New York Librarian

NovelNY

2012-03-20T11:41:00.001-04:00

Provided by the New York State Library, NOVELNY connects New Yorkers to 21st century information. NOVELNY is supported with temporary federal Library Services and Technology Act funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The New York Library Initiative is a proposal for permanent state funding for NOVELNY, a pilot project for the Statewide Internet Library

You don't look like a Librarian

2012-03-19T17:31:00.001-04:00

Amazing feat

2011-12-09T14:11:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-16T14:01:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-08T18:35:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-08T17:34:00.000-05:00

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

2011-08-24T14:19:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-10T18:00:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-12T09:46:00.002-04:00

20 April 2011

Lean times

2011-06-25T11:57:00.001-04:00

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

2011-05-15T13:25:00.001-04:00

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

2011-04-28T20:07:00.000-04:00

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

Where the sidewalk ends

2011-04-28T19:52:00.002-04:00

Ran across this book whilst processing books for RFID.

Rising superstar

2011-04-26T17:17:00.009-04:00

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

by George Sullivan

Kindle library

2011-04-20T20:13:00.000-04:00

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

2011-04-17T14:15:00.000-04:00

New databases and updates and enhancements to existing databases.

Take heed

2011-04-16T09:23:00.000-04:00

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.

2011-02-09T14:17:00.000-05:00

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!’

2011-01-30T15:49:00.004-05:00

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

2011-01-14T10:27:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-13T17:49:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-13T17:41:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-07T11:41:00.005-05:00

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

NORAD tracks flying sleigh

2010-12-24T11:01:00.001-05:00

What is that sound?

Web-Scale Discovery

2010-12-22T18:41:00.000-05:00

From ALA magazine.

Connecting users with the information they seek is one of the central pillars of our profession. Web-scale discovery services for libraries are those services capable of searching quickly and seamlessly across a vast range of local and remote preharvested and indexed content, providing relevancy-ranked results in an intuitive interface expected by today’s information seekers. First debuting in late 2007, these rapidly evolving tools are more important today than ever to understand.

Great theory, and, perhaps, a reality in some libraries, but nothing I've seen. An example of the divide in the library world between the reality of the mundane and commonplace, and the theoretical academic writing.

Akedah secular source

2010-12-22T16:35:00.000-05:00

12/22, 4pm
    A young man, university-age, approached the Reference Desk, and asked for information on the akedah. At first I thought he meant Acadia, but he explained that it is Isaac's binding (the binding that Abraham used to bind Isaac before the sacrifice). He wanted a "secular source," he explained when I suggested the Encyclopedia Judaica, which he had at his table. He also has a Christian source he got from the Internet; when I asked him if he thought it a reliable source he pointed out that he'll explain in his paper that it is an electronic source, and, indeed, it is that sort of source that he needs. Makes sense.

    OPAC searches revealed that HW's book on it was gone and billed; his deadline is tonight ("I like to leave papers for the last minute."). I suggested database searches, and gave him 296.14 as the call number of the book that is not there, the religion call number (actually 296 is Judaism). He thanked me, and went back to his table, laptop and assignment.

    Remembering Tikkun, I went to to the site and searched; plenty of results. I searched ProQuest and also found many results (Galenet gave 4 results).

    Walked over to the table where he's sitting, and told him about Tikkun, "it's a liberal Jewish publication." As soon as I said the word Jewish the Orthodox Jew sitting at the next table turned around to look at me.

    O, and the students first name is Solomon; I told him mine is Salomon.

Someone knows my name [electronic resource]

2010-12-22T08:46:00.000-05:00

A patron asked for this book, and, curious, I went to take a look. Searching the title, I saw that the OPAC contains a record for an electronic resource: an excerpt from the book is read, and can be accessed through a hyperlink. Whew, libraries racing into the future (well, the present, but, still).

Google Launches New Book Database

2010-12-16T16:34:00.002-05:00

A Google-backed project allows centuries of books to be scanned for specific words and phrases, equipping the humanities with a new method of cultural analysis.

Can't wait; gotta have it

2010-12-04T12:32:00.000-05:00

A regular patron reserved two Clive Cussler books due to be published next year, 2011: The Jungle (2011/03/08), and The Kingdom (2011/06/07)

Narcissus leaves the pool

2010-12-03T12:39:00.000-05:00

One of the beauties of working with people is that they bring ideas and topics to my attention that I do not know. A perfect example is this book, asked for by Dr. Evans, a regular patron who is in the Library just about every single day.

Epstein, Joseph. (1999). Narcissus leaves the pool: familiar essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Booklist Reviews: Epstein is one of the premier contemporary American essayists, and his status is reaffirmed in his latest collection, which, as the title indicates, is about himself. But there is nothing wrong with such egotism, because he happens to be an interesting fellow.

Kirkus Reviews: Vintage Epstein, for those who don't mind a faint bouquet of self-absorption.

Google e-Book

2010-12-03T12:20:00.000-05:00

Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions, a move that could shake up the way digital books are sold.

Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

Google says it is on a mission to reach all Internet users, not just those with tablets, through a program in which websites refer their users to Google Editions. For example, a surfing-related blog could recommend a surfing book, point readers to Google Editions to purchase it, and share revenue with Google. Through another program, booksellers could sell Google Editions e-books from their websites and share revenue with Google.

Not too early?

2010-12-02T13:48:00.000-05:00

Chicago vies with Hawaii for Obama presidential library

Already?

Remote viewing

2010-11-12T13:59:00.001-05:00

On a busy afternoon, a young man asked, sotto voce, for material on Remote viewing. I found this book that includes the topic.

Mayer, Elizabeth Lloyd. (2007). Extraordinary knowing: science, skepticism, and the inexplicable powers of the human mind. New York : Bantam Books. 133.8 M

Morris Louis

2010-11-05T11:17:00.001-04:00

A patron was seeking books about this artist. Morris Louis (born Morris Louis Bernstein, 28 November 1912 – 7 September 1962) was an American abstract expressionist painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. Living in Washington, DC. Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.

Morris Louis, Where, 252 x 362 cm. magna on canvas, 1960, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Schomburg gets Maya Angelou archive

2010-11-04T19:12:00.003-04:00

Olive: Voters approve library funding

2010-11-03T22:18:00.001-04:00

Published: Tuesday, November 02, 2010

OLIVE — Town voters on Tuesday approved, 1,280-419, a plan to support the Olive Free Library with $129,000 in annual town funding. The approval of the ballot proposition allows the library to receive $129,000 annually until the amount is changed through a future ballot proposition.

The library currently receives $43,000 from the town and another $54,000 from the library’s Bishop Trust.

Library board President Mary Ann Shepard has said funding cuts over the past several years had hurt basic services in a rural community where the library serves as a cultural center, educational resource, and job search facility.

Halloween at the Library

2010-10-31T16:00:00.001-04:00

Starting today at the Children's Room.

A man came in asking for Dear Mr. Henshaw / Beverly Cleary ; illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky.

A mother with her two daughters were looking for a PG-rated DVD; they looked at Home Alone 4, but Mum nixed it. The violence was okay, but the plot includes a relationship that clearly she did not approve of.

A father with his son, Joseph, who is in the third grade, asked for a book; recommended Cam Jansen.

It has gotten busy, and I can't keep up, but I've recommended, and as wasked about, Patricia Giff, Barbara Cohen, Robert Munsch. Books on Thanksgiving (on Halloween Day), Magic school bus.

At 3, I repaired upstairs to Reference. Decidedly different in Reference than in Children's. A few people studyuing, 6 Internet PCs in use. A patron I know came over and asked for three books:

Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, by Glenn Dynner. An associate professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College. Growth and development of Hasidic movement in Eastern and East Central Europe. Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early nineteenth century. (from Oxford Press)

Blind jump: the story of Shaike Dan, by Amos Ettinger. Found it in Suffolk.

Blind Jump is the story of the amazing exploits of Shaike Dan. During World War II, Shaike Dan volunteered to parachute behind enemy lines in Romania on behalf of British Intelligence. His jump had two objectives: to locate the prison camp where 1,400 Allied Air Force crewman, downed when bombing the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, were being held, and also to find ways to get them out of Romania so that they could go back into action and resume their contribution to the war effort. The second objective was to try to rescue Jews from Eastern Europe and get them to Palestine.

Rome and Jerusalem: the clash of ancient civilizations. Martin Goodman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2007.
933.05 G

Clearly there is a theme running through his requests. He is one of the more interesting patrons I encounter here.

I learned something today

2010-10-30T12:47:00.000-04:00

A young woman came over to the Readers Advisory desk, looking for "a Romeo and Juliet film," but all she could tell me was that the actress had "blond hair" and the actor had "black hair." I tried to guess, and offered the film Leo DiCaprio made, but that wasn't it.
She suggested I use Google Images, and when I did she recognized the cover of the DVD: Shakespeare in Love, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes

I learned something: image searching is indeed now possible to use as a librarian's tool to find requested material.

Virginia?

2010-10-28T15:21:00.003-04:00

A student asked for Who's afraid of Virginia Wolff, and saw this pun. Cute?

Making Ignorance Chic

2010-10-20T23:04:00.000-04:00

Maureen Dowd takes note of librarians in her column.

The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe. She was smart enough to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope.

Running the Books

2010-10-20T14:43:00.001-04:00

Running the books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.
Avi Steinberg. 399 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26.

[One library has it as Running the Books, another as a Biography.]

Fascinating review, or rather, review of a fascinating book written by a man who was a prison librarian for a couple of years.

Clinging to textbooks

2010-10-20T14:27:00.003-04:00

They text their friends all day long. At night, they do research for their term papers on laptops and commune with their parents on Skype. But as they walk the paths of Hamilton College, a poster-perfect liberal arts school in this upstate village, students are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks — and loving it.

