Adventures of an InfoMage in Training

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Various and Sundry I'm swamped with wedding planning -- only three more days to go! Future in-laws from Sweden have been here since Sunday evening. Next week is the honeymoon, mortgage refinance closing and due date for grad school tuition :-) It's official, I have bought Radio Userland now that my 30 day trial is up. Overall, I really like it; however, I noticed not too long ago that the title of my posts (under this theme) are not showing up. I plan on modifying and cleaning up this theme in August as my techie project for the month. I attended training for answerland.org and I know I'm just going to love volunteering for that! That's it from this part of the world until July 25th or so! 12:38:47 PM    comment []

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Get Your Librarian Action Figure! Nancy Pearl is already a woman of action: innovator, iconoclast, radio personality and author of an upcoming book with the word "Lust" in its title. But in the next month or so, it will be official. She'll join the ranks of Jesus, Sigmund Freud, Rosie the Riveter, Nico the Barista and a striped-shirted hipster/philosopher named Fuzz. What puts Pearl, executive director of the Washington Center for the Book, into such heady company? She's the model for a 5-inch-tall plastic "action figure" by Seattle-based Accoutrements, parent company of Ballard's Archie McPhee store, where zany meets kitschy meets glow-in-the-dark. Pearl herself comes across as modest and unassuming, but she's an unabashed booster of her profession: "The role of a librarian is to make sense of the world of information. If that's not a qualification for superhero-dom, what is?" From the Seattle Times 9:04:00 AM    comment [] Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large 3:9, Midsummer 2003 The latest from Cites & Insights is now available for downloading. This 20-page issue consists of one essay: Coping with CIPA: A Censorware Special If you don't care about CIPA, censorware (filters), and all that, you can skip the issue. A "normal" issue will be out around the beginning of August. -walt crawford- 8:09:01 AM    comment []

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

"Those Librarians are Revolting!" Direct from librarian.net: The Book is Out! Revolting Librarians Redux is now available! 11:14:42 AM    comment [] Microsoft vs Google Microsoft brains take on Google brawn. The software titan hires top scientists and mathematicians in its quest for search algorithms that will allow Microsoft to compete directly with Google. [CNET News.com] 10:23:39 AM    comment []

Sunday, July 06, 2003

Libraries the subject of "Talk of the Nation" this past week Between a recent Supreme Court ruling on Internet filters and several provisions of the Patriot Act, many librarians see themselves on the front line of a battle that pits public safety against intellectual freedom. It's hardly the first time. Join host Lynn Neary and her guests to discuss the role of libraries in American life and politics. Guests: Matthew Battles *Author, Library: An Unquiet History *Coordinating editor of the Harvard Library Bulletin Judith Krug *Director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association Anne M. Turner *Library Director, Santa Cruz public libraries Audio link available here (be sure to scroll down a bit). 6:34:18 PM    comment [] "Free Works" The larger topic here (the RIAA and the "evils" of downloading music for free) is somewhat off-topic except for this little bit from an article by Janis Ian titled "The Internet Debacle" just published in the Portsmuth Herald which I quote at length here (though it's a pretty long articel overall): Or take author Mercedes Lackey, who occupies entire shelves in stores and libraries. As she said herself: "For the past ten years, my three "Arrows" books, which were published by DAW about 15 years ago, have been generating a nice, steady royalty check per pay-period each. A reasonable amount, for fifteen-year-old books. However... I just got the first half of my DAW royalties...And suddenly, out of nowhere, each Arrows book has paid me three times the normal amount!...And because those books have never been out of print, and have always been promoted along with the rest of the backlist, the only significant change during that pay-period was something that happened over at Baen, one of my other publishers. That was when I had my co-author Eric Flint put the first of my Baen books on the Baen Free Library site. Because I have significantly more books with DAW than with Baen, the increases showed up at DAW first. There’s an increase in all of the books on that statement, actually, and what it looks like is what I’d expect to happen if a steady line of people who’d never read my stuff encountered it on the Free Library - a certain percentage of them liked it, and started to work through my backlist, beginning with the earliest books published. The really interesting thing is, of course, that these aren’t Baen books, they’re DAW - another publisher - so it’s ‘name loyalty’ rather than ‘brand loyalty.’ I’ll tell you what, I’m sold. Free works." In another article I ran across yesterday at the Interesting People mailing list archives was one titled "Where Have All the CDs Gone?" In this article (which can also be found at the online version of the Sound and Vision Magazine) the author, James K. Willcox, points to what George Ziemann considers to be the two key causes for the slow-down in CD sales: 1) that the labels raised CD prices during a down economy, and 2) that they slashed the number of new releases by almost 25% during the past three years.   8:26:08 AM    comment [] Review for Library: An Unquiet History Matthew Price of the Boston Globe reviews Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles. The history of libraries, as Battles records it, is a bizarre dialectic of preservation and destruction. He takes a somewhat philosophic view: ''[T]here is no library that does not ultimately disappear,'' he concedes. Still, a faint air of anxious gloom hangs over his sometimes indulgent meditations; his book is much more episodes than a complete history. 7:56:20 AM    comment []

