LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

How do researchers use online journals?
In the paper, the use of Oxford Journals by 10 major UK research institutions was analyzed in the fields of life sciences, economics and history, using the server logs for the full year 2007. Some of the key findings of the study include: One third of users access Oxford Journals outside business hours. Around 40% of sessions originated from a Google Search...

New from Google Labs: An Experimental Data Visualization Tool for Public Data
Something neat via The Resourceshelf.... ?The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

Boston Globe:The decision about which of Boston’s libraries to potentially close will be based on far more than just how many books and DVDs patrons borrow.

Library administrators will rank the 26 neighborhood branches by foot traffic, computer use, and how many Web surfers use laptops to log on to Wi-Fi networks. They will count how many programs are offered at each location and tally the number of people who attend storytime and English classes.

Amy E. Ryan, Boston Public Library president, will outline today the intricate measures the city intends to use to close as many as 10 neighborhood branches as part of a sweeping consolidation plan. Ryan will brief the library’s board of trustees at 3 p.m. at what is expected to be a crowded and contentious public meeting at library headquarters in Copley Square.

Full story.

Organizers expecting large crowd at lesbian book fest
A group of 100 followers of Lesbian fiction is expected to attend the Bold Strokes Books Authors Lesbian Book Festival this year.

Former librarian charged with grand larceny
A former librarian for the Tuxedo School District is accused of embezzling $12,621 from the school district’s Teachers Employee Union.

The chief said the investigation began with a complaint filed by union members and that his department was assisted by the Orange County District Attorney’s Criminal Investigation Unit.

The New York Daily News reports that "there's a scandal in the stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library."

The head of the system abruptly quit last week after a plan to lay off 13 employees backfired and ended in a very public embarrassment. Insiders said the firing fiasco was the last strike against Dionne Mack-Harvin. "The board was not happy with her," a source said. It wasn't supposed to end this way. Mack-Harvin took the post with great fanfare and a fabulous back story - the African-American daughter of a sharecropper who loved books and rose to her dream job.

From Poynter.org, New York Times to spin off Book Review for e-readers:

The New York Times is planning to offer its Book Review as a separate digital e-reader product, disaggregated from the rest of the Times content on the mobile devices, according to James Dunn, director of marketing for The New York Times.

Dunn alluded to the plan during an afternoon session at the Digital Publishing Alliance (DPA) and E-Reader Symposium at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute. Following the session, Dunn spoke briefly with Poynter's Bill Mitchell and provided additional details.

Mitchell reports the Times will introduce a separate version of its Book Review for three e-reader platforms, beginning with the Sony e-reader in the next couple of weeks. Versions for Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook will follow. Dunn declined to say what the price will be for the Book Review on these platforms.

On Sunday, March 7, U.S. customers woke up to discover that a huge number of normally expensive hardcover comics were available from Amazon.com for $14.99 apiece. Later in the day, some were discounted even further, to $8.24. Since these books included the Marvel Omnibus line, which normally is cover-priced at $100, lots of people jumped on the bandwagon and ordered wildly. Other affected publishers were IDW, Dark Horse, and Image, both preorders and current releases. As Bully points out, all of the publishers whose works were included were distributed by Diamond Book Distributors, which suggests a massive automated data glitch of some kind.

Full blog entry here.

(corrected from an earlier edition) The Canadian Booksellers Association has demanded that the Canadian government reject Amazon.com's application to open a facility in Canada, according to Quill & Quire.

From Shelf-Awareness:

In a statement, CBA said that "allowing Amazon to operate a business within Canada would contravene the Investment Canada Act which requires that foreign investments in the book publishing and distribution sector be compatible with national cultural policies and be of net benefit to Canada and the Canadian-controlled sector."

And CBA president Stephen Cribar added, "Individual Canadian booksellers have traditionally played a key role in ensuring the promotion of Canadian authors and Canadian culture. These are values that no American dot.com retailer could ever purport to understand or promote."

Amazon applied early this year to Canada's heritage ministry for permission to open an operation in Canada; it could take 45 days for the ministry to make a ruling (Shelf Awareness, March 3, 2010).

The story also mentions Amazon's dropping it's Colorado affiliates, as reported yesterday in LISNews, and a pricing error earlier this week that allowed a lot of inventory to be sold for overly discounted prices.

The used-book store, at the Carlsbad (CA) Public Library’s Dove Lane branch, is a treasure trove for bibliophiles looking for bargains. Shelves are lined with donated books that include classics, recent best-sellers, romance novels, mysteries, biographies, cookbooks and guides to self-improvement.

All the money from sales goes toward funding children’s programs and new acquisitions at the library and the annual Carlsbad Reads Together program. The store makes $100,000 to $120,000 a year, said manager Taffy Cannon.

Sign on San Diego also has reports from the Friends of the Escondido Library and the Vista Library. Each of the three FOLs has a bookstore.

Does your library have an active FOL or a bookstore?