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times - Victoria Adesoba, a New York University student, said her decision to buy or rent textbooks depended on the course. She said e-texts tempted her to visit Facebook.

Smart of her; would that other youngsters, including young librarians, heed that. It is amazing just how addicted people become to electronic gadgets, something I well understand. But at work, one has to act professionally, and Facebooking all the time ain't that.

For all the talk that her generation is the most technologically adept in history, paper-and-ink textbooks do not seem destined for oblivion anytime soon According to the National Association of College Stores, digital books make up just under 3 percent of textbook sales, although the association expects that share to grow to 10 percent to 15 percent by 2012 as more titles are made available as e-books.

He comes next

2010-10-15T15:13:00.000-04:00

A man came over to the Information Desk and asked for the book. 3 libraries own it. After he left, I looked at the record a little more closely, noticing the cover and the subject headings more carefully.

Note the fruits; nothing lost or confusing there. The complete title is He comes next : the thinking woman's guide to pleasuring a man.

Subject headings:

	Sex instruction for women.
	Oral sex.
	Male orgasm.

Israeli books

2010-10-06T16:21:00.000-04:00

A patron came in today with hold requests for these books:

To the end of the land, David Grossman
The trials of Zion , Alan M. Dershowitz.
The rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan
Bearing the body. Ehud Havazelet.
The Jewish Messiah. Arnon Grunberg.
Fire in the blood. Irène Némirovsky.
A pigeon and a boy / Meir Shalev.
When the grey beetles took over Baghdad / Mona Yahia.

Go GaGa

2010-08-26T10:22:00.000-04:00

This video was passed on to me; it's cute: Librarians Do Gaga.

Students and faculty from the University of Washington's Information School get their groove on.

Directed, edited, and produced by Sarah Wachter.
Lyrics by Sarah Wachter.
Lyrics available here: http://www.athenasbanquet.net/2010/05...
More info available here: http://www.athenasbanquet.net/2010/05...

One hit wonders of the '50s & '60s.

2010-08-18T17:36:00.001-04:00

Farmingdale Library called asking for two songs: Let me go lover! and I'll Always Love You. The second song is in sheet music; the first in this book.

Q 784.5 O

Songs:

Alley cat song -- Angel of the morning -- Apache -- Theme from Baby, the rain must fall -- The birds and the bees -- Bobby's girl -- Book of love -- Chantilly lace -- The deck of cards -- Dominique -- Eve of destruction -- Grazing in the grass -- Guitar boogie shuffle -- Happy, happy birthday baby -- Harper Valley P.T.A. -- I like it like that -- Israelites -- Leader of the laundromat -- Let me go lover! -- Love (can make you happy) -- May the bird of paradise fly up your nose -- More -- More today than yesterday -- Na na hey hey kiss him goodbye -- On top of spaghetti -- Pipeline -- Pretty little angel eyes -- Sea of love -- Silhouettes -- Stay -- Stranger on the shore -- Sukiyaki -- Tie me kangaroo down sport -- Who put the bomp (in the bomp ba bomp ba bomp) -- The worst that could happen.

$200 textbook vs. free. You do the math.

2010-08-06T17:22:00.000-04:00

Infuriating Scott G. McNealy has never been easier. Just bring up math textbooks. Mr. McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. “Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says.

Textbooks get more and more expensive every year.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

Thank goodness someone with sufficient resources, money, is doing something about it.

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.

They got away with it for a very long time.

“Today, we are engaged in a very different dialogue with our customers,” says Wendy Colby, a senior vice president of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Our customers are asking us to look at different ways to experiment and to look at different value-based pricing models.”

Huh?

Over the last few years, groups nationwide have adopted the open-source mantra of the software world and started financing open-source books. Experts — often retired teachers or groups of teachers — write these books and allow anyone to distribute them in digital, printed or audio formats. Schools can rearrange the contents of the books to suit their needs and requirements. But progress with these open-source texts has been slow.

Always is.

Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, promoted an open physics textbook from CK-12 in his previous role as the secretary of technology for Virginia, which included more up-to-date materials than the state’s printed textbooks. “We still had quotes that said the main component of a television was a cathode ray tube,” Mr. Chopra says. “We had to address the contemporary nature of physics topics.”

And that computer time-sharing was the latest rage?

£ 1 for a library

2010-08-06T16:54:00.000-04:00

Item in most current issue of ALA e-newsletter, from England. Library in a phonebox

Der Hirt auf dem Felsen

2010-08-06T12:46:00.003-04:00

Interesting question: recorded and printed music for this Schubert song. Found former, not latter.

Slow

2010-07-28T18:19:00.001-04:00

It is so slow I almost wish Mrs. Ochman would call again. Almost.

New bridge arrives

2010-07-26T21:42:00.000-04:00

An adventure in multidimensional space

2010-07-16T16:13:00.000-04:00

Amidst requests for newspapers and for directions to the bathroom, a good, solid question appears every so often, and today I got a good one: books on topology manifold. HW owns one that fits the patron's needs perfectly:

An adventure in multidimensional space : the art and geometry of polygons, polyhedra, and polytopes / Koji Miyazaki ; translated by the author ; edited and revised by Henry Crapo.

Bridge on the move

2010-07-15T20:33:00.000-04:00

Librado Romero/The New York Times - The new Willis Avenue Bridge will dock in New Jersey before going to the Harlem River.

Reference question on WW II

2010-07-14T18:32:00.027-04:00

A patron came into Peninsula Library looking for information on two topics:

1. Jewish soldiers in the Finnish Army who participated in the siege of Leningrad

2. Ukranian soldiers who served in the German Army.

He knew about both, yet wanted printed information so that he could prove the points to someone. He said he served in the US Army and was at D-Day; when US soldiers captured Nazi soldiers at Normandy, it turned out that they were not speaking German, and that they were Ukranian. He also knew about Jewish Finnish soldiers, and related to me a story of Finnish Army Marshal Mannerheim: requested by a German officer to not have Jews serving alongside Germans, he told the German that said soldiers were Finnish, and that he would not be told who could serve in his Army.

I did find material on the web, including a link to an article in the Jewish Quarterly, and information at Yad Vashem.

Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was a soldier and a politician, became president of Finland.

14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian)

A list of books

2010-07-10T14:19:00.001-04:00

This quiet, gray afternoon, a patron came in with quite a list of books; most were out, but she did find a handful to take with her; the others I put on hold. Quite an interesting selection:

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (2009).

A ticket to the circus: a memoir. Norris Church Mailer (2010).

The house at Riverton, Kate Morton (2009).

Hannah's list, Debbie Macomber (2010).

Bombay time, Thrity Umrigar (2001).

Day after night, Anita Diamant (2009).

Welcome to Utopia: notes from a small town, Karen Valby (2010).

The cleanest race: how North Koreans see themselves and why it matters, B.R. Myers.

Somewhere inside: one sister's captivity in North Korea and the other's fight to bring her home, Laura Ling and Lisa Ling (2010).

In search of Nella Larsen

2010-06-24T16:45:00.000-04:00

Hutchinson, George. (2006). In search of Nella Larsen: a biography of the color line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Saw an advert for this book, and was fascinated enough to pick it off the shelf. Whilst I am already reading other books, I could not resist the urge to look at this one. Thus far, the Introduction, my judgment has been confirmed.

One item of particular interest: Larsen was a librarian.

Mack & Mabel

2010-06-21T11:04:00.000-04:00

A patron called for this book, specifically one song in it: I won't send roses. Found it, set it aside for her, told her it'd be held at the Reference Desk.

Literally minutes later a young man came over and asked for the book. He is her brother; she is in Massachusetts, working in the theater, and needs this song. He will go home, scan it, and attach the file to an email.

Yay for high technology.

O, how true

2010-06-15T10:14:00.000-04:00

Unshelved gets it spot-on again, and again.

How often one wishes to say so.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö

2010-06-10T15:43:00.000-04:00

A Peninsula Library patron told me he was looking for books on CD by these Swedish authors, back some weeks ago. He was in today, and thanked me profusely for enlightening him on accessing the OPAC online. Nice to get such feedback.

Plundering paradise

2010-06-01T20:35:00.002-04:00

Seemed good; could not get into it.

War at the Wall Street journal

2010-06-01T20:33:00.002-04:00

As light as a Journal article. Put it down.

Imperfectionists

2010-06-01T19:03:00.001-04:00

A patron suggested this book. Looks interesting.

Under the Lemon Moon

2010-06-01T19:01:00.000-04:00

Under the lemon moon / by Edith Hope Fine ; illustrated by René King Moreno.

A patron requested it.

Where?

2010-05-28T16:45:00.000-04:00

An Orthodox Jewish woman came in looking to reserve a book; her address was on Church Street. Just a curiosity.

Chapter and verse on e-Bookstores

2010-05-27T14:40:00.000-04:00

As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there's another choice that's just as important for readers to weigh before they make the leap to e-books: which e-bookstore to frequent. Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you'll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It's as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?

Come and go? It is a valid point, at any rate.

The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc. and Sony Corp. all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple's new iBooks store can be read only on Apple's own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple's virtual bookshelf.

These vendors are in the business of selling hardware.

For now, the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. Anybody who just wants a simple way to carry digital books around might be happy with an app-based approach. But readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.

Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.

Amazon targets real readers

2010-05-26T20:24:00.000-04:00

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said the company's strategy for competing with Apple Inc.'s iPad was to keep its own Kindle e-reader focused on reading. He also said a reflective color screen for the Kindle e-reader was a ways off.

A ways off?