Saturday, July 05, 2003

Librarians want to take filtering into their own hands "Officials of the American Library Assocation will call a meeting with the makers of Internet filtering software next month to voice concern over a federal law that requires libraries and schools to use Internet filters or risk losing federal money." [via New York Times; read the rest of the story - may require registration] For more information from the ALA, see their announcement. 6:56:53 PM    comment [] University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Libraries Develop Policies to Protect the Privacy rights of Patrons "The impact of the USA Patriot Act is evident at the Cofrin Library at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where the staff has undertaken new policies to protect the privacy rights of patrons. The library has implemented a more systematic and swift protocol for the destruction of patron records. It will no longer keep a record of past reading requests. Once a transaction is completed, the patron’s request is purged, according to Leanne Hansen, assistant director of the Cofrin Library at UWGB." [read the rest of the story from the Green Bay Press Gazzette] 11:56:33 AM    comment [] Anniversary of Freedom of Information Act. (This should have been included in a previous post I made) Anniversary of Freedom of Information Act. "George Washington University's National Security Archive, the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, today released its annual Freedom of Information Act birthday posting, 37 years to the day after President Johnson grudgingly signed the U.S. FOIA into law on July 4, 1966. The Archive reported that documents released under federal, state and local freedom of information acts sparked more than 6,000 news stories in 2002 and the first half of 2003 (according to the Archive's searches of on-line databases), including revelations of major public interest such as the use of electronic highway toll data in criminal, administrative and civil probes, the failure of government agencies to prosecute water pollution violations, the misuse of federal student aid, defective military airplanes, and the loss of explosives, mines, mortars and firearms from U.S. stockpiles. The report features an itemized list of 20 significant news stories from the last 18 months that cited documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act." [via beSpacific] 9:46:18 AM    comment [] A User Driven Help Tips Distribution System Jacek Artymiak talks about a "Napster-like distribution system, an Amazon.com--like rating system, XML, and micropayments" and wonders if this could be the future of computer books. "Today's eBook efforts are missing the point. They make reading books harder, not easier. A book that cannot be read once the batteries run out or when you forget your password is pretty useless to me. Technology ought to make our lives easier, after all." [via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 9:40:44 AM    comment [] Blogging for the Masses  AOL be Blogging " Jeff Jarvis : 'Yesterday, I was one of a privileged council of blogging elders -- Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, Clay Shirky -- invited to see AOL's new blogging tools, which will be released later this year. They've done a good job.' You'll be able to blog from IM Every weblog will have a RSS/XML feed The want to feeds to be indexed by Technorati " [ Micah's Weblog ] I think this is huge becau... [via The Shifted Librarian] 9:31:27 AM    comment [] Government Information Awareness   Information and the US Government: My subversive little self really loves this! [via LISNews.com] In other government information news, I heard Peter Kornbluh speaking on Alternative Radio (via my local public radio station KOPB) the other day. His topic was his forthcoming book, The Pinochet File and how the National Security Archive had finally been able to get a number of documents released (censored, of course) regarding the US Government's involvement in the overthrow of then elected President Allende and subsequent support of General Pinochet (not that I was overly surprised to learn about this). What I found so fascinating is that then President Nixon and Henry Kissinger recorded almost every word they ever spoke and had to know that eventually, some of that material would be released to the public. It was amazing to hear Kornbluh quote Kissinger from his memoirs and then quote directly from transcribed phone calls and hear the outright lies that Kissinger wrote in his memoirs. I'm not sure why but I've been interested in Latin American politics for a number of years and nothing I learn about our government's involvement down there surprises me. Still, I can only take it in small doses and I tend to focus on Guatemala more than other Latin American countries. Despite that, I might just have to pick up a copy of this one.   9:04:18 AM    comment []

