LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

As reported in the most recent regular edition of LISTen, podcast hosting provider Podango collapsed on New Year's Day. All that remained was a parking page. LISHost announced its response that same day.

Click It To Buy It Filled with over 300 pages of effing goodness, the blog you love to read for free is now available in the dead tree format for $15.95.

$15.95? Is that all? For something I can get totally free otherwise? Wow, that's a bargain.

Edited very poorly by me, and quite possibly violating the copyrights of dozens of individuals and corporations, the.effing.librarian book is now ready for human consumption in a handy 5.25" x 8" format. Hold the.effing.librarian in your hands. Take the.effing.librarian to bed. Burn the.effing.librarian in a festive fire and get those chestnuts roasting.
Click the link below to read a sample of what you get:

OK, you've determined you're going to try to buy books from your local independent booksellers...but now the question is...what are you going to buy?

The New York Times has a list of Notable Books from 2008 , and a list of list of Notable Books for Children from 2008.

You've got the list, you've bought the book(s), what now? Maybe some greeting cards that recycle into bookmarks to go along with it? Ah, the perfect combo. Mention birdie sent you, and you'll get free shipping on your order through the month of December.

The obnoxious librarian from hades (http://olfh.blogspot.com) started out as a satiracal weblog telling the tales of a librarian working in a large bureaucracy.. and now it is available as a real book and e-book. You can buy the real book at a credit crisis adjusted price via http://www.lulu.com/content/4253767 or even download the e-book version for free!

In case folks are not aware, there are some products available from the podcast team. Purchase of these products gives you something tangible while giving some us funding to cover costs like telecommunications.

This is the disc containing high-quality Ogg Vorbis format versions of the audio from BlogWorldExpo:

https://on-disk.com/product_info.php/products_id/594

The price on the disc is USD$4.39 and does not include shipping. The podcast team only sees USD$0.99 as the overhead costs for media have increased slightly. The provider that you can order the disc through is a house that provides Linux distributions on-disc quite a bit. I've seen an example of their work when I bought a disc containing all the OpenOffice.org v3 installers and found it to be great.

There is a book the program's engineer produced in conjunction with an artist. The small book contains a variety of nudes. The book caters more to lovers of art and has been well received by art profs who have seen it. That is available at:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2056656

The list price for the print is $29.99 and that was set by the artist. If we got anything out of a sale, it would only be $5. The artist chose for the download price to be at a premium as he wants to encourage print materials over digital ephemera.

This is a printed collection of papers I have on file at E-LIS:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2052136

After the overhead costs of the item, we only get $3.98.

NPR has tote bags. PBS does auctions and fundraising drives. National Review Online is seeking money this week. While we don't have tote bags and the cost of fulfilling requests ourselves would be dwarfed by taxes, these are three ways we try to do much the same as bigger media outlets.

I'm not going to say anything like: "Buy These Now!" No, far from it. All I am going to say is that there are a variety of vendors that allow us to offer things and there hasn't been a consolidated list made up to date lately. These are some of things you might have missed, perhaps.

I know, my absence of late has left a giant gaping hole in your hearts somewhere right below the left ventricle or something. It's hard to visualize on the ultrasound, because no one in the clinic knows really how to work one of these things...

We'll hold the medical stuff at the moment, at least, as it pertains to me, except to say that we've got a loose name of what has been keeping me from living a normal life for -- well, it's been at least 20 years, but it only got particularly nasty in the last eight, and horribly blood-curdling nasty in the last five. It's a sleep disorder, they can not cure it, and if the case proves to be beyond a moderate sort of manifestation, they really can't treat it terribly effectively. A lot of non-sleep/neurological doctors will tell you that they can... There's this new drug... Uh. No.

Long and the short is, the sleep-neuro-guy says that I function at about 20% capacity on a good day. It isn't going to get better than that at this point, or even in the mid-range future.

So I've come to terms with the fact I am not going back to work in a normal environment. I've come to terms that I will never be able to see a movie in a theater again. I'm trying to deal with the idea that if I can come home and mentally function (or at least not walk into solid objects) after a twenty minute trip to the grocery store, I am having a pretty damn good day.

I hate not doing stuff. You know that, right?

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.

As we've gotten over the middle of a busy holiday week in the United States, it is best to give a little hint about what is coming in LISTen #28. The next episode of LISTen is going to have interviews with two fiction writers who have large fan bases. One of them referred to a "porn" text he wrote as being merely a "dirty book" and was surprised that public libraries actually owned copies. The other who is known for his "honor" brought up his speculative views on the future of libraries.

Wondering who the authors may be? Find out Monday after 0400 UTC by downloading the new episode of LISTen.

With the goal of building bridges between book group organizers (including librarians who run book groups or book clubs) and writers, I've created the Book Groups Wiki: http://bookgroups.wikispaces.com The wiki allows book group organizers and authors to enter information about themselves using simple templates.

Feel free to add your library's book group, your own book group, or your name as an author, as appropriate! Also, feel free to forward information about the wiki to anyone else you think might be interested.

Here's The webpage for "To The Eaves", By Lisa Forrest a Senior Assistant Librarian for SUNY College at Buffalo and the founding member of the school's Rooftop Poetry Club. (The Rooftop Poetry Club was established in June 2005 to provide a creative venue for writers of the Buffalo State College community.) The publisher has also published links to download MP3s of the poems set to music. To the Eaves is Lisa's first collection of published poetry.