Speaking at the company's annual shareholders meeting Tuesday in Seattle, Mr. Bezos said Amazon's approach to digital reading was focused on two fronts: devices and being an e-book retailer. For the device business, he said Amazon would focus on building a Kindle that appealed to serious readers, as opposed to devices like the iPad that try to serve several different purposes.

"There are always ways to do the job better if you are willing to focus in on one arena," Mr. Bezos said. He also conceded that "90% of households are not serious reading households."

10% of households are serious readers.

The comments were the CEO's first about the Kindle strategy in about six months, during which the landscape for e-book readers and e-bookstores has changed with the introduction of the iPad and a shift in the system for pricing e-books.

Follow the hyperlink

2010-05-22T15:21:00.000-04:00

A fascinating article in the current issue of the New York Review of Books on three books about the Dreyfus Affair, by Robert Gildea. In the Contributors page, he is identified as Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. Indeed.

Four of his books are in the OPAC:

Barricades and borders : Europe 1800-1914. Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1987.
Children of the Revolution : the French, 1799-1914. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2008.
France since 1945. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marianne in chains : everyday life in the French heartland under the German occupation. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

HW owns the 2nd and 4th; I'm going to take a look.

Kissinger dissertation

2010-05-22T15:02:00.000-04:00

Came back from lunch to a question of finding Henry Kissinger's doctoral dissertation. Googling the term Kissinger Elena Kagan (I recalled some news item to that effect – which turned out to be a Daily Beast quiz Is Elena Kagan a Socialist and was about their senior theses) eventually led me to Henry Kissinger - Conservapedia. Therein I saw reference to his dissertation: "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

The dissertation was published in 1957 by Houghton Mifflin [940.57 K].As the father, who had asked the question, said his son attends Yale, I went to Yale.edu, found a link to the library, entered the title, and got a record back:

A world restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the problems of peace, 1812-22.

Author:	Kissinger, Henry, 1923-
Title:	A world restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the problems of peace, 1812-22.
Published:	Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1957.
Description:	354 p. illus. 23 cm.



Location:	SML, Stacks, Yale Classification
Call Number:	Bi43 957K
Status:	Not Checked Out

Subjects (Library of Congress):	Metternich, Clemens Wenzel Lothar, Fürst von, 1773-1859.
	Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 1769-1822.
	Europe --Politics and government --1815-1848.
Database:	Yale University Library

The first link in searching on Google scholar was Kissinger: A Biography, by Walter Isaacson.

Wrote the kid an email, and closed the case (sorta).

Bookless library

2010-05-21T17:32:00.000-04:00

Stanford University prepares for 'bookless library'

One chapter is closing — and another is opening — as Stanford University moves toward the creation of its first "bookless library." Box by box, decades of past scholarship are being packed up and emptied from two old libraries, Physics and Engineering, to make way for the future: a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering.

"The role of this new library is less to do with shelving and checking out books — and much more about research and discovery," said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development at Stanford Libraries.

Well put, indeed.

Libraries are the very heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. But the accumulation of information online is shifting their sense of identity. For 40 years, the metal shelves of the modest Physics and Engineering libraries were magnets to thousands of students and faculty, including Nobel Prize winners Douglas Osheroff, Robert Laughlin and Steven Chu, who now directs the U.S. Department of Energy. On the wall of the Physics Library are 16 original prints by photographer Ansel Adams, dedicated to pioneering physicist Russell Varian. A cardboard cutout of a cheerful Albert Einstein greets visitors. A playful collection of clocks — illustrating the randomness of time — decorate a wall.

The future library — on the second floor of "The Octagon," the centerpiece of the university's new science and engineering quad that opens later this year — will offer a stark contrast. It is only half the size of the current Engineering Library, but saves its space for people, not things. It features soft seating, "brainstorm islands," a digital bulletin board and group event space. There are few shelves and it will feature a self-checkout system.

It is developing a completely electronic reference desk, and there will be four Kindle 2 e-readers on site. Its online journal search tool, called xSearch, can scan 28 online databases, a grant directory and more than 12,000 scientific journals.

Several factors are driving the shift. Stanford is running out of room, restricted by an agreement with Santa Clara County that limits how much it can grow. Increasingly, the university seeks to preserve precious square footage. Adding to its pressures is the steady flow of books. Stanford buys 100,000 volumes a year — or 273 every day.

"Most of the libraries on campus are approaching saturation," Herkovic said. "For every book that comes in, we've got to find another book to send off." This fierce competition for space on campus means that many, perhaps most, books will be shipped 38 miles away to a Livermore storage facility.

Stanford's plight is not unique. Four miles off its Durham, N.C., campus, Duke University has a high-density storage facility, with shelves 30 feet high, to hold 15 million books. Harvard's repository is 35 miles away in the rural town of Southborough, Mass.

"You just get to the point where you're busting at the seams," said Lori Goetsch, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and dean of libraries at Kansas State in Manhattan, Kan. — which stores its books more than 80 miles away, in Lawrence.

The sciences are the perfect place to test bookless libraries, librarians say. In math, online books tend to render formulas badly. And those in the humanities, arts and social sciences still embrace the serendipitous discoveries made while browsing. Johanna Drucker, UCLA professor of information studies, asks: "What version of a work should be digitized as representative? Leo Tolstoy's original Russian text? Or the Maude translation? Should we digitize the sanitized version of Mark Twain's classics, or the originals?"

That serendipity can also work in the sciences, no?

But technical information is readily and conveniently accessed online. "Physics was one of the first disciplines to really develop a strong electronic presence," Goetsch said. Science and engineering students agree, saying there is little nostalgia for paper.

"As far as research articles go, physics publication is already essentially entirely online," said physics graduate student Daniel Weissman. "And old journal editions from before the Internet era have largely been digitized, so you can get those articles online too. So that just leaves reference books — and yeah, you're starting to see more and more of those in online versions, too."

But the transition is tougher for Physics librarian Stella Ota, who is responsible for the fate of thousands of old books as she prepares for the June 9 closure. "It is challenging — I'll look at a book and say, 'This is important work, but not currently used,' " she said. So the 1937 edition of Webel's Technical Dictionary, German-English, is moving to Livermore. So is the huge and heavy Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies, with glossy photos. "Or perhaps it is worn, or damaged, or food was spilled," so it will be given away, she said. That is the fate of the 1970-79 Bibliography of Astronomy, as well as the decrepit Selected Physical Constants. A lucky few will be selected for the few shelves at the new library.

"When I look back, then there is a certain sadness for me. Any change is hard. And there are moments of joy, when I see bookplates of former faculty who owned and donated the book, and sometimes made notes on the side," Ota said. "But looking forward, I see an opportunity to create something new."

Boost for Army library

2010-05-21T16:58:00.000-04:00

Saw this article in the ALA newsletter. The newspaper is from Petersburg, VA.

FORT LEE - The Army Logistics University Library officially accepted one of the most comprehensive collections of logistical documentation ever donated to an Army professional development school. Retired Lt. Gen. William "Gus" Pagonis donated a collection he has had in his possession since the end of the Persian Gulf War. The documents, reports and videos detail the logistics behind the war effort known as Operation Desert Storm.

"Every briefing, every interview was taped," Pagonis said during the ceremony yesterday. "I was hoping that by doing that, we wouldn't make the same mistakes twice."

Pagonis said that in his role as the chief logistician under Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, he asked several historians within the National Guard and Army Reserve to document the operations. Those operations in 1990 and 1991 included bringing equipment to the area, moving two divisions behind enemy lines and setting up logistics stations. The moves were some of the largest ever accomplished by an Army. Pagonis said he even drew on history to make the moves possible with the logistics stations. The inspiration for that came from antiquity.

"Alexander the Great would leave logistics camps as he conquered the known world at that time so that he didn't have to go very far back for supplies," Pagonis said.

He added that Schwarzkopf asked if there were more modern examples, to which Pagonis cited the British in the North African campaign of World War II. Pagonis said that while the British faced defeat through most of that campaign, they kept their supplies close at hand. German Gen. Edwin Rommell did not and ended up losing the campaign. For the U.S. in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, there was a seven-month buildup to the 100-hour war.

"It was one of the greatest coups in history," Pagonis said. "Logistics is what made it work."

One of Napoleon's great mistakes was moving into territories with no supply planning; bad logistics.

He added that of all the casualties suffered, approximately two-thirds were logisticians. Pagonis said that the records were never his. "I was just holding on to them," he said of the documents, maps and tapes.

John Shields, research librarian at Army Logistics University, said that because Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield were such important operations, it's good to have primary documents. "In these operations, he really made logistics come together," Shields said. Shields added that the Army Logistics Library has never had anything like this donated or added to its collection before. "We're very excited about it."

Maj. Gen. James E. Chambers said that he's hopeful the library will soon have other important document collections added to it, perhaps from other wars such as World War II. Shields said that the library is still formulating how the documents will be added to the catalog. As part of the special collections, all the items will be able to be used by students at the Army Logistics University and members of the public who wish to do research.

"We won't let it circulate though," Shields said.

Nella Larsen

2010-05-20T18:46:00.000-04:00

Came across her name in reading biography of Federico García Lorca; when he was in New York, in 1929-30, he met Larsen.

In 1919, Larsen married Elmer Samuel Imes, a prominent physicist, the second African American to receive a Ph.D in physics. They moved to Harlem, where Larsen took a job at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). In the year after her marriage, she began to write and published her first pieces in 1920.

Well, I don't find an NYPL branch on 135th Street. There is the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which seems to be on 135th; and the Countee Cullen Library, which is at 104 West 136th Street (near Lenox Ave).

