LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Sean McGown: I've been noticing something recently and I'm seeing it more and more. IT learning resources are moving more and more towards video screencasting and less and less towards the continuation of written material. Now, I'm not predicting the demise of books just yet, but I've noticed that people are asking for video resources more often.

R.I.P.: Molly’s Books Today comes the news that Molly’s will be closing, and while this is awful news, it’s not exactly shocking; much like the local record store, the local book store has been in decline for a while now. Like the best of these places, though, Molly’s was special....

Ray Bradbury spoke last week at the iconic Long Beach bookstore and railed about its threatened closure and the dearth of bookstores in certain areas around Los Angeles. LBReport.com was there and quotes Bradbury, who said of Acres of Books, "I love this place. I love the smell of it. When it used to rain...I'd come to Long Beach, I'd come here to the Acres of Books and I'd go in the back."

Can wet books, papers be salvaged? The Minnesota State Historical Society offers advice on restoring valuables. Papers, and especially books, that have been exposed to flood water are fragile, very likely to mold, and difficult to dry successfully. They may be a health hazard, so wear waterproof gloves.

Private detectives hunt for late library books: Norfolk County Council (That's in England) admitted it had spent £82,358 in the past three years using private detectives.

Much of the money was used to hunt debtors and the council confessed it had used detectives to look online for people who owed them cash but had moved away.

Wickedlocal reports...A new chapter started yesterday at the Milford Town Library, with Susan Edmonds, formerly of Boston's George Fingold Library, taking over as director and establishing stability for a staff that has worked under three bosses in three months in a newly renovated library.

Edmonds said she's ready to lead, but first has to get her bearings.

On day 1, Edmonds had to check with staff to see how to get into the locked Milford Room, which showcases the town's history.
When a staff member in circulation told Edmonds her staff key would open the door, the new director halted and smiled, saying, "Oh, I don't have one yet." And when the phone rang in her office, "I gotta learn how to use this," she said, picking it up to say, "Hello, this is Susan."

At the state library in Boston, Edmonds worked in technical services, as the library systems manager, assistant director and head of services. Before that, at the Somerville Public Library, she was reference librarian, circulation supervisor and technical services librarian.

"I've been everything else, but," she said of the director's job. "And I enjoy what I did but this was an opportunity I couldn't miss, pass up."

American University Librarian Emeritus James Heintze, who wrote the "Fourth of July Encyclopedia" published in 2007 by McFarland, traditionally visits the National Archives and watches the Fourth of July parade in downtown Washington. Here's Heintze's website on the subject that he finds perpetually fascinating.

AP gives us a glimpse of the former librarian and his patriotic passion.

If you ever wanted concrete proof that the "Don't share my information with other companies" and "Stop emailing me" options on a web site are often useless, it's here. It's impossible to know which companies share data and which don't, but registering with the "do not share my e-mail" option ticked didn't appear to reduce spam in any way. Some of the bloggers reported a drop in the amount of spam they were receiving on a day-to-day basis when they unsubscribed from certain services, but the trend is not particularly strong.

The MPAA is taking a heavy hand with piracy, as is the RIAA, but that only covers audio and video. What about books?

According to book publishers the threat of piracy from illegally downloaded text books is growing. Rather than students spending as much as US$100 per book to get the texts they need, they are turning to the Internet to download scanned versions for free.

Full article here.

Eric Schnell Wonders Will the Next Generation of Library Systems be Customer Generated?

It's no wonder that library systems of tomorrow are really just library systems of yesterday. It seems to me that as a profession we are stuck in a bad relationship with our systems and vendors. We just can't figure out a way to get out of it. Are we happy that III will not give us APIs? Are we so insecure with our relationship with them that we are content to take what they give us? Do we feel we are that powerless?

Bad News For plans to make all children’s books carry age guidance were in tatters last night as JK Rowling came out in opposition to the move.

The support of the Edinburgh-based Harry Potter creator was welcomed by authors determined to sabotage moves to introduce age-banding on all children’s titles by the autumn.

Sad News from Oregon: Numerous unsuccessful pleas for money to reopen county libraries marked a 50-minute public hearing on the Josephine County 2008-09 fiscal year budget.

“It’s a tough decision,” said Commissioner Jim Raffenburg, “but you can’t call the library for help in the middle of the night.”

Marginal Revolution has the best comment I could find on This Paper (Summarized Here on "The Long Tail."

Overall I cannot call this one for Elberse. If you take a genre as given, the web looks less revolutionary but part of the long tail is the creation of new genres. We have blogs now, for instance, and we didn't fifteen years ago, even though blog readership is quite concentrated among the top sites....You could have rewritten that as "The Long Tail hypothesis is basically true, just don't sell to the Long Tail alone." On that we should all be able to agree.

As we've gotten over the middle of a busy holiday week in the United States, it is best to give a little hint about what is coming in LISTen #28. The next episode of LISTen is going to have interviews with two fiction writers who have large fan bases. One of them referred to a "porn" text he wrote as being merely a "dirty book" and was surprised that public libraries actually owned copies. The other who is known for his "honor" brought up his speculative views on the future of libraries.

Wondering who the authors may be? Find out Monday after 0400 UTC by downloading the new episode of LISTen.

Tip of the week at the NYT:

Tip of the Week: Look Up Books at Your Library From Home

See full tip here.

Sci-fi writer Paolo Bacigalupi uses real environmental science as a starting point for his stories. His collection, called Pump Six, describes a near future where massive droughts create a black market for calories.

Hear full interview on NPR

Here's an article from the San Diego Reader that we missed (dateline June 18). Lots of readers wrote in with kudos for author and playwright Alex Finlayson, who hangs out a good deal of the time at her local branch, North Clairemont.

Some major sites on the Web want to know: What was the last name of your kindergarten teacher, the name of your dog, your mother’s maiden name, the brand of your first car or in what year did you graduate from high school?

These are some of the commonly asked “fallback questions” that Web sites pose to users who need to reset their passwords. Some are just as difficult to remember as the password itself. Others are easily guessable (here’s a list of common pet names, for example.)

Internet companies want us to pick complex, hard-to-guess passwords. As memory-challenged Web addicts, many of us are hopeless at the task. So we resort to punishing our brains to recall which fallback question we selected when registering on the site, and what, darnit, was the name of that kindergarten teacher anyway?

Full article in the NYT here. Article goes on to discuss another method of password recovery that a company has developed.

Folio reports that Time, Inc. will be offering a new service called "Maghound." It allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for a mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. The Freakonomics Blog has some interesting commentary on this.

Newsweek says Don't Be Deceived; Even A High-Tech Library Still Needs Shelves Of Books And Journals.

"Who made the decision that everyone who is not computer-literate-very computer-literate, in the ease of our new library-could be left in the cold? Who is pretending that men and women from low-income neighborhoods, schooled without computers and without computers at home, can use this library? And how many decades will pass before everyone who graduated from pre-computer colleges is dead, and until inner-city and rural public schools have computers in sufficient numbers to teach all their children how to use them? Indeed, precious few minority faces are to be seen at the computer stations in our fancy new library."