LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

This topic has been discussed on LISNEWS before but Morning Edition had a piece today about the topic.

John Allison, CEO of banking giant BB&T, calls Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged "the best defense of capitalism ever written." He says that Rand changed his life, and he's working to ensure that the deceased author isn't left out of the nation's college curricula.

Since 2005, the BB&T Charitable Foundation has given 25 colleges and universities several million dollars to start programs devoted to the study of Rand's books and economic philosophy. In January, the company announced it was donating $1 million to Marshall University in West Virginia.

The money would establish a course dedicated to Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and help create the BB&T Center for the Advancement of American Capitalism on campus.

But not everyone at the university is excited by the gift. Rick Wilson, a sociology instructor at Marshall and head of the West Virginia Economic Justice Project, says that Rand's philosophy, objectivism, is based on the view that selfishness is the only moral value.

Listen to the Morning Edition piece here.

Egyptian Gamal Banna backs women's right to lead prayers and thinks clerics should adapt to modern times the LA Times reports.

A slight man in a brown suit, whose smooth face belies his 88 years, can slide one from shelves of thousands, brush its cover and tell you a story, whether it be about jihad, St. Francis of Assisi or the labor movement of the 1930s. He has written 120 books himself, many of them about Islam, which to him has too long listened to the restrictive voices of the past. Tellingly, he adds, "They live as if from five centuries ago."

Gamal Banna is one of Islam's leading liberal thinkers. For years he has accused conservative clerics of running a dictatorship that has kept the Koran from speaking to a world much changed since the 7th century revelations of the prophet Muhammad. Banna, whose long-dead brother led a fundamentalist movement that inspired many of his critics, relishes unnerving opponents with opinions that strike at convention.

Judith Flanders Says Very unambitious fraudsters are claiming to be writers as part of a confidence scam. Maybe real authors should follow their lead: we need a few quid

Vladimir Nabokov's final work — an unfinished manuscript scholars call The Original of Laura — was meant to be destroyed 30 years ago. When Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft.

But Nabokov's wife, Vera, couldn't bear to destroy her husband's last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now 73, is the Russian novelist's only surviving heir. He says he inherited the problem of whether to honor his father's wishes or save the literary master's last written words for posterity.

Listen to the full story on NPR

Cory Doctorow (or his publisher) has made parts of his new novel Little brother available as audio -- DRM-free mind you. From BoingBoing:

"The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it, you're free to take up to 30 minutes' worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it's clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you're allowed to do without my permission (of course!)."

There is also an embeddable widget which lets you port the audio sample into your own blog.

A University of Florida English professor has admitted to plagiarizing in several of his books, triggering an internal ethics inquiry and potentially jeopardizing his reputation in academia and beyond. Potentially??!! I'm no legal/English language/academic expert, but I'd say plagiarizing several of your books would no doubt jeopardize your reputation in academia and beyond...

"I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others."

Scott Douglas appeared on Think, The Dallas NPR Station. His new book, Quiet Please, is all about his life working in the public library. "This is hardly a job for the faint of heart..." Those of you who don't want to go through the hassle of iTunes or don't have iTunes, here's a direct link to the 50 minute NPR interview...

Justice Scalia was on 60 Minutes on Sunday night. You can watch the full piece on the Sixty Minute website. Scalia has a new book coming out called Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.

Larry McMurtry will receive the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award this week because he is a “bibliophile par excellence.” That’s how City Librarian Fontayne Holmes describes the novelist, essayist and screenwriter. “He really is such a book person in every single meaning of the word, as a bookstore owner, as a book collector, as a writer and as an incredible reader of literature,” she said.

McMurtry, who has published 41 books, is known for depicting an un-idealized vision of the Old West and his native Texas. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, which became a television mini-series starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones and Danny Glover in 1989.

His store, Booked Up, is in Archer City, TX.

An interesting post over at Boing Boing about Clay Shirky and his book Here Comes Everybody. He postulates that the death of the sitcom and the lackluster shows on TV have driven people to other things, including the ability to think again.

Need proof? Look at Wikipedia.

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.