The New York Public Library’s $300 million plan to sell its Mid-Manhattan branch and the Science, Industry and Business Library and consolidate them in a renovated main building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street continues to generate criticism. Opponents, hundreds of scholars and others who have signed a petition to block the plan, have said it would undermine its mission as a research center because millions of books would be moved to a storage facility in Princeton, N.J. But library officials say the move is vital to saving the two branches, would have little effect on research and would bring in more users. Should the library go forward with the plan?
From The Verge,
"As the publication world is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital world, a lot of complex issues come up. One of the most important, especially for librarians and archivists (not to mention students of history looking to the future), is the question of preservation...The problem, says Barbara Galletly reporting for Digital Book World, is that the foundation for such a transition has not been properly laid, digital preservation is a largely chaotic, random affair right now, and the metadata itself is unstable."
When Colin Campbell Ross was sent to the gallows at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1922, few would have guessed his name would be cleared by a humble librarian more than 80 years later. Kevin Morgan was the librarian, historian and author whose book, Gun Alley, was instrumental to Ross receiving a pardon in 2008 for his wrongful conviction for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in a Melbourne alley. To coincide with the release of a new edition of Gun Alley with an epilogue detailing Ross's pardon, Morgan yesterday launched a second book, Detective Piggott's Casebook, based on a detective's scrapbooks he discovered researching the Gun Alley case.
California Schools hiring fewer librarians
California is issuing fewer credentials for public school service positions such as librarians, school nurses and administrators, and its schools are employing fewer service staff, according to a recent report by the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
The commission issued 11 percent fewer service credentials between the 2006-07 and 2010-11 school years. The number of people employed in service positions declined 9 percent during the same period, according to the report.
https://unglue.it/
Unglue.it is a service provided by Gluejar, Inc. It's a place for individuals and institutions to join together to liberate specific ebooks and other types of digital content by paying rights holders to relicense their works under Creative Commons licenses.
What does this mean?
Book-lovers and libraries everywhere can join together to set books free.
Authors and publishers get the compensation they deserve.
Books that are out of print, not available as ebooks, or otherwise hard to enjoy will be available for everyone to read, share, learn from, and love -- freely and legally.
"Our librarians will find a way to make life better for us. Their working in a library building as we know such is doubtful. There won’t be a library for us to go to. We’ll be ordering e-books and other media from them by computer. They’ll send them to us by computer. Will do everything by computer. Probably we’ll never see a librarian face to face. In fact, the process may be automated. I’m optimistic. I’m all for progress. But I’m glad I won’t see this progress. I treasure my memories of my good times in public libaries big and small, near and far. Good times beyond count."
How mobile networks are policing the web — badly
While the British government considers forcing internet providers to censor the web, it turns out that many European mobile operators are happily acting as censors themselves already — and mistakenly blocking lots of legitimate sites along the way.
The Millionaire Authors' Club
You think writers live in garrets? Think again. Carl Wilkinson introduces the Millionaire’s Club, an exclusive band of authors whose books have sold more than a million copies.
While board members and the library services director said they appreciated input from four people who spoke in favor of the book’s return and one who supported its removal, they did not talk about giving “Fifty Shades of Grey†space again at the 17 Brevard County Public Libraries branches.
Uncovering YA Covers
Starting with The Elevensies and this Goodreads list of 2011 YA releases, Michelle Andelman looked at 900+ covers, focusing only on US releases within the 2011 calendar year.* Originally, Michelle Andelman planned to count every self-published, indie, Big 6, or other book on the list... but somewhere in the 600s Michelle Andelman started losing my mind and decided to keep stats only on presses whose acquisitions are announced in Publisher's Marketplace. This still left her with 624 "traditionally published" books to count.
Shorter University tenured librarian Michael Wilson planned to work at the school's Rome, Ga., campus until retirement. Instead, he is preparing to hand in his resignation.
According to Inside Higher Ed, this year Shorter issued amended contracts to university employees requiring that they reject practices it deemed inconsistent with Christian values. Wilson, who is openly gay, signed the contract but crossed out the contract's "lifestyle statement" that read: "I reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality."
Our users don’t want most of the things we think they want. Even if you’re an old hand at user-centered design, they will surprise you. (I never saw using the search box to find a database coming.) Interview a variety of different users, and ask smart questions. Use the answers you get to build composite personas of different types of users. Whenever you are stumped about how to get past a design problem, go to your persona. That will help guide you to user-centered thinking.
