Friday Notes

CE:

Web Junction class [Home of TechAtlas]
co-sponsored by SLI & NEILSA,
Thursday October 19, 9 - 12
Overflow session 1 - 4
In West Union.

WebJunction Iowa is an on-line community where library staff meet to share ideas, solve problems, take on-line courses, and meet colleagues from around the state and country. This hands-on class will give you the opportunity to learn more about WebJunction Iowa. We will explore some of the information that can be found on the site, register and sign up for an on-line class, and learn to post to the web boards.
Cost $15.00
CE 3 to 5 ce's
Instructor Michele Leininger

Class size limited for this class.

Register via Statewide ce catalog at:
http://www.statelibraryofiowa.org/cgi-bin/cecat/
Search under: "Web Junction"

PLA announces new start dates for e-learning courses
?E-Learning @ PLA,? the online education program of the Public Library Association, will offer five new start dates for two of its popular courses. ?New Planning for Results? and ?Creating Policies for Results? will each be offered five times between September 2006 and April 2007....

OPAL: Online Programming for All Libraries--And All Library Users

NEW: Streaming Audio Preview of OPAL online events coming in July (playback time: 6 minutes) NEW: Streaming Video Introduction to OPAL (Windows Media Video file; playback time 2 minutes, 39 seconds)

FROM: http://www.opal-online.org/


We are planning a DEMCO Book Repair Workshop for sometime this fall, Ken will still do a workshop at county association meetings if requested and scheduled anead of time.

Featured review: Reference
Ciment, James, ed. Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History. Sept. 2006. 1,324p. Sharpe. (0-7656-8065-3).
Colonial America presents a bird?s-eye view of life in the original colonies, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with entries ?designed to complement the high-school American history curriculum as well as undergraduate survey courses.? Although their professors may relish the scholarship of the topically arranged Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (1994), students will find it less frustrating to browse Colonial America?s seven broad thematic essays (?Gender Issues,? ?Race and Ethnicity,? etc.) and more than 450 alphabetically arranged articles on topics such as alcohol, food and diet, inns and taverns (public houses), and piracy....

Encyclopedia update, 2006
In this year?s update, Barbara Bibel and Shauna Yusko review three print encyclopedias: Encyclopedia Americana, The New Book of Knowledge, and The World Book Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia publishers continue to take a ?big umbrella? approach, incorporating into one website an array of offerings. But they have also taken more steps to target specific audiences....

Electronic postcards from Baghdad
Keir Graff writes: ?Here are links to a selection of eye-opening passages from Riverbend?s Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog From Iraq (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2006), as they were first published on her blog. I?ve probably included too many, but I circled even more page numbers in the book. So many entries contained information I hadn?t known, or a viewpoint I hadn?t considered, or simply put it all together in a compelling way.?...
Likely Stories blog

Library books draw complaints in West Brazos
Students at West Brazos Junior High School in Brazoria, Texas, won?t be allowed to check books out of the school?s library after two complaints about profanity and sexual content were found in books borrowed by children. One September 19 complaint by a West Columbia resident claimed the book Zero to Sixty: The Motorcycle Journey of a Lifetime by Gary Paulsen, which was checked out from the school library by his 12-year-old son, contained details of sexual acts and profanity....
Brazosport (Tex.) Facts, Sept. 21

Most challenged books in America
This week marks the 25th anniversary of Banned Book Week, an effort by ALA to promote freedom of access to ?unorthodox or unpopular? written works as well as freedom of expression within these books. ?Throughout history, there always have been a few people who don?t want information to be freely available. And this is still true,? said ALA President Leslie Burger. ?Banned Books Week reminds us that we must remain vigilant.?...
PBS newsmagazine NOW, Sept. 22

Audit: Reading First beset by favoritism
A September 22 internal report (PDF file) detailing the U.S. Department of Education?s handling of the multibillion-dollar Reading First grant program criticizes Bush administration officials for steering funding awards to certain educational publishers and for illegally dictating to schools which solutions they must use. Yet another report (PDF file), from the independent Center on Education Policy, suggests the program is having a significant impact on student achievement....
eSchool News online, Sept. 25