Certified in 1923 by the NYPL's library school, she transferred to a children's librarian's position in Manhattan's Lower East Side. In 1926, having made friends with important figures in the Negro Awakening that became the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen gave up her work as a librarian and began to work as a writer active in the literary community. In 1928, she published Quicksand (ISBN 0-14-118127-3), a largely autobiographical novel, which received significant critical acclaim, if not great financial success.

Today

2010-05-12T14:35:00.002-04:00

Started at Reference at 1 in the afternoon.

Man returned Newsday.

Woman patron put three books on reserve:

George, Elizabeth. This body of death

Clark, Mary Higgins. The shadow of your smile.

Deliver us from evil Baldacci, David.

Woman called, looking for It's complicated on DVD. Our three copies are out, overdue; she asked if they could be in the back. Told her they are out of the library. She said thanks you and hung up.

Woman patron requested Song of Solomon. Morrison, Toni.

Woman patron asked for The bedwetter : stories of courage, redemption, and pee / Sarah Silverman.to be placed on hold.

A patron called and asked to have Game change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the race of a lifetime / John Heilemann. placed on hold.

A woman asked for 1022 Evergreen Place. Macomber, Debbie (not due out until August)

A patron asked if Nine parts of desire: the hidden world of Islamic women / Geraldine Brooks. is on CD. It is not.

Man returned Newsday.

Woman called, and asked for today's movie. Asked her to hold on, and she kept talking. Turns out, no movie today.

Dr. Sheen returned the headphones (sank you bery much; he's not Latino, no.)

People came out of the group study room.

Man looking for Swimming in Auschwitz. Survival stories of six women [DVD]., and his library card expired two years ago.

Between 1 and 3 there was quite a bit of activity; these are just the some of the ones I handled. Took a coffee break at 3, returned to ID until 4. Light activity. Went to dinner.

Down to Reference at 5. Started off with a student looking for a critical study of The dream of the red chamber. Found one owned by East Meadow and Manhasset libraries; as it turns out, his father owns a business in Manhasset. Had Manhasset Library put it on hold for him. Also showed him how to use databases to do research on his topic.

Be nice to the patron

2010-05-07T16:52:00.003-04:00

Filtering allowed

2010-05-07T09:29:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON STATE: High Court Rules Libraries Can Use Internet Filters

The state's Supreme Court ruled that public libraries can use Internet filters to block content.
In a 6-3 ruling Thursday, the court said public libraries have discretion about which Internet content to allow, just as they decide which magazines and books to offer.
The majority said libraries don't need to completely remove Internet filters and can provide access to websites containing constitutionally protected speech if requested by an adult.
But a blistering dissent by Justice Tom Chambers argues that the ruling restricts constitutionally protected speech.

—Associated Press

Weeding Grows the Garden

2010-05-04T19:44:00.000-04:00

Well I recall discussions in the Collection Development class on weeding. Once I started working, I was assigned to weed certain parts of the collection, areas in which I had some specialty: business, history, biographies, sports. Now I am weeding at my second library job. This article resonates with me.

Weeding Grows the Garden: Removing worn-out and outdated material is a surprisingly effective circulation booster.

Michael Sawyer takes pride in weeding books. In fact, he estimates that over the past 30 years he has overseen the removal of more than 500,000 items across eight library systems. As you can imagine, this has not been without controversy. “Many librarians have an emotional attachment to their collections,” Sawyer observes. “They think of the books as a literal part of the library, as part of their family.” Sawyer takes a more utilitarian view of library materials by believing that most items in the average library will eventually fulfill their purpose and need to be discarded.

As director of the Calcasieu Parish Public Library in Louisiana, Sawyer feels that weeding the collection is one of the most essential practices that a library can do. While there are many benefits, the main reason is that it helps to improve circulation. “When the library gets rid of those ragged, smudged, damaged, and unattractive rebound books, circulation increases every time,” Sawyer maintains.

He believes that public libraries in particular have a responsibility to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information possible. Weeding not only allows for this, but also presents the library as a more credible source for information and enables patrons to find what they need more easily. However, routine weeding has not always been an easy task, and Sawyer has shown his dedication through leading by example. With the CREW weeding manual in hand, he has personally trained staff on the subtle art of weeding. “It is one thing to have a philosophical conversation about removing materials, but when you are out in the stacks handling books that are damaged or that have outdated information, people start to understand why we need to do this.”

While Sawyer’s passion is weeding, he also focuses on public relations. One of the library’s most successful programs, the Yard Sign Project, almost didn’t get off the ground due to staff reluctance. The project was inspired by Louisville (Ky.) Free Public Library and rewarded kids who read 10 books over the summer with a yard sign that proudly stated: “A library champion lives here.” The response was phenomenal. Sawyer said that the initiative demonstrated in a very visual manner how much support there is for the library. In addition, it created a sense of positive peer-pressure that generated excitement for children and their parents. Sawyer’s persistence paid off; staff embraced the project and the library earned the 2010 Public Library Association’s Highsmith Innovation Award from the American Library Association.

Sawyer strives to make his library the heart of the community, but in order to do so he knows that he has to appeal to its mind. In 2009 his parish was set to vote on a tax renewal to cover library funding for the next 10 years. Knowing that the majority of the money would be collected by local businesses, Sawyer circulated a white paper that outlined the economic benefits of the library for the community. In addition to digital billboards and television ads, he developed a series of talking points that distilled funding into relatable terms. A homeowner with a house valued at $100,000 would pay a tax equal to about two candy bars a month. A business owner with property valued at $600,000 would pay a rate equal to a monthly home internet connection. The community responded emphatically by passing the tax with a 91% approval rate.

While a strong vision and managerial prowess are important qualities of leadership, perhaps one of the most critical aspects is the ability to generate buy-in. Whether it is building trust among staff, convincing the board to embrace a new project, or presenting the value of the organization to the community, developing support is essential to success. Having a great idea is one thing, but convincing others to collaborate, implement it and make it their own is the key step in the process.

Brian Mathews is a librarian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Marketing Today’s Academic Library, from ALA Editions, 2009. This column spotlights leadership strategies that produce inspirational libraries.

Librarian's Retirement Gift

2010-05-04T10:40:00.000-04:00

Below pictures of celebrity women strutting in their low-cut, expensive dresses, all showing cleavage, a pout that is supposed to convey sexiness, or some such, sits this story of a woman, a person, who realizes that what matters is life isn't what can be bought, or doesn't have to be expensive.

Leslie Ogan never made more than $65,000 a year working for the Brooklyn Public Library and lived simply: She eschewed a television in favor of music and replaced shopping with volunteering. Now, she's retiring and giving $30,000 to the World Music Institute, a nonprofit that brings music and dance performances from around the world to New York.

Ms. Ogan, 67 years old, began volunteering for the World Music Institute 15 years ago after deciding she didn't have the $25 to $40 for tickets to see the shows. Since then she's seen more than 1,500 performances, filled her apartment with hundreds of CDs and spends 40 hours a week running the nonprofit's volunteer program and providing hospitality for visiting artists before and after shows. "Sometimes I spent more time volunteering at WMI than in my paid job…That's why I never bought a television," says Ms. Ogan, a soft-spoken woman who also spent some of her retirement money to get braces.

The organization plans to use Ms. Ogan's donation as a matching grant to raise $100,000 and keep its programs going, which range from its annual New York Flamenco Festival to globalFEST, a festival for emerging world music artists. Funding at the organization is down 30% over the past two years and ticket sales have sunk by a third. The organization lost $125,000 in foundation funding and $75,000 from a grant funded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg through the Carnegie Corp. of New York, a philanthropic trust.

In response, the nonprofit cut its programs from 60 to 40, canceled a touring component of its music program and instituted a 20% pay cut for staff. "It's a difficult time in the economy, particularly for arts organizations. Hopefully my donation can help carry WMI through the next year or so and ensure the future of the organization," Ms. Ogan says. An amateur flute player, Ms. Ogan says her near-obsession with the music institute started when she moved to New York from Holyoke, Mass. and saw the organization's fall show lineup, which included acts from as far away as Iran, Mali and Japan. She says she had never seen that kind of breadth and global reach of a music program before and immediately began penciling show times into her calendar.

The nonprofit gave her a chance to experience the world through music, including percussionist Zakir Hussain, an Indian tabla player, and Frankie Kennedy, an Irish flute and tin whistle player, who she counts among her favorites. "Librarians are poorly paid so I'm well read, but not well traveled," she says. "Music is really a gateway to culture."

NEW YORK MAY 4, 2010: Librarian's Retirement Gift

By SHELLY BANJO - Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A27

Judging literary prizewinners

2010-04-30T14:38:00.000-04:00

Every so often in an attempt to expand my fiction horizon, I will pick a book from one of the literary prize lists. I am disappointed enough by these selections to wonder if I am missing something. What do the panels look for when judging whether a book is commendable?
—David Friedricks, Albany, N.Y.

The word "panels" is important to keep in mind when judging the judges of literature. If you have ever been on a jury or a board, you know that group decisions almost always involve negotiation and compromise. Or as David Lodge, who has been a judge for Britain's most prestigious literary prize, the Man Booker, put it, "A committee is a blunt instrument of literary criticism." Another British novelist, Julian Barnes, called the Booker "posh bingo."

The original description of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (first awarded in 1918 to the forgotten "His Family" by Ernest Poole) was for the novel "which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." That was later changed to the novel that "shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life."

Like many people who consider themselves alert readers of fiction, I was taken by surprise by the recent announcement that "Tinkers" by Paul Harding had won this year's fiction Pulitzer. Fortunately, my library was ahead of me. I read and admired "Tinkers"—it's a small (in size), highly polished gem, a dying man's ruminations on clocks, fathers and nature. And it's unusual, a trait I suspect may be especially valued when facing down a mountain of contemporary fiction ("No! Not another disintegrating marriage! Not another kid goes bad on drugs!")

