Amazing feat

The rise and fall of the great powers : economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 / by Paul Kennedy. New York, NY : Random House, c1987.

How did he know about 2000 in 1987?

Novelist fights tide, open own bookstore

After a beloved local bookstore closed here last December and another store was lost to the Borders bankruptcy, this city once known as the Athens of the South, rich in cultural tradition and home to Vanderbilt University, became nearly barren of bookstores.

A collective panic set in among Nashville’s reading faithful. But they have found a savior in Ann Patchett, the best-selling novelist who grew up here. On Wednesday, Ms. Patchett, the acclaimed author of “Bel Canto” and “Truth and Beauty,” will open Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore that is the product of six months of breakneck planning and a healthy infusion of cash from its owner.

“I have no interest in retail; I have no interest in opening a bookstore,” Ms. Patchett said, serenely sipping tea during a recent interview at her spacious pink brick house here. “But I also have no interest in living in a city without a bookstore.”

Even among the young there is an interest in holding a physical book, browsing, hanging out. But it is a tough time to own a bookstore. I just got done helping a patron who wants to read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, but can not imagine lugging around a 630 page book, and does not believe she can finish it in fourteen days. We talked about the Kindle Fire, and, for her, as for so many others, ebooks are a solution to the problem of not having enough time at home.

Cultural leaders convened meetings in the public library to discuss who could step in and open a new bookstore. One idea, to start a co-op requiring small investments of $1,000, never got off the ground. 

And they met at the library, the public library.

CIA's vengeful librarians

This item appeared on my Twitter account; I was sitting on a bench in South Orange, NJ, enjoying a cup of coffee (before spilling half of it; at a buck forty four for a small cup, that was a real bummer – and I was still reeling at being called hon by the cashier). I was on my way to visit my Mum in her new apartment, had just gotten off the train, and was taking five minutes.

CIA monitors up to 5 million tweets daily, report says - Agency's Open Source Center said to use social media to assess reaction to world events

Twitter and Facebook are enabling the Central Intelligence Agency to get reliable, real-time assessments of public sentiment during rapidly changing events around the world. According to the Associated Press, the CIA is monitoring up to 5 million tweets a day, poring over Facebook and blog posts, and watching other social networks from a nondescript facility in a Virginia industrial park.

What exactly is nondescript? On eof many, that does not stand out?

A CIA spokesman did not immediately respond to a request today for comment on the report.

Was the request sent as a text message?

A CIA team known internally as the "vengeful librarians" that numbers in the hundreds gathers information in multiple languages to build a real-time picture of the mood in various regions of the world.

Why vengeful?

The analysis is "sought by the highest levels at the White House" and ends up in the President's intelligence briefing almost daily, the AP quoted Doug Naquin, director of the CIA's Open Source Center, as saying.

Imagine that, tweets wind up in the daily intelligence briefing POTUS sees.

Chihuahua alista eventos por Día Nacional del Libro

Cuentacuentos, talleres, verbenas populares, charlas y un Festival Internacional de Cortometraje, "El cine a las calles", serán parte de las actividades que se desarrollarán a partir de mañana en las instalaciones de las bibliotecas Pública Central e Infantil.

Storytelling, workshops, popular festivals, talks and International Short Film Festival, "Film to the streets" will be part of the activities taking place from tomorrow at the premises of the Central Public and Children Library.

Con motivo del Día Nacional del Libro, el gobierno del estado, a través de su programa "Chihuahua vive la cultura", desarrollará estas actividades culturales gratuitas del 9 a 12 de noviembre, dirigidas a niños y jóvenes de esta entidad.

Musical soundtrack, for ebooks

Booktrack, a start-up in New York, is planning to release e-books with soundtracks that play throughout the books, an experimental technology that its founders hope will change the way many novels are read. Its first book featuring a soundtrack is “The Power of Six,” a young-adult novel published by HarperCollins, soon to be followed by “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Jane Eyre,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Three Musketeers.”

The idea of pairing a book with music is not new. In the past some authors have suggested full playlists to listen to while reading their books, and the best-selling thriller writer James Patterson has even given away CDs to accompany his novels. But Booktrack’s founders say that their product is an improvement on the old book soundtracks, partly because it plays at the pace of the individual reader and can be paused or adjusted with a touch of the screen.

Into the future

Public libraries sometimes get a bad rap for not utilizing the latest technology, but in reality more of them are pushing their services onto smartphones. Checking a book out on a smartphone rather than at a counter is becoming a more common occurrence. Santa Clara County, Calif., provides library services via mobile devices through its SCCL Mobile tool. The tool allows patrons to locate libraries as well as find library hours of operation. Through a text message feature, patrons can receive library contact information through the tool’s Ask a Librarian feature.
In June, Los Angeles Public Library staff announced that its Silver Lake branch was the first public library to launch a smartphone app that provides a self-checkout feature. With the MyMobileLibrary app, patrons can securely check out items from anywhere within the library.
Some libraries are also supporting apps like CardStar and KeyRing, which allow a smartphone to store the bar-code data for a library card. In essence, the smartphone becomes the library card.

xISBN

20 April 2011

Lean times

In New York, as in districts across the country, many school officials said they had little choice but to eliminate librarians, having already reduced administrative staff, frozen wages, shed extracurricular activities and trimmed spending on supplies. Technological advances are also changing some officials’ view of librarians: as more classrooms are equipped with laptops, tablets or e-readers, Mr. Polakow-Suransky noted, students can often do research from their desks that previously might have required a library visit. “It’s the way of the future,” he said.

Well, technically, the present. Yet the point is wrongly argued. Simply having access to information is not sufficient to translate it into knowledge.