NCES has not redesignated school librarians as instructors
In its August 1 report on 2003?2004 expenditures for public elementary and secondary education, the National Center for Educational Statistics has modified the way expenditures are broken down, but it has not changed the underlying structure of financial accounting for states and school districts. School library media specialists and school library services continue to be classified as ?support-services-instruction,? stemming from a definition of library media services that has not been changed since 1980....
ALA American Association of School Librarians

Banned in the U.S.A.: A quiz
In honor of Banned Books Week, Mental Floss Research Editor Sandy Wood put together a 12-question cultural-literacy test involving controversial titles. The first: True or False? Two 1960s children?s books written by Dr. Seuss were later removed from print (and stricken from his bibliography) for questionable moral content....
Mental Floss, Sept. 25

Banned books around the world (PDF file)
David Shook has compiled a brief list of books banned recently in Iran, Albania, Vietnam, China, and other countries....
World Literature Today 80, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct.): 25

Help solve the wire loop mystery
Over the last several years, books with a small wire loop have been found in several libraries across the United States. Initial inquiries found no satisfactory answer for their presence. Speculation included some sort of security device to tie the book in place, a method of attaching a bookmarker to the textblock, or a hook to attach an information tag. Books identified with these devices to date have been published in London by various firms between 1908 and 1933....
Michigan State University Libraries

University of Chicago study notes surprising result
?The more today?s Chicago students use electronic research materials, the more they do research the old-fashioned way,? writes Andrew Abbott about a 2005 survey of campus library usage conducted by the University of Chicago Provost?s Task Force. ?The more an individual uses books, the more he or she uses electronic-research resources, and vice versa. At the very least, the survey data provides no evidence that traditional research practices are being replaced by electronic ones.?...
University of Chicago Magazine 99, no. 1 (Oct.)

Digital access to archival works
Cornell University Library Intellectual Property Officer Peter B. Hirtle takes a look at Section 108(b) of the copyright law and concludes that digital technologies could serve as a means of providing access to unpublished research materials without having to distribute physical copies to other repositories....
Stanford University Libraries, Sept. 24

Royal Society launches online journal archive
The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically until December in the Journals Digital Archive. The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday?s groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton?s invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking....
Royal Society, Sept. 14

Ten reasons to use Ask.com instead of Google
Sarah Houghton writes: ?I think many librarians rely on Google as their sole search engine, forgetting other search tools and the wealth of information that?s out there in the invisible web. But there is one search engine that I?ve come to rely on in addition to the big G: Ask.com. So, here are my 10 reasons that librarians should use Ask.com instead of Google.?...
Librarian in Black, Sept. 22

Best practices for designing web services in the library context
The National Information Standards Organization has released a set of recommended practices (PDF file) to use in support of interoperable digital library services. Included are sections on HTTP caching, filtering of user input, reuse of output formats, security, and throttling....
NISO, Sept. 19

The future of the internet
A survey (PDF file) of internet leaders, activists, and analysts shows that a majority agree that by 2020, humans will remain in charge of technology; virtual reality will spawn new addiction problems; people will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy; and English will be a universal language of global communications....
Pew Internet & American Life Project, Sept. 24

Bobby Bitman promotes the public ?libary?
Eugene Levy (as Bobby Bitman) offers his take on kids and libraries in this sketch (1:43) that aired on SCTV, November 26, 1982: ?As a kid, I was pretty ignorant. Fortunately for me, I ended up in show business.?...
YouTube

Renaissance Library calendar, 2007
The Renaissance Library calendars have been produced since 2001 by Information Strategy and Information Management, a consulting and publishing firm based in Sollentuna, a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. Each month features a photo of a historic library, selected from nominations submitted by librarians and information professionals in nearly 40 countries. The cover of the 2007 calendar shows the 1752 rococo-style library of St. Peter?s Abbey in the Black Forest, Germany....
Renaissance Library Collection