I read literary prizewinners because I like to compare my opinion to that of the judges—critics, scholars, other authors. I often applaud their choices (and sometimes am appalled). A few Pulitzer-winning novels that I also loved: "Lonesome Dove" by Larry McMurtry; "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides; "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout; "Empire Falls" by Richard Russo; "The Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields; "A Thousand Acres" by Jane Smiley; and "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones.

But it's worth recalling what Sinclair Lewis wrote when he refused the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for "Arrowsmith": "By accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions, we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience."

2 very different questions

2010-04-29T17:53:00.000-04:00

Yesterday a patron asked me for books on creativity in education. She insisted she did not want the usual suspects, the predictable, but, ratherm, wanted something unusual. I plugged in creativity and conducted a keyword search. I talked with her about subject headings, showed her how to move around in the OPAC, and left her to her own efforts. She wound up with an interesting choice: The spark: igniting the creative fire that lives within us all / created by Lyn Heward ; and written by John U. Bacon. Lyn Heward is the former president and COO of Cirque du Soleil’s Creative Content Division.

She was very excited about finding the book. When I mentioned the Big Apple Circus, and remarked about the man who started it, she responded that she did not like animals being in the circus. Clearly she had found precisely what she wanted. It seemed to be material for making an in-class presentation.

Today's question was decidedly different. A patron who seemed in her teens asked me for books on child abuse. This was clearly not a school project. Whether about herself or about someone she knows, it seemed to be quite personal. Concerned, I tried to find a way to probe gently without overstepping my bounds. I asked if there were other issues or if she simply wanted books, and she left it at wanting books. I gave her 4 works: Understanding child abuse and neglect. Cynthia Crosson-Tower.
Child abuse / Jean Leverich, book editor.
The encyclopedia of child abuse / Robin E. Clark and Judith Freeman Clark
Recognizing child abuse : a guide for the concerned / Douglas J. Besharov.

She stayed here for moer than an hour, and read. When she left she quietly gave me back the books, and went on her way. In fact, her aunt just (5.45pm) came in looking for her: said she was 15, shy. I said it probably had been her, and that she seemed serious. I can't figure out how much to say, and it seems better to err on the side of caution.

Things fall apart

2010-04-21T20:12:00.000-04:00

A student was doing research on this book by Chinua Achebe. Found some interesting material.

A Library That Most Can Only Dream Of

2010-04-20T15:23:00.000-04:00

Money talks, and buys.

A Reference library

2010-04-19T00:10:00.000-04:00

Reading Alan Schom biography of Napoleon Bonaparte; as he set sail on Egyptian invasion, described on page 96. "As part of a theoretically semiacadmic mission, polymath Monge, chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, and their colleagues had ordered dozens of crates of astronomical, chemical, physical, survey, surgical, and pharmaceutical instruments, accompanied by by a reference library of several hundred tomes of science, philosophy, history, and geography, not to metion an array of what proved to be antiquated and all-but-useless maps of Egypt." p.96

Says much about weeding and keeping the collection fresh and current.

Watchmen

2010-04-16T13:31:00.000-04:00

Requested today. Alan Moore, writer; Dave Gibbons, illustrator/letterer; John Higgins, colorist.

Texas textbooks rewrite U.S. history

2010-04-06T15:08:00.001-04:00

A fascinating look at how conservatives wield their power.

Last week, the Texas Board of Education debated the statewide curricula, most notably the social studies curriculum. These board members are elected officials— not experts or professional historians— though according to the March 12 issue of The New York Times, “some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.”

Certain ones? Which?

What upset people, however, was not the makeup of the Board, but its decisions. The aforementioned bloc (10 of the 15 members) espouses conservative values— they question Darwin, they believe the founding fathers were guided by Christian principles and they dislike Thomas Jefferson for coining the term “separation of church and state.”

Imagine conservatives disliking Jefferson, he of states's rights.

On this last point, the Board decided to replace Jefferson on a list of Enlightenment thinkers students should know with Calvin, Aquinas and Blackstone. It also neglected to add notable Hispanics to the history of the Mexican-American War. Nuanced defenses of McCarthy and criticism of Johnson’s Great Society were included in the curriculum, however, comprising a neat, Republican package that passed along party lines, 10-5.

History according to the conservatives.

The influence of this decision goes beyond Texas. Since Texas is the second most populous state, textbook publishers tailor their American History texts to Texan standards. And since the most populous state, California, is so persnickety about its curriculum, Texas really sets national standards for what students will learn. This is especially true given the primacy of the textbook in America. Indeed, the textbook is the cornerstone of public secondary civics education and far more influential than the teacher. The teachers who write test questions from their own words and research are far fewer than the mass of underpaid, overworked, non-history majors who pull test questions straight from the book. In too many classrooms, practice questions at the end of chapters stand a good chance of becoming actual test questions.

The saving grace is that most high school students don't give much attention to history class, ignore much of what terachers say, and forget the answers they've provided to test questions as soon as the test is over.

So if most students are simply learning by rote in public schools, what they are memorizing is very important. Since these schools are public, it is not just a matter of what parents want students to learn, but what parents and special interest groups can lobby politicians to include in curricula and thus force students to learn (unless attentive parents intervene). Because make no mistake— anything run by the government is ultimately backed by a monopoly of coercive force. Thus, this debate about an American history curriculum is really a battle over what will be the state-sanctioned, monolithic account of how things were.

Clearly this article comes from a liberal viewpoint, but, anything run by the government is ultimately backed by a monopoly of coercive force? What exactly does that mean? What the right wing says?

Everyone ought to stop fooling themselves. There is no one authoritative history, in America or anywhere else. Bias is inherent to historiography. No matter how closely a historian scrutinizes sources and attempts to balance one account with another, by the very selection of some sources over others, a particular account is written; not all sources can be included, and that is OK.

Truth must still be sought, though, and certain histories will do this better than others. Simply because there is no one irrefutable account does not make all accounts equally valid or valuable. It would behoove the people of this nation to start compiling the truths of their own stories and presenting them alongside many others, rather than jostling to write their own pages in the state-approved story book of what really happened. This can take the form of textbook-free classrooms that rely on articles and primary sources or free association of like-minded individuals to educate their children in a certain tradition (read: private schools). Embracing our differences has always made us stronger as a nation, and it is what will keep us ahead in the coming decades, even as European countries wrestle to redefine what it means for them to no longer be ethnic nations. The beauty of this civic nation is forged in the fires of pluralism. E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”

By NATHAN STRINGER

Published: Thursday, March 25, 2010

Amazon gives way on e-Book pricing

2010-04-01T14:25:00.000-04:00

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

Facing the specter of Apple Inc.'s iPad launch, Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to halt heavy discounting of e-book best sellers in new pricing deals with two major publishers.

The e-book agreements, with CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster and News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers, mirror deals struck this year with Apple for the iPad: Some new best sellers will be priced at $9.99 but most will be priced at $12.99 to $14.99.

The new deals ensure that Amazon will have the same array of titles that rival what Apple will offer on its digital bookstore. Apple has forged deals with five of the six major publishers to provide titles on the iPad, which will compete with Amazon's popular Kindle e-reader.

Amazon declined to comment.

Other deals between publishers and Amazon could follow ahead of Saturday's iPad debut. The online retailer is in advanced talks with Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, and Pearson PLC's Penguin Group, according to people familiar with the situation. Bertelsmann AG's Random House has yet to sign a deal with Apple.

Amazon, which launched its Kindle e-book reader in November 2007, has been a leader in pricing new best sellers at $9.99 in the digital format. Publishers objected to that price, fearing that consumers will come to believe that all books are worth only that much.

The issue of digital book pricing heated up earlier this year after the five major publishers, which also include Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; Hachette, and Penguin reached an agreement with Apple to make their digital books available for sale on the iPad.

Macmillan then butted heads with Amazon by insisting on the same control over pricing.

HarperCollins Chief Executive Brian Murray said the deal with Amazon followed a month of negotiations. "Our digital future is more assured today than it was two months ago," said Mr. Murray, calling the agreement "fair" for both sides.

News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

One digital publishing executive warned that there will likely be some near-term glitches. "People shouldn't overreact if an e-book isn't immediately available on one site or another," said Maja Thomas, senior vice president of Hachette

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B

Fiction Reading Increases for Adults

2010-03-24T18:46:00.000-04:00

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen. The news comes as the publishing industry struggles with declining sales amid a generally difficult economy.

The proportion of adults reading some kind of so-called literary work — just over half — is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992, and the proportion of adults reading poetry and drama continued to decline. Nevertheless the proportion of overall literary reading increased among virtually all age groups, ethnic and demographic categories since 2002. It increased most dramatically among 18-to-24-year-olds, who had previously shown the most significant declines.

“There has been a measurable cultural change in society’s commitment to literary reading,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “In a cultural moment when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.”

Under Mr. Gioia’s leadership the endowment spearheaded “The Big Read,” a program in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest to encourage communities to champion the reading of particular books, like “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. The report is being released just over a week before Mr. Gioia steps down after six years as the endowment’s chairman.

Four years ago the endowment released the report “Reading at Risk,” which showed that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read novels, short stories, plays or poetry. That survey, based on data gathered in 2002, provoked a debate among academics, publishers and others about why reading was declining. Some argued that it wasn’t, criticizing the study for too narrowly defining reading by focusing on the literary side, and for not explicitly including reading that occurred online.

In each survey since 1982 the data did not differentiate between those who read several books a month and those who read only one poem. Nor did the surveys distinguish between those who read the complete works of Proust or Dickens and those who read one Nora Roberts novel or a single piece of fan fiction on the Internet.