Friday, July 04, 2003

Some Local Notes: CIPA Impact and Answerland.org I volunteer at a small public library not far from where I live and have been doing so since last October. It's my hope that I'll be able to continue to do so despite starting grad school and a new job next month :) I was interested to see what the director of this library had to say regarding CIPA and its impact on the library. I was pleased to learn that other than one possible exception, none of the public libraries in my county have been using the federal funds that would require them to implement Internet filters. So that's cool. In other cool news, answerland.org, Oregon's new statewide online reference program, has recently solicited for volunteers from local area library students (those attending various distance programs). Of course I raised my hand and now it looks as though I'll be attending a short training course next week and on my way to volunteering. Yay! The project itself is still in pilot mode with approximately 21 libraries statewide participating. I'm interested in seeing how it goes and if I can become involved in other ways over time.   6:37:25 PM    comment [] Off Topic The Economist: Mobile snaps. But now a new threat has appeared: camera-equipped mobile phones. These could change the nature of photography entirely, because they make sharing digital snaps far easier--and they will soon outstrip both film and digital cameras. [Tomalak's Realm] An interesting article. I've toyed with 35mm photography off and on most of my life. I was also an early adopter of digital camera technology having bought one over five years ago. And finally just this past week we bought two Ericsson T300 phones that came with the CommuniCam™ MCA-25 digital camera. Additionally, my other half just bought Sony TDSCV1 and he's not even an avid photographer. The only time we use film cameras are when we buy use-once cameras for convenience. Everything else is digital just so we can easily share pictures with relatives around the world.   1:36:15 PM    comment [] Tim Bray posts about his thoughts On Nations, leaving me with something to ponder. [ongoing] 9:21:36 AM    comment []

Thursday, July 03, 2003

On a Slightly Personal Note Dear Readers, I know there's a few of you out there... I just wanted to let you know that updates to this blog will be a bit on the infrequent side for the next couple of weeks. I'm getting married on the 19th so there's plenty of non-online activities to keep me busy! I will be back in full force, however, shortly before the end of the month. Cheers! 5:21:23 PM    comment []

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Will Microsoft control our information access? Digital Restrictions Management Technology (DRM) is perceived by most people as relating mostly to music and video. It is important to note that other formats, such as eBooks, are currently using DRM to restrict both access and fair use privileges. I am going to paint a fairly scary picture of how this technology might easily expand to cover all formats and all electronic information, and how it might do so with the blessing of John Q. Public. [read the rest of the story] 8:25:35 PM    comment [] New Articles at LIScareer.com These articles have just been published at LIScareer.com: Hall, Leigh. "Managing at Home: the Librarian as Working Parent" (Jul 2003) Osterloh, Cassandra. "Your First Year on the Job: Five Tips for New Librarians" (Jul 2003) Shontz, Priscilla. "A Librarian without a Library: Staying Professionally Active While Unemployed" (Jun 2003) If you would like to write for LIScareer.com, please see the author guidelines and contact Priscilla. 6:29:23 PM    comment [] Librarians Book Club for July The choices this month for the Librarians Book Club are: The Accidental Systems Librarian by Rachel Gordon Singer Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World by Nancy and Lawrence Goldstone [Catalogablog] 5:49:15 PM    comment [] Info Career Trends: Latest Issue is Available   The latest issue of Info Career Trends is now available. The topic is "Paths to Librarianship". 5:25:34 PM    comment []

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