LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

The ResourceShelf Notes Edgar, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s electronic database of corporate filings, will be replaced by a new system dubbed IDEA, or Interactive Data Electronic Applications, the SEC announced Tuesday.

Originally the interview found in this special episode was supposed to air in the next regular episode. Being overtaken by events is never fun. As such the interview is being released in a special edition now.

Dr. Stanley Kurtz made an attempt to seek access to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge collection of documents at University of Illinois-Chicago. After initially being granted access, such was taken away. With conflicting answers Dr. Kurtz wrote a piece for National Review Online.

The production team contacted both the University of Illinois-Chicago as well as Dr. Kurtz. Dr. Kurtz responded to the request for an interview. The only contact from the University of Illinois-Chicago was to be told there was no statement and no comment.

In a case where we're left with only more questions, the interview is presented for consideration. The audio engineer's question that he requested be put is: was this incompetence or a bungled covering up?

Marketplace from American Public Media

The novel is not dead. Nor is any other kind of book. Self-publishing technology has empowered wanna-be writers -- no matter how strange their pitch. Cash Peters checks out the DIY crowd at a book expo in LA.

Full story here.

In response to rising textbook prices, some academics are writing their own textbooks — for free.

Links to articles and publisher responses at "The Reader" at the American Public Media show Marketplace website.

Ithaka has recently released the full findings from our 2006 surveys of the behavior and attitudes of faculty members and academic librarians. These complementary studies, co-sponsored by JSTOR and by Ithaka’s incubated entities Portico, Aluka, and NITLE, have been of interest to academic librarians and scholarly publishers alike in presentations over the past year, but now we are making the datasets and a detailed white paper available as well.

Here's a photo & video tour of the newly renovated North Georgia College and State University (both!) from the Gainesville Times.

Library Director Shawn Tonner said the new $18 million Library Technology Center is much more than a library with 150,000 books. It also houses 200 computers, 50,000 electronic books available to students online, a coffee shop, 25 group study rooms, a writing center for peer editing and the Center of Teaching and Learning Excellence.

Barnes & Noble has cancelled its 10,000-copy order of Obama’s Challenge, a book by Robert Kuttner that Chelsea Green is making available early exclusively through Amazon.com. Chelsea Green president and publisher Margo Baldwin said the chain will make the book available on BN.com and will special order it, but that it will not stock it in its stores.

More at Publisher's Weekly

The Canadian Association of Special Libraries and Information Services (CASLIS) invites Canadian information specialists to explore their creative side and apply their skills to solve a mystery.

To enter the contest, we want you to create an information specialist (be it librarian, records manager, archivist, knowledge management consultant, or whoever) who makes use of their professional skills to turn detective. You don't need to write the entire novel. Just give us:

* A title
* An outline plot summary
* An extract

The total length of the entry (including the title, summary and extract) should be no more than 500 words long. Entries will be judged on their entertainment value and the inventive use they make of our specialist skills rather than their potential interest to a literary agent.

Entries will be reviewed by a jury composed of librarians and mystery writers. The winner will be awarded a $50 gift certificate from a mystery bookstore. The jury members are:

* Evette Berry, Calgary Public Library
* Ross Gordon, Director, RCMP Library and Canadian Police College Library
* Mary Jane Maffini, mystery writer and lapsed librarian

All submissions will be published in the October 2008 edition of Special Issues: Bulletin of the Canadian Association of Special Libraries and Information Services. Members of the Canadian Library Association will be invited to vote for the winner of a People's Choice Award who will receive a $25 gift certificate from a mystery bookstore.

There's been a "big debate/kerfuffle/brouhaha brewing in the legal blogosphere" over whether re-posting someone’s personally identifiable comment made on another blog to your own blog post without first notifying the author and giving them notice and opportunity to respond, constitutes bullying in the blogosphere. Another issue embedded in this opportunity to respond matter is whether one should use trackbacks to ping a blogger's post when one criticizes the opinion express in that post. Links and our just launched online polls on both issues at A Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith in Social Media, Law Librarian Blog at

"I'm lost without a book - and lost in one- The steps I take to avoid being without a good read would shame a hardened alcoholic." by Jane Shilling, The Times, August 18, 2008

The steps I take to avoid being left bookless would shame a hardened and devious alcoholic. I always have some sort of little book stashed in my handbag, just in case. And another little book for good measure.

I once spent New Year's Eve scouring Lisbon for something to read and knew that the coming year wasn't going to turn out well when all I could find was Lorna Doone.

Occasionally, being trapped in the company of a book you dislike can bring about a miracle conversion. Ages ago I travelled from Aberdeen to King's Cross with nothing to read but The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which I had already attempted and discarded with loathing. I tried looking out of the window, but it was winter and the light failed early. In desperation I reopened the book and began again at: “I wish either my father or my mother... had minded what they were about when they begot me...”

