I know it says “tech news” at the top, but Copyfight should be required reading for all librarians because it tackles the increasingly legally problematic issue of free information. In the library, we give our information away, freely. We learn about Fair Use to watch our asses, but who is going to sue a library? Well, here is a good post about Fair Use and folks who are challenging the DMCA with their own legislation, the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act, or DMCRA.
Author: jessamyn
popular books by the book popularizers themselves
Top 100 Library Books, from OCLC, who should know. Sort of a surprising list, in some ways. Chicago Manual of Style appears twice for different editions. I’m not sure why Environmental Tobacco Smoke: Proceedings of the International Symposium At McGill University made the list. They seem to be all either politics, management or reference books, with a few curveballs [no Googdnight Moon? Only three kids books?]
librarybug.org – free public library info
Incidentally, when I was looking for a link for the Wallingford library, I found this new source of US public library demographic data: librarybug.org. The entry for our library is a little out of date, but mostly correct, and they even have our micro-library that I use here in town. Oddly, doing a whois search for the domain turns up nothing. It’s registered to some company that prefers to remain anonymous, but also owns collegebug.org
another librarian cookbook
Help the Iowa Library Associations Endowed Speakers Fund. Contribute a recipe to Dewey or Don’t We? Librarians Cook
RIP – print index medicus
Index Medicus was probably the first really high-end reference source I can remember using in college — for a paper on methemoglobinemia. I remember being so astonished that you could attain that level of access to medical information, and that it was available even to scrubs like me. This was back when online searching was pay-by-the-query Dialog searching and available only to highly skilled library staff. Now it’s 16 years later and the print version of Index Medicus is ceasing publication due to lack of subscribers, only 155 subscribers last year.