set up an advisory committee to consider the request. On the committee's recommendation, Mr. Verba eventually decided to release the documents, with the names of the students, now all dead, blacked out.
The National Library of Medicine maintains a thorough finding aid to online AIDS information.
The Gambia Library and Information Services Association
organized a three-day
training of trainer's
workshop on the dissemination AIDS/STIS for Library Personnel.
Community college library has a display of plaster mask casts of 26 people with HIV and AIDS, showing that AIDS affects everyone.
'30nov02
Are snack food books for toddlers more or less noxious than Hershey's partnership with ALA to "ignite interest" in reading by plying kids with unhealthy junk food in an effort to get them in the library? Disgraceful.
The Library. It really is a nest of pirates, you know. [ thanks hanan ]
How to grow a library in a rural Central American location. [ thanks mac ]
Library Quilt. [ thanks ole ]
Mitch Freedman and CLA president Anne Turner campaign for a raise for librarians with this editorial in the Sacramento Bee. [ thanks robert ]
Everything you ever wanted to know about Alabama's oldest librarian. She's 93.
'27nov02
Hi. I am interviewed in Library
Juice this week. I've also added a permanent link to the
librarian.net RSS
feed for those of you who like that sort of thing.
'25nov02
Hi. I met the nicest, most helpful librarian at the
Cornell main library today. I am also running for ALA
Council, please consider voting for me.
Prison's religion library could use donations
of religious books.
One of the better articles I have read on library
activism: Librarians
Emerging From Book Stacks, Increasing
Activism. [ LAtimes, thanks dan ]
PLA is now going to be distributing The Shy
Librarian to all its members, way to go
Joseph!
'24nov02
Flesh Public Library never gave much thought to their name, until they found their website banned by their own filtering software. Part fifteen in a series of Why Filters Suck Eggs. [ thanks all ]
While the vandalized puppet story was not quite the same as Educational Puppet Pelted with Crayons, it's always good to have an excuse to link to The Onion. [ thanks gus ]
Who is killing all the great health sites of America? In fact, the whole Memory Hole website is worth examining.[ thanks heidi ]
'22nov02
Hi. I'll be slowly making my way westward to head back to Seattle for the Winter. No updates likely for the next week, but perhaps I'll surprise you.
DC Libraries a total disaster due to budget cuts. The public library is funded at roughly .47% of the total DC budget. What a mess.
Signs placed recently at three branches announce months-long closures for renovation and maintenance. Other branches advertise community meetings to decide which days the libraries must close starting in January to meet budget cuts.
When someone calls in sick, branches must close; there is no money for overtime. About 35 percent of D.C. residents are illiterate [ thanks anna ] Some branches of government seem to appreciate the work their librarians can do.
Speaking of the government, how about the Energy Department's decision to end PubScience because the commercial sector [who has been lobbying for this furiously, natch] is providing duplicate services?
"Our fear is that this is the beginning of privatizing government services for profit," she said.... Private companies are being allowed to "take information that has been created with tax dollars, they turn around, make some slight little change, and then they start selling it," [ALA WA's director] Sheketoff said.
Huntington Free Library and Reading Room in the Bronx in danger of closing because of a dispute with the Smithsonian over part of its collection. [ NYT article ]
'20nov02
International Children's Digital Library now online. Here's a fawning NPR report on it. Do you really think homes in "remote corners of the world and ... homes where there aren't many books" will really have high speed Internet access? Really? Welcome to the new face of the digital divide:
Q. I don't have high-speed Internet access-- can I still use the ICDL software?
A. No. Use of the ICDL requires ongoing, significant downloads. With dial-up modem access, the download time will be far too slow to allow for use of the ICDL. [ thanks sharyn & allison ] Boy gets bomb threat idea @ his local library. [ thanks bill ]
Now here's a job that looks interesting, the Data Center's Economic Justice program is looking for an Information Activist.
