Longtime friend of librarian.net ricklibrarian [aka Rick Roche] has published a book Real Lives Revealed A Guide to Reading Interests in Biography featuring 600 revieed and categorized biographies. Nice job Rick. For those of you going to ALA, be sure to say howdy and check the book out.
Tag: books
can you loan out a kindle?
Library Journal announced last week that Brigham Young University had received a verbal okay from Amazon to start lending Kindles in their library. This week it appears that they’ve suspended the program until they can get written permission. While I totally understand the concerns on both sides here, I’d really like it if libraries sometimes erred on the side of continuing to do whatever it was that they were doing, in good faith, and let the vendors let them know if they’re not doing something correctly. It’s a little weird to me that Amazon has invested all this time and money into an ebook reader and has no policy about what the legal/copyright concerns are with using it in a library. Can someone please force this issue?
update: There is an interesting story making the blog rounds about just how much of the Kindle’s policies and DRM weirdnesses remain mysterious, even to the people who work at Amazon.
some weekend and summer reading
Summer starts this weekend which means some people decide it’s time to read books. The main impetus is kids out of school, but there are also teachers who have summer “free” to read books as well. Many media outlets make their summer reading lists and other bloggers collect them. Here are a few links that I find worthwhile about summer reading, but when I make my list, I’m just going to look at the towering stack of both unfinished and not-yet-started books that always graces the table by my kitchen table.
- Rebecca Blood’s list of Summer Reading Lists
- Possibly the best looking summer reading library website I’ve seen: Summer Reading 2009 (NYPL, Broolyn Public and Queens Borough Public)
- Flickr’s Summer Reading Programs photo pool
I was going to include links to state libraries’ summer reading programs but it looks like a lot of state libraries either don’t have statewide summer reading programs or don’t advertise them well. If you have a library summer reading program you’re fond of, please put it in the comments.
And a special “Hey nice job” to a colleague of longtime reader/contributor Eoin Kelly whose coworker Rosemary Hetherington was awarded the Children’s Books Ireland award which recognizes “outstanding contribution to the world of children’s books.” There’s a nice writeup on the CBI page. Congrats Rosemary!
neat pictures from old books
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new site with neat old pictures. I have a tendency to just trawl Google Books to find old images, but this site — From Old Books — has a bunch of neat images along with all the citation information and sometimes some nifty stories besides.
in the library with the BOOK
“In the game Clue there’s a library, but no little plastic book to use as a murder weapon. What’s up with that? Should be able to do in Col. Mustard, in the Library, with the Book.”