xISBN

20 April 2011

Lean times

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

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

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

Bible only, BART Books

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

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

Children's Poet Laureate

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

Where the sidewalk ends

Ran across this book whilst processing books for RFID.

Rising superstar

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

by George Sullivan

Kindle library

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

e-Reference

New databases and updates and enhancements to existing databases.

Take heed

Sign on door of Technical Services:

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

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

Its grade was an F.

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

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


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

The same should be done for libray schools.

Civic Engagement Trumps ‘Shhh!’

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

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

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

Racial Disparities Seen

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

 

Differences in Race and Health

Weeding Wuthering Heights

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

Killing Castro

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


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

Journal Showcases Dying Art of the Research Paper

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

NORAD tracks flying sleigh

What is that sound?

Web-Scale Discovery

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

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]

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

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.