New York Society Library, a subscription library open to everyone, more or less. lThey maintain a list of links to other membership libraries in the US. [ bookism ]
And in a sort of related story: do you think having an all female bar staff at a library-themed bar is sexist? [ thanks ann ]
'16nov02
Hi. I had a great time at the thing on Friday. I spend so much of my librarian face-time with the radical or alternative librarian set, I forget just how darned nice and intelligent most librarians are. We heard from Ann Seidl who is in the process of making a movie called The Hollywood Librarian and gave a lively talk, and I was on a panel with a lot of local librarians talking about "the image thing". A good time all around. The only thing that was a little off was a little "thank you" gift certificate for Barnes & Noble, notorious for squeezing small bookstores out of business and making our libraries look lame for lack of lattes. I think next time I give a talk, I'll ask for an honorary library card instead.
Hey, librarianship is described as being a "great job"
Bjork has mre respect for librarians now that she's had to play music librarian to her own recordings.
[ thanks sarah ]
When people talk about "too much information" I often think of the positively creepy Information Awareness Office. What do you think "truth maintenance" is anyhow? For more on your personal freedoms, or lack thereof, see William Safire's dystopian vision: You Are a Suspect.
Remember Poindexter? ... He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua....
A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony.... He heads the "Information Awareness Office" Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American. [ NYT thanks daniel ]
'15nov02
Hi. No entry today because I am at a conference in
Burlington on the image of librarians. My name tag, besides being
illegible at more than two feet, has a woman in a bun and glasses
[finger to lips, of course] and I can't tell if it's ironic or not,
I really can't. [later note: it was]
'13nov02
Hi. McFarland has decided to go with one of the covers I designed for Revolting Librarians Redux. I can not tell you how happy I am. And yes, that is my Encyclopedia Britannica [ninth edition] in the photo, and my hammer.
Childrens Internet Protection Act coming before the Supreme Court, already being debated to death on Slashdot. It almost makes me want to join ALA again. Bad web pages like this one are one of the things that keep me away.[ thanks josh & ]
Is it the good news or the bad news if Barbie becomes a librarian? [ thanks katia ]
Man steals 3,000 books from local library. Related story: 2,999 books go missing from local libraries before anyone catches on. [ thanks all ]
You know that library in the latest Star wars movie, the one with the really annoying librarian? Turns out it appears to have been based on the Long Room Library at Trinity College in Dublin, without credit, natch. [ thanks bill ]
Harry Potter [yes, it's that time again]: pampered jock, patsy, fraud. [ thanks dawn ]
Libraries in Palestine: a website put together by some IFLA folks.
'11nov02
Hi. I updated the About This Site page, in case you're interested. It's nice that I now no longer have to tell people what a weblog is.
And the good news is, even if the Hartford Library wasn't bugged, the whole episode has been an awareness-raising situation, letting the public know what can happen in their library.
This FBI and libraries thing has made it to the comics page. [ thanks dawn ]
Did I mention before that the Special Libraries Association wants to change its name? The two options at this point are: SLA and Information Professionals International. [ thanks rteeter ]
Do you think the dropping of the "L word" is because too many people have bad librarian associations, and do not want those jobs?
'10nov02
Hi. I am busily working on cover ideas for Revolting Librarians Redux. Do not ask me about the suggestion we got from our publisher about the cover. Suffice it to say it included fireworks and someone in glasses.
Huh, a marketing campaign to try to erase the negative librarian stereotype. The $102,000 they are spending on it could really raise the salaries of a lot of librarians, maybe that would make them scowl less. How much do you think the communications consultant is making?
Detroit Public Library in the soup over mismanaged funds and missing computers. [ thanks thomas ]
Another good use for those Ask a Librarian sites, you can use them to write your New York Times articles. This one is about the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.
Are books getting dumber? Are we getting dumber?
'09nov02
Hi, my presentation went really well. I like all the Yale librarians a good deal. I'll be writing up my loose set of notes about the unfunniness of librarian jokes and the Third Wave of radical librarianship in the next few weeks. I completely forgot to mention two new good alt.librarian articles in the press lately: Utne Reader's "Revolution at the Reference Desk" and Punk Planet's "Liberating Information" neither of which are presently available online, but are worth reading.