"My town officials think all we're running here is a babysitting service" a librarian recently shared in a moment of frustration. She went on to mention studies about the proven impact on cognitive abilities when toddlers are actively engaged in library programs like Lapsit versus passively engaged with toys & videos.

This was news to me; my how the educational product companies and toy manufacturers had shaped my understanding! I also hadn't thought of toddler programs as educational initiatives. When I've seen adults and toddlers together at the library, I've usually thought "oh, aren't those kids adorable" and "I'm glad people are getting together to have fun". Though it now seems obvious, the educational and literacy component of Lapsit was lost on me.

This last point was intriguing, so I did some quick research. I googled "Lapsit" and got plenty of results from library websites around the country. I clicked through to the top 20 (all different libraries, by chance) and searched for the terms literacy and education in the page content, in images or as part of the navigation.

• 80% made no mention of literacy or education in conjunction with Lapsit
• 20% contained the term literacy
• 10% contained the terms literacy and education

Clearly these stats don't tell the whole story, but they tell a good one about the help libraries need presenting information to the public.

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On the whole, I'm not much of a book reader. Most of my reading is done online; I read a handful of books every year, mostly non-fiction, based on various whims. Right now, I'm reading The World Without Us, a captivating exploration about how the world would revert (or not revert) back to a pre-human emergence. Some of these things have been dramatized into a series on the History Channel by a different name, providing the added element of CGI to show how buildings would collapse, infrastructure would fail, nature reclaims the suburbs, and how all that would remain for future archeologists is our stainless steel cookware. For the scientist in me, it's fascinating to see everything humans have made becoming undone by the natural forces of this world.

So, in touching upon the premise of the book, I thought, "What would the world be like without libraries?" How would our demise come?

In no less than the New York Times Sunday Book Review...a rave for Marilyn Johnson's "This Book is Overdue : How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All”. Critic Pagan Kennedy writes:

Johnson ushers us into the American Kennel Club Library and introduces us to the inevitable graying librarian in a boiled-wool jacket with a Scotty pin. She also teleports over to a Las Vegas “gentlemen’s club” called the Library, where ladies wearing spectacles (and not much more) slide their way down stripper poles. She peppers the book with lots of random instructions, like how to remove odor from an old Graham Greene paperback. (Use a sheet of Bounce fabric softener.) This is one of those books, in the vein of Mary Roach’s “Stiff” (about human cadavers), that tackle a big topic by taking readers on a chapter-by-chapter tour of eccentric characters and unlikely locations. Given Johnson’s attractions to wild tangents, the journey often dissolves into a jumble. It is a testament to her skill as a writer that she remains fascinating, even in the throes of A.D.D.

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In China, it's hard to be anonymous online in part due to a phenomenon known as the human-flesh search engine. It's not really a search engine at all. Rather, it's a community of message board users that seek out and punish in the real world people they find committing offensive acts online. Tom Downey explains in this weekend's New York Times Magazine that the human flesh search engine offers a disturbing mix of justice and revenge.

Read or listen to full piece here.

Breaking news is now copied and redistributed on thousands of websites across the Internet within minutes - producing a World Wide Web of carbon copies. First Amendment lawyer David Marburger argues that this redistribution is hurting newspapers financially and that the fault lies with the Copyright Act.

If embedded player does not show you can hear and read full story here.

HULL, MA - Calliope Pina Parker is a sixth-grader who reads as many as 10 books a week and favors Harry Potter. She dresses as Potter characters for Halloween, plays Potter trivia with friends, and regularly revisits the series - all seven books and 4,167 pages.

Calliope is also an avid user of libraries, borrowing from across the region and frequenting branches throughout the South Shore on her way to and from school, ballet, and karate practice. So it came as a particular blow when budget cuts in Hull not only sheared the local library’s funding and hours but also cost the town its state certification last month.

“Now people from Hull can’t go to any other library,’’ said Calliope, whose card is no longer welcome at many other certified libraries.

Wanting to do something about it, the 11-year-old organized an all-day reading of the J.K. Rowling book that started it all, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.’’ Yesterday’s readathon and bake sale, with wizardly cupcakes and “magic wand’’ frosted pretzel rods, raised awareness about the library’s circumstances and collected money for the nonprofit Friends of the Hull Public Library.

Library site a hot new social media hangout for teens
"Our goal is to draw students in so that they're comfortable hanging out in the library, and then get them to engage with the workshops and technology in the space," Neal said. "We're seeing more and more students who were hanging out, participating in workshops and on the social network. It's been great to see their interests develop."

Students enrolled in workshops may check out digital still cameras or Flip high-definition video cameras for a week at a time to work on special projects.

This article in O'Reilly Radar asks the hypothetical question: When all of the states have passed e-fairness laws, who will be left for Amazon to fire?

Upper Norwood (UK) library was a hotbed of blackmail and treachery, records reveal
Jerry Savage, the library’s reference and local history specialist, told the Norwood Society how the first chief librarian, William A Stobie, was challenged for control by his senior assistant George Churchill and two juniors George Stevens and George Allard.

The trio told Mr Stobie he was overly strict, his behaviour was being monitored and written records kept.