LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

The Clermont County Public Library Board of Trustees is facing a lawsuit in Federal Court for not allowing a financial planning meeting in the Amelia branch for religious reasons. The library is being sued by George and Kathy Vandergriff of Amelia and the Institute for Principled Policy which sponsored the seminar.

"We had done them quite often at church," George Vandergriff said. "We felt there were people who were reluctant to come to a church setting for instruction of Biblically based financial planning."

Calling It A Book Burning, G. R. Evans, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History University of Cambridge, says The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) announcement for funding for the UK Research Reserve, described as “allowing universities to reclaim the space from journal storage and repurpose it for new opportunities, for example research and learning”. These are weasel words for getting rid of what was on those shelves.

Locative information is one of the most practical and heavily used aspects of information science. iPhone users are showing up on Twitter with new apps allowing their iPhone to pinpoint where they are and seek out others using the system. Lots of us use GPS to get around and I don't know about you, but the last conference I went to, my GPS was incredibly useful. Not only could I get around, but I could find bars, restaurants, bookstores, and anything else I needed.

The problem is, GPS only works on the Earth... which could be an issue if we're thinking about going back to the moon.

Now granted the moon is only about a quarter of the size of Earth, but you could still get lost pretty easily and it's not like there's anyone about to ask for directions. So NASA needs a plan... and it turns out that they have one.

Thomas F. Lahr, deputy associate chief biologist for information at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has been named 2007 Federal Librarian of the Year by the Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) of the Library of Congress.
Lahr, who serves as a senior manager in the USGS Biological Informatics Program, has led the development of new ways to integrate and deliver information and has initiated and maintained USGS public and private partnerships with a wide variety of organizations.

More at http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1978

A federal appeals court struck down as unconstitutional a Clinton-era law that would have forced websites with adult material to verify visitors' ages, dealing another blow to the government in a 10-year court battle over net censorship.

The 3rd U.S. Circurt Court of Appeals upheld on Tuesday a 2007 lower-court decision that the Child Online Protection Act violated the First Amendment since it was not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult websites.

Old people are funny, they write stories like "Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks" Everyone knows us kids can do 12 things at once, and do each and every one of them perfectly. "Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day."
(Link stolen from http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/ )

Don sent over a link to The answer could determine your library's future: As libraries battle popular search engines and Internet research services for users, the new book The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld says that one simple question determines an organization’s future: Would you recommend us to a friend? Learn more about this one-question survey and the latest efforts in library customer service and assessment.

From BestCollegesOnline.com, a list of the 'twenty-five most modern libraries' with links to each. Eight are modern for 'architectural' reasons; twelve are considered to have found "new and creative ways to use technology and design", and five have the best digital collections according to the author of the article, Christina Laun.

Among the top 25 are the national libraries of Australia, Britain, France, Denmark, Czech Republic, Japan and the LOC, and a good number of large metropolitan libraries.

Michael Lieberman's blog at the Seattle Post Intelligencer includes a charming photo of one of the most modern children's libraries (in Japan)...
...but I have a feeling that it wouldn't work to have children sitting on a flight of steps here in the US.

The Consumerist.com Takes A Look @ Libraries: "Reader MG is a fan of the site and a public librarian and has written a list of 7 ways that your library can help you during a bad economy. Libraries are an excellent resource and they're pretty easy to use. Don't worry if you're not a big reader, there's lots more stuff to do at the library besides just checking out books."

You need special access to read Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship, but the intro looks good:

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

So, this weekend I attended my first hacker conference, “The Last H.O.P.E (Hackers on the Planet Earth)” sponsored by 2600 Magazine. Featured con speakers were: Steven Levy, Kevin Mitnick, Jello Biafra, Steve Rambam and Adam Savage of MythBusters fame. Some of the sessions I did attend included: “Evil Interfaces: Violating the User”, “A Hacker's View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)”, “Hacking Democracy: An In Depth Analysis of the ES&S Voting Systems”, “One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer”, Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”, “YouTomb - A Free Culture Hack” and all the featured speakers (except I very sadly missed Steven Levy, I loved that iPod book!).

So what’s a librarian to make of all this? Well believe it or not, there is some common ground between the hacker community and us information science professionals. Chief among these are copyright (especially now with all the digitization occurring in libraries), The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), censorship, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and the ever popular Wikipedia. There are more parallels between library science and hackers than you would ever think possible. We have similar concerns such as: accessibility of information, the sharing of information, collaboration and community outreach.