Speaking of Chris Dodge, Street Librarian, he's got a new online entry: Collection Building By the Seat of Your Pants. My favorite: "Leave the comfort of your offices and reference desks to go treasure hunting out of doors."
Oh yeah and that "FBI bugging libraries" scare from a few days back was just that, a scare. However, because of the gag rule inherent in the PATRIOT Act, if there were really tracking devices on the terminals in your library, you would probably get just about that much information about it. I'm really waiting to start seeing the "We're sorry, due to National Security concerns we are unable to tell you if your Internet surfing habits, passwords and email content are being monitored by federal agents, please act appropriately."
[ thanks all ]
The National Library of the Ukraine has had a large amount of their materials damaged due to some sort of heating system failure. They are looking for some help. UNESCO may provide some assistance but more is always needed. [ thanks edlef ]
Why privatizing the Goverment Printing office in the US could be a threat to democracy.
Currently, a federal agency such as the Pentagon can't delete an embarrassing passage from a historical document without first going through the hassle of asking each reading room to obscure the passage with a black marker. If Daniels gets his way, all an agency will have to do is call up the document in Microsoft Word and quietly hit Control X to delete the passage for eternity.
[ thanks karen ]
Just when you thought there would never be a type of library you've never heard of, along comes The Wooden Library. Let's all add xylothek to our lexicons.
A xylothek is generally speaking a collection of simple pieces of wood specimens placed together in some kind of cupboard. In a refined form it is in the shape of "books" where you can find details from the tree inside, everything arranged as a "library". This latter form flourished in Germany around 1790-1810.
[ thanks ole ]
'05nov02
Hi. I'll be in New Haven for the next few days, checking out the libraries there, giving a little talk about somethingorother, revelling in high speed Internet access. Back Sunday.
Happy Election Day! Stevens County [WA] is voting on whether or not to continue funding the Stevens County Rural Library District. Theoretically you can watch the election results here, the library fans seem to be winning! [ lisnews ]
The FBI has bugged our public libraries, true or false? More on Slashdot, of course.
[ thanks bryan ]
Got extra books that you haven't already donated to the Library Bar? Try donating them to the Kahnawake Library on the Mohawk reservation. [ thanks aaron ]
Who knew that Laura Bush used to have a cat named Dewey? And might be a closet Democrat.
The top ten ways to make sure potential applicants for your library job are immediately turned off when they read your ad.
MIT is creating DSpace, a library specifically to store digital work, all kind of digital work. Do you think it's too much to ask that the search page at this new library 1) have a valid security certificate and 2) not crash my browser half the time? I did find a book on Collaborative Library Systems Development from 1971, downloadable as a 32MB pdf file. [ thanks mom ]
'02nov02
Hi. If any of you are in or near New Haven, I'll be speaking at Yale on the seventh. I haven't worked out my presentation yet [the director of the National Securities Archives picked "terrorism and freedom of information" last month] but I'm sure it won't be a snooze.
Preparing a talk for a bunch of librarians has been likened to "surreal extended low-level panic for the days and hours leading up to the event" but this is from the guy who wrote In Praise of Librarians. [ thanks pat ]
Of course, Rory beat me to all the really good lines.
If we really are rebel librarians, we should be
rebelling against stultifying aspects of the library establishment,
undermining the middle-class bias of the profession and trying to undo
actual features of our professional culture that negative aspects of the
librarian stereotype truthfully represent.
A new book about a diary, the writer of which is in love with a librarian. I think this article is a review, but I am not sure. [ thanks rteeter ]
I don't care iof you are the National Library of Canada, I am not going to give you a copy of my holographic book, in protest! [ thanks dsdlc ]
New head librarian in Anchorage, AK appointed by the mayor, right after the exhibit ban there has ended.
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