LINCOLN, VT — Dancing gorillas, chattering teeth, jumping owls, rolling hamburgers, a climbing panda and a Mickey Mouse that strolls. What do they all have in common? They’re wind-up toys — a cultural relic of childhoods past.
In an era where digital games, like Angry Birds and Diner Dash, dominate the minds of many children, the Lincoln Library is paying homage to the centuries-old wind-up toy. For the months of May and June, more than 200 miniature, wind-up toys are on display in the Lincoln library, some of which date back to the early 1900s.
At the library last Thursday afternoon, librarian Debi Gray and assistant Marcia Jimmo were in high spirits as they wound and clicked their way through a half hour, watching the clockwork motor toys dance around.
The large collection of wind-up toys actually belongs to Jimmo’s grandson, but Jimmo and her husband, Roger, have kept them safe for years. Now that their grandson is a teenager, he doesn’t have any use for the toys, said Jimmo. So, she decided to take the collection out of its resting place in an old box and bring the little automatons back to life under the lights of the town library.
The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced a pilot program with University of Minnesota bookstores last week that may eventually make early semester lines and sold-out core texts as obsolete as the diskette.
McGraw-Hill will offer its complete catalog of more than 1,600 e-books to University of Minnesota students starting in the 2012 fall semester (the number of participating students was not yet available). Professors decide whether to sign up their classes.
The full texts will cost significantly less than a hard copy and appear in the university’s learning management system, or online interface, as soon as a student registers for a class.
"What is that and they're like oh termite poop and they're like eeew, so it's our job to make sure everything is clean and there's lots of tiny little holes and we get duct tape and we put duct tape over the holes," says Waileia Botelho, library aide.
Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg’s Bible
It is a little-known but undisputed historical fact that Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. Though the Gutenberg Bible was certainly the first mass produced printed work, it was hardly the first printed book — nor was it even the first made using movable type. Chinese and Korean inventors had been producing printed books for centuries before Gutenberg was born.
All Books Are Sacred
For me, a library is a kind of chapel. Spiritual traditions are not as abstract as people think. They are not all about creeds and beliefs. They are concrete, physical, tangible and sensual. There was nothing abstract about that moment in my memory holding the heavy book painfully against my skin as I held it stiff and formal. A library is not an information center, it's a chapel for books. Your home library, as small as it might be, is also a chapel made sacred by the book itself.
What Makes a Critic Tick? Connected Authors and the Determinants of Book Reviews
Executive Summary:
The professional critic has long been heralded as the gold standard for evaluating products and services such as books, movies, and restaurants. Analyzing hundreds of book reviews from 40 different newspapers and magazines, Professor Michael Luca and coauthors Loretti Dobrescu and Alberto Motta investigate the determinants of professional reviews and then compare these to consumer reviews from Amazon.com. Key concepts include:
•The data suggest that media outlets do not simply seek to isolate high-quality books, but also to find books that are a good fit for their readers. This is a potential advantage for professional critics, one that cannot be easily replicated by consumer reviews.
•Expert ratings are correlated with Amazon ratings, suggesting that experts and consumers tend to agree in aggregate about the quality of a book. However, there are systematic differences between these sets of reviews.
•Relative to consumer reviews, professional critics are less favorable to first-time authors. This suggests that one potential advantage of consumer reviews is that they are quicker to identify new and unknown books.
•Relative to consumer reviews, professional critics are more favorable to authors who have garnered other attention in the press (as measured by number of media mentions outside of the review) and who have won book prizes.
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"Partnering with a local business is not only a great way of generating income for the library and keeping the library alive with potential new visitors but enables local businesses to get more involved in what matters to the community," he said.
D.C. to cut 34 school librarians as they are a poor investment
D.C. (District of Columbia) officials plan to cut 34 librarians from staff in the 2012-2013 school year. The move is to cut costs in the Washington school system.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson said: “We have invested in full-time librarians for the last three or four years and we haven't seen the kind of payoff we'd likeâ€While noting that she is not disparaging librarians she said "We have pulled away from programs where we haven't received a return on our investment.†Apparently a payoff on investment would involve improved test scores.
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