Mr. Gioia said that Internet reading was included in the 2008 data, although the phrasing of the central question had not changed since 1982. But he said he did not think that more reading online was the primary reason for the increase in literary reading rates overall.

Instead he attributed the increase in literary reading to community-based programs like the “Big Read,” Oprah Winfrey’s book club, the huge popularity of book series like “Harry Potter” and Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight,” as well as the individual efforts of teachers, librarians, parents and civic leaders to create “a buzz around literature that’s getting people to read more in whatever medium.”

This apparent reversal came a little more than a year after the endowment released an overwhelmingly pessimistic report in 2007 that linked a decline in reading-test scores to a fall in reading for fun among adolescents. That report also collected data showing that the proportion of adults who read regularly for pleasure had declined. At the time Mr. Gioia called the data “simple, consistent and alarming.”

Elizabeth Birr Moje, an education professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in literacy, language and culture, said it was impossible to do more than speculate why literary reading rates had increased in the most recent survey. The rise could just as easily be attributed to changes in health care or a need for escape in difficult economic times, she said.

What’s more, Ms. Moje added, it was an isolated piece of information. “It’s just a blip,” she said. “If you look at trend data, you will always see increases and decreases in people’s literate practices.”

Among ethnic groups the latest report found that the proportion of literary reading increased most for what the study classifies as Hispanic Americans, rising to 31.9 percent in 2008 for adults 18 and over, from 26.5 percent in 2002. The highest percentage of literary reading was among whites, at 55.7 percent, up from 51.4 percent in 2002. The rate of literary reading among men 18 and older increased to 41.9 percent in 2008, from 37.6 percent in 2002. The proportion also increased among women, to 58 percent in 2008, from 55.1 percent in 2002.

At the same time the survey found that the proportion of adults who said they had read any kind of a book, fiction or nonfiction, that was not required for work or school actually declined slightly since 2002, to 54.3 percent from 56.6 percent.

Mr. Gioia said that the decline in book reading might be attributable to a falloff in the reading of nonfiction, although he offered no explicit evidence of that.

Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, suggested that some people might not count the reading they do online or even on electronic readers like the Kindle as “book” reading.

Jim Rettig, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at the University of Richmond, said that the 2008 data would not reflect a recent uptick in circulation at libraries. As the economy has soured, Mr. Rettig said, “people are discovering that you don’t have to spend anything to read a book if you have a library card.”

January 12, 2009
Fiction Reading Increases for Adults
By MOTOKO RICH

The Future of Reading: Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? (July 27, 2008)
Page Turner: A Good Mystery: Why We Read (November 25, 2007)
Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading (November 19, 2007)

'Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy' (National Endowment for the Arts) [pdf]

Today

2010-03-20T11:58:00.004-04:00

First two hours, covered Children's; questions: books about Spring, rainbow, for pre-K; Spiderman.

At 11, up to Reference, question about Marco Polo's travels. Man said he had already traveled to the East, while in the service (Armed Forces). Wants to follow some of Polo's route. Asked about a city called Kamul. Found a result that puts it in western Iran. (Just noticed there is also a Kamul-li, in Korea.) Also asked about Tabriz (in Iran, as well). Said he'll probably go to China; fascinated with the East. I endorsed Venice.

He already has this book, but when I showed him the one I knew, he became enthusiastic, and took it with him.

Marco Polo : from Venice to Xanadu / by Laurence Bergreen.

This book (right) is the companion to the show I saw on PBS. Found it online, showed him it can be watched online.

In the afternoon, back at Reference, a young man came over to the desk, looking for a book on SAT Math; alas, our copy is out. He returned, asking for The talented tenth, by W. E. B. DuBois. We own a book, The Negro problem; a series of articles by representative American Negroes of to-day, which contains that essay. A new one to me; there is always more to learn.

Book-Scanning efforts in new territory

2010-03-11T19:09:00.002-05:00

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images - Rows of archives at Italy's National Library in Florence.

Police: Man Stripped Naked In Library

2010-03-09T12:36:00.000-05:00

Simply can't make this stuff up: a man stripped naked in the children's room in a public library, made sure he was seen, "thrust his hips toward a librarian", then dressed and stole some books. There is even video (gladly, not of the incident itself).

Watch: Man Accused Of Being Naked, Stealing From Library

Even in the UK

2010-02-25T16:31:00.000-05:00

Found this cartoon on the Spectator UK website.

An irregular Library regular

2010-02-20T12:13:00.001-05:00

Corey Kilgannon/The New York Times Greg Sloane in his spot at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on Thursday

Perhaps the most regular visitor to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is Greg Sloane, who can be seen nearly every day among the dancers, musicians, actors and culture-mongers who flock to this gem at Lincoln Center. Mr. Sloane, 62, is not from the School of American Ballet or the Juilliard School or any other esteemed arts institution nearby, but he does excel at his own particular performing art: survival in New York City without a home.

It is a magnificent facility.

It is a pursuit that involves seeking a roof, a chair and some heat, maybe something clean to lean on. And this is where the library comes in. After a wash-up and shave in the bathroom, he might peruse the 12,000 titles in the library’s Reserve Film and Video Collection and select something to watch. Or perhaps he will select a recording and settle in for the day to culture himself. For the arts-minded, the Performing Arts library is one of those places that makes New York City worthwhile, with its extensive archival collection of recordings, video, sheet music and other resources. But most important to Mr. Sloane, it is open every day except Sunday — till 8 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays and till 6 other days — and he is allowed in. There are somewhat private and comfortable listening and viewing stations where one can avail oneself of the library’s resources, or just take a nap.

Mr. Sloan can invariably be found on the first level near the Recorded Sound and Moving Image Circulating Collection, next to those delving into their Shostakovich and Rostropovich. He might be nodding out listening to some Anita Baker on his headphones or checking out an older film. Maybe a Steve McQueen movie — he loves McQueen. Or James Coburn in “Our Man Flint”? Now that’s a movie. Not to say that Mr. Sloane has no use for today’s movies. He goes to the theater almost daily — to sleep. On a Sunday, he will arrive early to pay a senior or matinee ticket price and settle into a seat in the back and doze off.

The closest megaplex to the library is AMC Loews Lincoln Square, where he says the late showing of “Avatar” lets him sleep till 3 a.m. when staff members clear the theater. Recently, however, it was the police who rousted him. “They called in the cops to wake me up,” he said. “They handcuffed me and took me to the 20th Precinct and gave me a ticket. So I’m boycotting that theater now.”

Mr. Sloane is a bit scruffy, but not bummy — picture Billy Dee Williams in a rough role. There’s a way to keep oneself in clean clothes without ever doing laundry: the thrift store. “There’s no reason to go around in dirty, smelly clothes,” he said. “There’s rich people in this city who wear something once and give it away. You get anything you want for a buck or two — cheaper than doing laundry.”

Cheaper than doing laundry; like the sound of that.

On Thursday, he did look pretty styling, with his snappy bracelets and rings and his Dior sunglasses, whose lenses he replaced with his own prescription bifocals. He wore a Claiborne suede coat over a cashmere blazer with the sleeves cut off, vintage green wool Army pants and nice running shoes. He sleeps in various locations outside or sometimes at a friend’s or a girlfriend’s place, he said. “I got family in every borough, but you can’t visit your family when you’re homeless,” he said. “When something goes missing, who do you think everyone looks at?”

Mr. Sloane likes his Hennessy Cognac and Newport cigarettes. Once he burns through his monthly welfare check, he hails cabs for the party people bar-hopping in the meatpacking district. For this, he wears around his neck a yellow medallion on a chain that says “TAXI.”

Mr. Sloane grew up in the Bronx in the Patterson projects, which also produced the basketball great Nate (Tiny) Archibald and the boxer Iran Barkley. For high school, he attended the S.S. John Brown, a maritime school docked then in the East River, he said, and then served in the merchant marine on the DePauw Victory cargo ship, which delivered munitions to troops in Vietnam. He recalled spending months on the anchored ship listening to bombing and gunfire night after night. He said he was still unable to sit inside for very long without looking out windows. Thankfully, his library spot has them.

As one might imagine, Mr. Sloane sees — or sleeps through — many current movies, and he offered his Oscar predictions.

Best actor: George Clooney for “Up in the Air,” a biased prediction since he has met Mr. Clooney. Hailed him a cab, in fact.

Best actress: Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side.”

Best picture: “Avatar.”

“I hope ‘Avatar’ wins so they keep it in theaters longer,” he said. “It’s three hours long, so you get more time to sleep.”

This Book Is Overdue

2010-02-09T10:58:00.002-05:00

From Wisdom to Wi-Fi: A library is no longer a mere home for books. It is a wired-up information center.

There are many unsung heroes of ordinary life—nurses, trash collectors, accountants—whose job it is to take care of things that the rest of us take for granted. So too the librarian, that iconic figure who long presided over a sanctuary of books and guided readers, young and old, to the treasures of a vast print culture. But the profession has undergone a dramatic transformation of late because libraries themselves are not what they used to be. Today they have less to do with books per se than with computers, films, community events and children's activities. They are, above all, public portals to the world of "information," especially the online version. In "This Book Is Overdue!," Marilyn Johnson, a former staff writer for Life magazine, takes us on a tour of the modern library and introduces us to the men and women who call it their professional home.

I am not comfortable with the concept of the quotidian being heroic. If we call these folks heroes (and I am a proud librarian), then what do we call the firefighter who runs into flames to rescue a person trapped inside?

As I'm blogging this, a call came in from a patron who wants to reserve a new book: Brava, Valentine : a novel, by Adriana Trigiani. Summary: A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity takes shoe designer and businesswomen Valentine Roncalli from the winding streets of Greenwich Village to the sun-kissed cobblestones of Buenos Aires, where she finds a long-buried secret hidden deep within a family scandal. Once unearthed, the truth rocks the Roncallis and Valentine is determined to hold her family together as she longs to create one of her own. So, do patrons get what they as for, or should they be steered to 'quality'?