Nancy Everhart, president of the American Association of School Librarians, whose membership has fallen to 8,000 from 10,000 in 2006, said that, on the contrary, the Internet age made trained librarians more important, to guide students through the basics of searching and analyzing information they find online. Libraries, Ms. Everhart said, are “the one place that every kid in the school can go to to learn the types of skills that will be expected of them when it’s time to work with an iPad in class.”

Bible only, BART Books

Story of interest: US prisoners refused all books except Bible -American Civil Liberties Union says jail in South Carolina is banning books 'for no good reason'

Library book lending machine opens at Millbrae BART Station: BART customers are now able to borrow a book on their way to their train at Millbrae Station, handed to them by the robotic arm of a new book lending machine. BART and the Peninsula Library System (PLS) unveiled a "Free2Read & Ride" book lending machine on the concourse level of the station during a ceremony on Thursday, May 5, 2011. Anyone who has a library card for one of the PLS libraries can use the machine to borrow one or more of the 500 available books.

Children's Poet Laureate

Ran across his books while doing RFID work in Children's.

Where the sidewalk ends

Ran across this book whilst processing books for RFID.

Rising superstar

Whilst processing children's book for RFID, ran across this little gem. Bobby Bonds : rising superstar

by George Sullivan

Kindle library

The world of Kindle reading soon will get bigger: Amazon today said that later this year it will launch library lending for Kindle books, from over 11,000 libraries in the U.S. The Kindle Library Lending feature will be available for all Kindles and Kindle apps, Amazon said. The company did not give a more specific time frame for launch of the service. You'll be able to check out a Kindle book from a local library and start reading on any Kindle device or Kindle app. If a Kindle book is checked out again or that book is purchased from Amazon, annotations and bookmarks will be preserved, Amazon said in a news release. Amazon said it is working digital book distributor OverDrive on the service. OverDrive offers DRM protection and download services for publishers, libraries, schools, and retailers.

e-Reference

New databases and updates and enhancements to existing databases.

Take heed

Sign on door of Technical Services:

NO BROWSING, LOITERING OR HANDLING OF ANY ITEM WHATSOEVER IN THIS ROOM WILL BE TOLERATED

Sign looks as if it were posted in the days of shushing, yet it remains on the door. Watch out.

Its grade was an F.

Teachers’ Colleges Upset by Plan to Grade Them: Grades are the currency of education — teachers give them to students,  administrators grade teachers and states often assign grades to schools.         Now U.S. News & World Report is  planning to give A through F grades to more than 1,000 teachers’  colleges, and many of the schools are unhappy, marching to the  principal’s office to complain the system is unfair. U.S. News and its partner in the ratings, the National Council on Teacher Quality,  an independent advocacy group, originally told schools that if they did  not voluntarily supply data and documents, the teacher quality group  would seek the information under open-records laws. If that did not  work, the raters planned to give the schools an F. That got the attention of educators. Education schools have faced criticism frequently over the years. They are faulted by a recent wave of education advocates as emphasizing education theory over hands-on classroom training, and as graduating teachers with weak academic skills.

Actually, I think they ten dot be strong in academic skills, and weak on practical skills.


The federal education secretary, Arne Duncan,  has said that many, if not most, teacher-training programs are  mediocre. “It is time to start holding teacher-preparation programs more  accountable for the impact of their graduates on student learning,” Mr.  Duncan said in a speech in November.

The same should be done for libray schools.

Civic Engagement Trumps ‘Shhh!’

Steven Holl Architects - A rendering of Steven Holl’s design for a new library at Hunters Point in Queens.

There may be no better example of the worrying state of American architecture than the career of Steven Holl. At 63, this New York architect is widely considered one of the most original talents of his era. His work has influenced a generation of architects and students. And over the last decade or so he has become a star in faraway places like Scandinavia and China, where he is celebrated as someone able to imbue even the most colossal urban projects with lyricism.

So when the Queens Library Board of Trustees approved the design of the new Hunters Point community library this month, it was a well-deserved and long overdue breakthrough. The project, done in collaboration with Mr. Holl’s partner Chris McVoy and scheduled to begin construction early next year, will stand on a prominent waterfront site just across the East River from the United Nations. It is a striking expression of the continuing effort to shake the dust off of the city’s aging libraries and recast them as lively communal hubs, and should go far in bolstering the civic image of Queens.

Racial Disparities Seen

White people in the United States die of drug overdoses more often than other ethnic groups. Black people are hit proportionately harder by AIDS, strokes and heart disease. And American Indians are more likely to die in car crashes. To shed more light on the ills of America’s poor — and occasionally its rich — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday released its first report detailing racial disparities in a broad array of health problems.

 

Differences in Race and Health

Weeding Wuthering Heights

Working on paper books for RFID, came across a tattered paperback copy of Brontë's classic. In concurrence with my boss, we decided to weed this copy. And, I said to her, it occurred to me that that would make a wonderful title for a story: I weeded Wuthering Heights; or, perhaps, I thrashed Brontë. Now that I have the title(s), to write the story.

Killing Castro

Block, Lawrence. (2009). Killing Castro. New York: Hard Case Crime.


I know that paperbacks are, well, can be schlock, but this is amazing, even by those standards. Lawrence Block is a crime writer, and this book was originally published in 1961 as Fidel Castro Assassinated (Block writing as Lee Duncan). But this cover is amazing in its, what shall I call it, implied meaning? Little implied about it.

Journal Showcases Dying Art of the Research Paper

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times - William H. Fitzhugh publishes The Concord Review, featuring research papers written by high school students.