Hackers get a bad rap. I always had a soft-spot for them, even the nasty ones, as they show great ability to think outside the box and open up previously closed discussions on security and our rights. At the con there were no phones stolen, no re-wiring of the hotel elevators, no malicious hacking, or anything of the like. At the end of the 3-day con I was not surprised to hear this, from the session I had attended and the people I met, I learned a lot about hackers and their community. Hacking from a positive prospective brings attention to topics that definitely need more discussion, RFIDs and electronic voting for instance. Their act of exposing security flaws becomes shared knowledge within the community. They bring to light the shortcomings of processes and systems we depend upon, making way for improvements. Today, many hackers have jobs where they keep our precious data safe by testing systems, exposing vulnerabilities, looking for back-doors and ways to compromise the system, resulting in systems that keep our data safe.

(Posting this again for those who missed it)

Over the next week or so I’d like to try and assemble audio answers from as many people as possible to our favorite question: "Why did you choose librarianship?" Stephen will stitch them all together and release a podcast at some point in the next few weeks.

I’d very much like to make this an audio project. To leave an answer to be included in the podcast, there are a few ways you can go.

If you are in the US, you can call 646-495-9201, enter extension 61340, and leave your answer.

If you are outside the US, or just want to use your computer, you can upload an MP3 file using the upload tool located on the podcast page http://lisnews.org/podcast/.

Be sure to tell us who you are and where you're calling from. You need not provide us with your entire bio, just something simple is fine if you’d like to remain private: "Hi, this is Blake calling from western New York and I chose librarianship because..."

Part of this "Libraries fight to protect patrons' privacy article has a "MULTIMEDIA FEATURE":
"Click the headings below to learn more about how libaries [SIC] have evolved to meet the changing needs of the communities they serve." It's a neat little report, good PR for libraries/ians

The Libraries become hip (and all its many variations) story continues to make the rounds in local papers. "It's important for the library to offer programs and services to all ages to keep the community interested and for the library to remain relevant. Just doing that is a good use of tax dollars," said Coshocton Public Library young adult librarian RoseMary Honnold.

David Pogue was the Keynote Speaker at the 2008 AALL Annual Meeting. Here is a paraphrase of a quote he made about doing extensive research.

I did extensive research on this. I Googled it for like 6 minutes.

-David Pogue
Line said in jest as Keynote Speaker at 2008 AALL Annual Conference

Tina Gasperson reviews Glubble, a free proprietary Firefox add-on from Glaxstar that limits the activity your child can perform online by blocking access to Web sites and filtering Google search results. For parents, a tool like Glubble can seem like the perfect answer to the problem of protecting kids from the unsavory elements of the Internet. But as she discovered through her use of Glubble, the questions surrounding the idea of Internet filtering don't come with easy answers.

Why Newspapers Shouldn't Allow Comments: a newspaper is not a blog—not even its online version. Conversely, a blog is not a newspaper. Comments are thought to be an added value to a newspaper's site—providing another reason to read. You come for the article, and stay for the interesting discussion. The only problem is, there is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers.

The mythical supersmart LISNews readers almost always carry on interesting discussions!

According to Bertelsmann Lexicon, there are reasons why people will want to see a print version of the German Wikipedia. Guardian UK reports.

With a price tag of €19.95 , €1 from every Wikipedia Lexikon sold will be given to the German chapter of Wikimedia, the non-profit group behind Wikipedia, for the use of its name.

The publication reverses the industry trend towards the internet and away from traditional print. Publishers of the Wikipedia Lexikon insist it is too soon to say farewell to the book format.

arstechnica: Stephanie Lenz's YouTube video of her tot dancing to an old Prince song was pulled down at the request of Universal last year after the music label said that the clip infringed on its copyright. Not content with simply having Universal retract its claim, Lenz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are out to put the squeeze on Universal for issuing a bad-faith DMCA takedown. But Universal told a judge this week that, even though the clip may in fact be "fair use," it was still "infringement" and therefore the initial takedown notice was made in good faith.

Seeing the eReader program icon on the iPhone's screen literally brought tears to Joe Hutsko's eyes. Having spent the last decade reading scores of e-books from backlit cover to cover on Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia and BlackBerry devices, he thought the arrival of eReader to the iPhone was a dream come true ...