Ms. Johnson's enthusiasm for libraries and the people who work in them is refreshingly evident throughout the book. In a charming if meandering style, she samples from her conversations with traditional librarians and with "cybrarians," a catch-all term for a generation of librarians intent on finding ways to integrate the old mission of the library with the new possibilities of technology.

Some librarians are positive on change, and some resist it with zeal.

A good observer with a keen eye for detail, Ms. Johnson attends conferences where librarians cast off their staid image to perform cheeky dance numbers with rolling book carts; she unearths the 'zines of tattooed librarians, who write about vegan wedding cakes and political activism; she visits librarians from St. John's University who are teaching computer skills to people in developing countries; and she interviews the founders of Radical Reference, a group that grew out of the protest of the Republican convention in New York in 2004, when the group's members provided roving reference services to demonstrators and journalists. An early version of its Web site carried the banner: "Answers for Those Who Question Authority."

Ms. Johnson succeeds in making us like librarians, but she avoids digging too deeply into the controversies roiling around the future of books and their keepers. Something seismic is happening when a culture casts off old words ("librarian") for new ones ("information scientist") and conventional ways of pursuing knowledge (reading on paper) for novel ones (reading on a screen).

Casts off seems an overly strong and sweeping term; change is occurring, and library is an academic science, but librarians and paper have not yet disappeared.

One of the more disturbing stories in "This Book Is Overdue!" is Ms. Johnson's description of the New York Public Library's decision to upgrade its image from that of a stuffy research library, replete with reference librarians whose knowledge and expertise are of incalculable value to researchers, to a place where parents and toddlers might want to pick up a DVD and a latte.

This Book Is Overdue!
By Marilyn Johnson
Harper, 272 pages, $24.99

In a poignant interview with John Lundquist, the former head of the now-defunct Asian and Middle Eastern Division of the NYPL, Ms. Johnson learns that the library's leadership feared that the institution was becoming "archaic, dead, outdated" and so restructured it to suit the times. "They want the library to be active and hip, they want us to put in a cafeteria and schedule entertainments," Mr. Lundquist tells Ms. Johnson. He worries that by jettisoning so many of the library's research divisions, administrators made the mistake of assuming "that everything is now on the Internet, in digital form," when in fact it is not.

Hardly. NYPL itself is digitizing particular collections to make them available more widely than they are in physical form. Again, the question is whether the library changes to adapt to changing demands, or if it stays unchanged and forces people to adapt to it.

The question that Mr. Lundquist tries to address, but that Ms. Johnson does not, is whether we lose something when a library "upgrades" itself: It isn't just the old-fashioned card catalog that disappears but a whole culture.

This age can hardly be the first one to face this challenge; libraries have changed before, and survived, eve thrived.

Although Ms. Johnson adopts a balanced approach to the new technology, she accepts uncritically some of the canards of our techno-positivist age. A younger generation of "digital natives" doesn't learn by listening to lectures, she reports, but by "collaborating, networking, sharing." But as several recent reports have made clear, the browsing, skimming and multitasking of this younger generation also leads to less retention of what it is reading.

The younger generation always makes the older generation rue change, and yearn for a better, simpler, more enlightened time.

Later, Ms. Johnson dismisses as "old-fashioned" a speaker who expresses concern about modern society's dependence on technology, even though the question he asks about our many gadgets—"Have they freed us for more quality moments, or simply made us busier?"—is surely a reasonable one. A library whose main appeal is the presence of free wi-fi and movies is exchanging one community function (encouraging the consumption of the written word) for another (encouraging the consumption of images).

The library I work in has many books, and few patrons. It has wi-fi and DVDs, MP3 ebooks, books on CD (cassette tape now an anachronism, and nearly obselecent). And yet it is underused. TV was criticized in the age of radio programming and movie theater attendance. VHS tapes were criticized in the TV age. It is an endless cycle.

Even Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, recently told the Davos World Economic Forum that he worried about the loss of deep reading skills. "As the world looks to these instantaneous devices," he said, "you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines, and so forth." Ms. Johnson's chapter about the New York Public Library ends with a description of twentysomething New Yorkers filling one of the building's grand rooms to watch a video series created by the library. As they plop down before the large screen, Ms. Johnson is optimistic, likening the crowd to "large children, gathered around a virtual rocking chair for story time." This "fresh crowd" is "new, alive, and up-to-date, playing with new media," she writes. "That's the future of this library." If so, how sad—for readers and for the excellent librarians who might guide them.

Woe unto us.

Ms. Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.

Who dat?

2010-02-08T15:46:00.000-05:00

No, not the New Orleans Saints (who won the XLIVth Super Bowl yesterday, 31-17), whose fans made that phrase their motto.

Island Trees Library called, looking for the book Give us this day, written by Sydney Stewart. He was a survivor of the Bataan death march. His obit starts:

Sidney Stewart, a survivor of the Bataan death march and three years in Japanese captivity in World War II who wrote the highly praised memoir ''Give Us This Day,'' an account of how the prisoners endured their intense suffering, died on March 18 at a hospital in Paris. He was 78 and lived in Paris. The cause was complications from emphysema contracted by inhaling coral dust while laboring as a prisoner of war, said a colleague, Dr. Abby Adams-Silvan of New York.

Normally, having looked at the table of contents, I would have processed the book. But in checking the hold so I could fill out the correct routing slip, the patron's name caught my eye: Richard Conte. Not the Richard Conte who starred in House of Strangers (that I watched this past weekend) and as Barzini in The Godfather, but a namesake. Still.

A day in the life

2010-01-29T12:20:00.001-05:00

A music question to begin with: sheet music for two songs: Sitting on the Dock of the Bay (Otis Redding, in Three decades of rhythm & blues classics), and Don't you worry about a thing (Stevie Wonder, in Stevie Wonder complete).

A second question: an older woman wanted information about Invasive ductal carcinoma (a type of breast cancer).

“invasive ductal carcinoma” refers to cancer that has broken through the wall of the milk duct and begun to invade the tissues of the breast. Over time, invasive ductal carcinoma can spread to the lymph nodes and possibly to other areas of the body.
According to the American Cancer Society, more than 180,000 women in the United States find out they have invasive breast cancer each year. Most of them are diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma.
Although invasive ductal carcinoma can affect women at any age, it is more common as women grow older. According to the American Cancer Society, about two-thirds of women are 55 or older when they are diagnosed with an invasive breast cancer. Invasive ductal carcinoma also affects men.

Later, a mother and daughter came over to Reference, the mother asking for material on politics. Her 15-year-old daughter got an internship at Senator Schumer's office. She knows nothing about politics. I suggested The Nation, 1865-1990 ( edited by Katrina vanden Heuvel, whhose name I know) and No excuses by Robert Shrum. I told her to use the table of contents and index to focus in on topics and names, rather than just dive into the book. I also suggested she go to senate.gov to look up Schumer.

A few minutes before one a mother walked down the steps whilst finishing a cellphone conversation (with the ear implant, not a phone), and asked for a play for her 8th-grade daughter. I did a quick reference interview: does she like to read? Is she a good reader? I thought of Neil Simon. Then I thought of downloadable books, so I asked her if her daughter has an iPod. Of course. I showed her how to go to the website to look for ebooks and recorded books, and also mentioned Playaways. She was thrilled.

SIRO

2010-01-21T14:53:00.000-05:00

Alan Taylor and Anna Barnes talking in Polonezkoy.

Anna: "Ottoman history was my field, before I became a NOC."
"No shit," said Taylor.
"No shit."
"What sort of life crisis pushed you into the CIA? Too many overdue library books?"

a chilly Library has rewards

2010-01-12T11:29:00.000-05:00

Henry Thomason, 18, studied one day last week at the Soundview library branch in the Bronx, where a thermometer showed a temperature of 70 degrees.

In the pantheon of New York City jobs, many people face rugged extremes. Ironworkers brave fierce winds high on beams. Subway track workers traverse dank tunnels. Firefighters climb through flames.

But inside some city public libraries, the definition of extreme trends more toward turtleneck than breakneck. Under a little-known contract provision titled “Extreme Temperature Procedures,” unionized workers at branches of the New York Public Library can accrue compensatory time when the temperature inside dips below 68 degrees for a couple of hours. Similar clauses exist for libraries across the city.

Not in the burbs, I'm sure.

In the United Kingdom, regulations require that workplace temperatures be “reasonable,” which the government defines generally as at least 16 degrees Celsius, or a hair below 61 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Even at 16 degrees Celsius, there shouldn’t be safety or health issues, it’s more in terms of comfort and productivity,” said Alan Hedge, a Cornell University professor who researches and advises corporations on work environment issues.

Uneasy Rider

2010-01-09T14:06:00.000-05:00

Ivan Pisarenko, shown arriving in the heart of Buenos Aires, will embark this week on the last 1,900 miles of his trek.

On reading this article I thought of Lois on the Loose. I read that book last July. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

PAGE ONE - JANUARY 8, 2010

Ivan Pisarenko, Uneasy Rider: One Biker, Two Continents, Four Years

BUENOS AIRES -- In 2005, a year from finishing law school, Ivan Pisarenko got restless. The 33-year-old Argentine decided to take a break for a very big motorcycle road trip, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

The approximately 17,000-mile journey was supposed to take nine months. But because of detours involving Mexican bandits, Salvadoran rock stars and Colombian soldiers, Mr. Pisarenko still hasn't completed the trip four years later. At one point, he was hit by an Ecuadorean SUV, and upon his return to Argentina in October, he had his bike confiscated by customs officials.

