Mary Minow does a great summary of some library policies concerning unattended children over at the Library Law blog.
Conference Speaking: Walt Has a Little List
I haven’t read the rest of the current Cites & Insights yet, but Walt has made a little mashup of the conference advice that he accumulated from posts by me, Rachel and Dorothea with his own added observations and notes. Since the HTML version of C&I doesn’t have links, I’ve added links to the posts he mentions here.
- My post: Ten Tips for Presenters
- Conference Economics by Dorothea
- Ten Do’s and Don’ts for Conference, Workshop, and Program Organizers by Rachel
- Speaking Survey: Comments from Correspondents by Rachel
- Speaking Survey: Results by Rachel
when public goes private: access to US National Archives costs $
The U.S. National Archive struck a deal with footnote.com. The good news? Lots and lots of historic documents wil be “available” in digital format for researchers, hobbyists and nerds like you and me. The bad news? For five years you are going to have to pay to access these documents online, or travel to Washington DC to view them for free. The documents also have terms of use that are onerous, annoying or just plain bizarre. More ananlysis and links about this deal at Dan Cohen’s blog.
What I am not certain of is how users accessed these documents in the pre-footnote era? Did Archive staff photocopy them and send people copies for a small fee? I’m also not entirely clear if these documents will be OCRed and available as text, or just locked up in proprietary formats and barely keyword indexed. In any case, while I understand why the Archives sees this as a savvy move, it’s bad news for citizens and sets a bad example of shifting public documents into the private sphere because we’re too broke to do the work ourselves. [del]
re: transparency
Just a “how to do it” note at the recent departure of Chris from LibraryThing. Chris posts to his blog, a little unhappy. Tim posts to the LT blog, quite professional. Space is available at LibraryThing for leaving messages about it all. Chris, you put in a lot of hard work and your dedication and skills will be missed. Tim, way to be a classy guy about it. This is a great example of how you don’t need to send out dorky “we are really looking forward to these new opportunities” press releases when something bad happens. I welcome this aspect of transparency that comes along with our new 2.0-ish world.
welcome to the social…. library?
John Blyberg talks about the social tools built into the new Social OPAC (SOPAC!) he’s rolled out — and released the source code for — at AADL.