Read more about it at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jane_shilling/article4552530.ece

Should one take into account the ideology of the authors and editors when choosing course books "bearing in mind that you're sending revenue their way?" It's become an issue in the academic legal blogosphere. What do you think? Take our poll on Law Librarian Blog at http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2008/08/sending-incom-1.html

Data Lost in Rush to Close Libraries: Facing massive budget cuts, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2006 decided to close some of its physical research libraries and make the data available online instead. However, in its haste to do so, the EPA may have lost some files, according to government auditors. Testifying before the House Science and Technology Committee's Investigations and Oversight Committee, Government Accountability Office (GAO) auditors said the EPAs push to digitize its libraries led to hasty closings, which lawmakers criticized.

Texas school district to let teachers carry guns while in Maryland Allegany libraries adopt weapons ban. The Allegany County Library System's board of trustees has voted to ban weapons, handguns or firearms from its branches. Meanwhile A Texas school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district's superintendent said on Friday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.

How does the government manage data that was born digital, meaning it was created in electronic form? Organizations as varied as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the White House, open-government groups, and House members have recently offered recommendations for managing the growing volume of such information. Their approaches underscore the differences of opinion about how much responsibility and power various entities should have over future federal recordkeeping.

Granted, it’s not as bad as waking up and finding you’ve become a big bug, as memorably happens in his novella “The Metamorphosis.” But somehow, even in 2008, Franz Kafka himself keeps morphing, inspiring generations of fans to imagine him anew.

Beloved writers often get reclaimed for a new readership. Oscar Wilde, best known for being a wit in his own time, would become a gay icon in ours. Long after his death, the Romantic poet Lord Byron would receive the diagnosis of manic-depression. Rudyard Kipling would be embraced during the British Empire and then criticized as imperialist and sometimes racist as the Empire collapsed. Ernest Hemingway, a beloved, swashbuckling figure in his day, would later fall out of favor for a time as a chauvinist.

Now it’s Kafka’s turn. In a new book, “Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life” (St. Martin’s Press), James Hawes, a British lecturer and satirical novelist, considers the man behind the literary myth.

Full article in the New York Times

Kate Carraway Says Libraries need love:

The public library is among the last real democratic institutions. The Holds shelf is an exemplar of the social contract. A library applies systemic order to cacophonous wilds of ideas, and the librarians who make it happen are eternal sex symbols. "Quiet" and "books" are intoxicating signifiers, but more than that, the library loves its patrons with Aslan-calibre benevolence. It wants to help you. It wants to enrich you.

This week's episode brings a shorter than normal commentary as well as interviews from New Media Expo 2008. Interviews from the exhibit floor at New Media Expo 2008 will be aired this week and next. This week's thread was hardware while next week's is software and service providers.

Related links:
New Media Expo site
MXL Microphones
Shure
Mackie
Sony

Franz Kafka's dying wish were that his papers be burned; thanks to his friend and fellow author Max Brod, we now can read "The Trial" and other works that were not published during his lifetime.

Brod's secretary, Esther Hoffe died last month at 101 years of age, and her 74 year old daughter, Hava, who inherited the Kafka papers, will make a decision in the next few months when and how they will be published. According to this San Francisco Chronicle article, Hava Hoffe is keeping scholars and archivists up at night wondering about the condition of what they believe are letters, diaries, photographs and perhaps unpublished works of the two Czech Jewish authors, with Kafka one of the best-known authors of the 20th century.

A terrible crime was perpetrated against a child in a St. Paul Library. A library spokesperson noted that "[O]ur libraries are still safe places for children to be."

The child who used a locked basement bathroom after obtaining a key from a library staff member in this safe library, was brutally attacked by the disgusting pedophile. The child reported the criminal assualt to library staffers who released the public computers to police officers after they obtained a search warrant.

The librarian staff's concern for the little girl as demonstrated by their vigilance in making sure someone didn't follow her into the bathroom, and their swift response to her notification of the assault are noted... well not in the article linked above, nor in this article nor this one, nor this one.

It is not noted in this article either, although a parent wonders "Such a small library, I just thought wow, the people at the desk can't even notice that a pervert is loitering when everything is right in front of you."

Even the St. Paul Public Library is getting into the political act as the Republican National Convention approaches.

The library will host political analyst Mark Halperin on Monday and pundit Susan Estrich on Tuesday to talk about the election.

Both events will be held at Metropolitan State University as part of the library's political series. Dozens of political commentators are expected to descend on the Twin Cities for the September convention in St. Paul.