But the persistence of Mr. Pisarenko, who has braved sharks and border officials, has made him a minor folk hero of the Western Hemisphere.

The number of people like Mr. Pisarenko attempting to ride the length of the Americas has grown at least tenfold in the past decade, to roughly 2,000 a year, according to Grant Johnson, co-founder of Horizons Unlimited, a Web site on motorcycle road trips.

Kevin Sanders, who heads GlobeBusters, a U.K. motorcycle tour company, says the Alaska to Patagonia route offers a wondrous variety of terrain, from northern tundra to the mountainous Andes and the Pampas plains. Mr. Sanders says that bikers on the Americas route face less risk of violence than in Africa and less government snooping than in China.
Ivan's Motorcycle Diary

View Interactive

Follow his route and see photos.

* More photos and interactive graphics

Mr. Sanders and his wife, Julia, hold the world record for riding from Alaska to Patagonia -- just 35 days in 2003. A trivia section on the Sanderses' Web site says they rode for 28 hours without sleep on one stretch and nearly had a catastrophic collision on the so-called Mountain of Death in Costa Rica. Mr. Sanders made do with just two pairs of boxer shorts.

Long-distance motorcycling, to a host of destinations world-wide, has been on a roll, with sales of touring bikes in the U.S. more than doubling from 1998 to 2008, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Sales slipped in the past year of recession. Travelers have found inspiration in media productions like "Long Way Round," the documentary chronicling actor Ewan McGregor's bike trip from London to New York via Central Asia, and "The Motorcycle Diaries," the biopic on the youthful travels of Che Guevara.

Mr. Johnson says the Internet has also encouraged epic trips, allowing riders to write their own motorcycle diaries, as well as find backers and exchange travel tips.

Mr. Pisarenko worked hard to promote his trip Web site, America en Dos Ruedas, America on Two Wheels, selling T-shirts bearing its logo and giving interviews to a slew of newspapers and TV stations en route.

Those efforts earned him thousands of messages of support and a measure of celebrity. In Ecuador, Mr. Pisarenko starred in a TV commercial for a caffeine pill. In Argentina, his Honda Transalp 650 motorcycle was exhibited reverentially at a recent bike show. Of more practical use to Mr. Pisarenko, who has been traveling on a shoestring, more than 300 people contacted him en route with offers of lodging.

Mr. Pisarenko shipped his bike to Seattle and departed from there on May 20, 2005, heading north through Alaskan towns like Coldfoot and Wiseman on to Prudhoe Bay.

Then he turned around and rode south through Canada, the Western U.S. and into Baja California. In Mexico, robbers accosted him at a roadside cantina. When Mr. Pisarenko told them he barely had a peso, the impatient outlaws demanded to know where he was coming from. After he said it was Alaska -- and then explained to them where that is -- they were so astonished they bought him a drink rather than rob him.

In Central America, Mr. Pisarenko earned his keep by serving as the personal photographer for a Salvadoran rock band, Prueba de Sonido (Sound Check), and selling photos of a Honduran diver who takes tourists down to the lair of Caribbean reef sharks.

As he took odd jobs along the way, and got caught up in the lives of people he met, Mr. Pisarenko's trip extended from months to years. In 2007, the Argentine was taking photos of the inhabitants of Honduras's tiny Chachahuate Key when a boy came up and said he didn't have a single photo of himself.

Touched, Mr. Pisarenko promised Chachahuate's schoolteacher, José Francisco Velázquez, that he would prepare a portrait for each of the 40 children on the island. There was no place nearby to print photos, so Mr. Pisarenko emailed the images to an Argentine printer and then waited...and waited. It took five weeks for the pictures to arrive by mail, "but the kids will remember Ivan forever," says Mr. Velázquez, by telephone.

Mr. Pisarenko shipped his bike by boat to Colombia from Panama to avoid the Darien Gap, the nearly impenetrable 100-mile strip of marsh and forest separating the two countries.

He arrived with some trepidation in Colombia, where ruthless motorcycle-riding drug hitmen have prompted an odd riding regulation: Motorcyclists must wear vests in bright colors with the license number on the back, to identify them to police.

Mr. Pisarenko was stopped at a roadblock by military police on the lookout for traffickers or Marxist guerrillas. The troops' suspicions vanished, he says, when they got a good look at his beat-up motorcycle, plastered with travel stickers that seemed to be all that was holding it together.

"They decided no one would ride that bike to a war," he says. The sympathetic soldiers gave him a meal, two gallons of gasoline and a Colombian military scarf, and sent him on his way.

Moving on to Ecuador, Mr. Pisarenko was invited to a dinner where the main course was guinea pig, an entree widely enjoyed in the Andes. "I only forced it down because I was the guest of honor," the biker says.

Maybe the guinea pig was an omen. On Nov. 8, 2008, Mr. Pisarenko was on an isolated Ecuadorean highway when an SUV appeared from out of nowhere and collided with his bike. His family flew him back to Buenos Aires, where he spent six months recovering from a broken pelvis.

In April last year, he returned to Ecuador by plane, repaired the wreck of his bike and hit the road again. In Peru, he was given a mutt named Wari, named for an ancient indigenous culture, whom Mr. Pisarenko bundled up and carried with him on his motorcycle.

When Mr. Pisarenko arrived back home to Argentina in October, border officials greeted him by impounding his bike. They said he had violated article 970 of the Argentine Customs code, which allows a bike to leave the country for only 180 days.

Luckily for Mr. Pisarenko, the Argentine press got wind of the case, and the story of the bureaucrats hassling the intrepid adventurer was splashed all over the pages of Argentina's biggest newspaper, Clarin. The customs officials sheepishly gave him his bike back.

Mr. Pisarenko spent the holidays resting up in Buenos Aires, but he's embarking this week on the last 1,900-mile stretch to Tierra del Fuego.

That patron, again

2010-01-06T17:38:00.000-05:00

The woman with the whiny voice called just after 5pm, and asked about Harold Holzer.

"He's a Lincoln scholar, but that's all I know."

"What is it that you'd like to know about him?" I asked. Everyone deserves to be asked.

"What his politics are," she whined.

"Well, I'm not sure I can find that out, but I'll try. Hold on." I googled him, and the usual information appeared in numerous places: Lincoln scholar, VP at the Metropolitan Museum., member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

"I haven't been able to find anything about his politics," I told her after a few minutes.

"That sort of information is listed in Who's Who," she offered.

Skeptically, I walked over to get the Reference book. Last year we have it for is 2007. I went online, but it's a pay subscription. Then I went to HWPL.org and found it:Biography Resource Center and Marquis Who's Who. I searched for Holzer, Harold, and found a biography of him. In the PERSONAL INFORMATION section, the damning evidence: Politics: Democrat.

"He's registered as a Democrat."
"I thought so," she droned, condemning the slob to that special purgatory she reserves for those she dislikes, which are many.

Hair

2009-12-29T15:21:00.001-05:00

Minutes later, when I answered the Information Desk phone, a woman if we owned Hair on DVD.

The stage play? I asked.

In the background I heard a younger woman's voice (daughter) say
no, not the play, the 1979 movie.

Hewlett doesn't own it, but a few other libraries do, including Peninsula. I told her so, and gave her that phone number.

Trigun

2009-12-29T15:07:00.001-05:00

A young man called, and asked for Trigun. I have never heard of the word; luckily the OPAC has entries. Its a series of graphic novels, as well as a set of DVDs based thereon (Based on the comic by Yasuhiro Nightow.). The record shows this summary: This DVD contains 26 episodes total. This box set contains English and Japanese dialogue with English subtitles. In the distant future... on a desert planet...there is a legendary gunman. His names is Vash the Stampede. A gunslinger so dangerous, a $60,000,000,000 reward has been placed on his head!.

When I told him that only the Bethpage Library owns the DVD series, he said, oh, okay, and started to say goodbye. I did tell him we could interloan it, and he asked how long that would take. Three to five business days, I responded. Never mind, he said. WOuld you like their phone number? I asked. No, he said, I can get it online.

Left me baffled.

Overdue books: creative leniency

2009-12-29T09:37:00.006-05:00

Boxes of food items used to pay fines for overdue books were moved from the library in Conneaut, Ohio, to a food pantry van.

Since the beginning of the economic downturn, librarians across the country have speculated that fines for overdue items are keeping people from using the library — particularly large families whose children take out (and forget to return) many books at a time. Some libraries learned that the fines, which are often as low as 25 cents an item per day, quickly multiplied for many people and were becoming an added hardship.

“We can’t push the cost to consumers because they’re also struggling,” said Richard Sosa, the finance director of the Denver system, which has $9 million worth of books in circulation through 23 libraries and two bookmobiles. “The library philosophy is: We do not want to restrict access to information. The use of fines or harsh collection tactics — and we could potentially do that — could essentially restrict people’s access to the library.”

And another thing: They need their books back.

At the Denver Public Library, librarians can negotiate a fee structure that feels fair to them based on individual cases.

The Monterey County Free Library system in Monterey, Calif., has reclaimed more than 1,000 books since offering end-of-the-year amnesty to patrons in November and December.

“We thought, People are suffering, having a hard time, so let’s give them a break and get our books back,” said Jayanti Addleman, the county librarian.

In Pelham, N.H., the public library director, Robert Rice, offered a food-for-fines program during November.

“We will probably continue that policy once the new year starts,” Mr. Rice said. “The loss in terms of money was maybe $20 a day. We well made up for it with the amount of food that came in.”

He continued: “We got our materials back and did something positive for the community. Use is up greatly, and budgets are being cut. But we’re not going anywhere. We’re keeping the doors open.”

That is how libraries should work, as community resources, and not as businesses.