Smartphone

In a MarketWatch column, Süreyya Ciliv, the chief executive officer of Turkcell, is quoted: “Turkey has changed. Here, now, my son won’t be held back,” Ciliv added. “By going to school in Turkey, he might even be better off. He gets to experience the dynamism of Turkey without sacrificing the information he has access to.” 

He adds: “Historically, the library was the center of knowledge, which is why in previous generations the Turkish businessman wanted to go abroad. Today, the library, all the knowledge my son might need, is right in here. The truth is, demand for our services in Turkey is increasing so rapidly that the biggest challenge for Turkcell is how to meet it.”

And what is the challenge for libraries? Perhaps twofold: to convince Mr. Ciliv that his smartphone is the conduit for all knowledge, and to convince him and others that, somehow, libraries are relevant.

Banned books library

San Antonio is one of four cities (the others being Houston, Albuquerque, and Tuscon) that will host, what Diaz has dubbed, “underground libraries,” community-minded reference/lending facilities forged with the primary purpose of keeping at least four copies of each book that was taken out of Arizona classrooms when the HB2281 law (sounds like a virus vaccine, no?) effectively killed off Tucson's ethnic studies and sent boxes of Latino literature to a book depository for the interim.

Greg Harman - The shelves at SWU's Underground Library are organized by first edition, signed, fiction, poetry, and banned. Underground Librarian Diana Lopez said that recognized local writers like Sandra Cisneros and Dagoberto Gilb have contributed works to the effort. SA Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla even donated multiple copies of her book of poetry, Curandera, republished with "Banned in Arizona" on the cover.

 San Antonio's Underground Library erupts into operation this Thursday, May 10, with a reading from Gustavo Arellano, the much-syndicated Ask a Mexican columnist, who has just written a subversively salivating book called Taco USA (see review "Time of Mex-Tex"). On Arizona's recent legislative policies, the author, who is a great fan of Librotraficante, says: "Those idiot politicians thought that Mexicans and their allies would just allow them to strip the libraries and classrooms of such books; instead, it created the opposite effect. Sure, Arizona law has now pushed Latino literature to the back of the burro, but now you have a vibrant movement of people pushing and reading these books, and authors more than willing to engage in such actions to promote literature. To use that terrible but so apropos cliche, the sleeping Mexican has woken up." •

Open Access Spreads to Miami University

From ALA Magazine:

The librarians of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, joined the ranks of the worldwide open-access (OA) movement May 14 by voting to make their scholarly articles freely available in the university’s institutional repository, the Scholarly Commons. Based on Harvard University’s model policy, MU’s open-access principles take effect immediately and make the libraries the first department on Miami’s campus to successfully pass an open access policy.

What Dewey number fits?

In an article entitled Here's looking at you - should we worry about the rise of the drone? in the 14 May 2012 issue of the New Yorker, Peter W. Singer, "a fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Wired for War, a book about military robotics, is quoted.

His book is in various libraries, but not my two. However, I found the record in the Nassau OPAC rather curious. Of the 15 libraries that do have it, all but two have classified it as military and nautical engineering, 623 in the Dewey Decimal System (623.04 S). Two others have classified it military science (355.0201 S).

350 is Public Administration
620 is Engineering & Applied operations