I’ve been hedging writing this post over the last couple of days. I should have written it last week when it was fresh and new and, well, pre-hurricane. It’s now hard to muster the excitement for the day when you see pictures like this and this from Atlantic City. The Atlantic City Historical Museum (our […]
Once again, Banned Books Week is here, the Spirit Week for Intellectual Freedom lovers all over the United States. As it is the apparent tradition of this event, the same tortured arguments and responses get trotted out like holiday decorations pulled out of bins that are stored in the basement all year. It is met […]
Right now across the country, there are new graduate student arriving in the classroom (both real and virtual) to start their academic journey towards a Master’s degree in Library Science. It’s hard for me to believe that I only graduated six years ago and have only been on the job in a librarian capacity for […]
David Lankes wrote a blog post at the beginning of August in which he urges librarians to drop the “save the library” mentality and embrace an aspirational public relations model that advocates how libraries help their communities thrive. I’m inclined to agree with David; the ‘library in crisis OMG OMG OMG’ card has been played […]
In returning from vacation last week, today’s social media catch featured a wonderful juxtaposition of library eBook oriented links: the ALA’s Digital Content & Libraries Working Group report, “EBook Business Models for Public Libraries”, along with Library Journal’s Francine Fialkoff’s editorial “Too Many Ebook Cooks: Ineffectual Committees Aren’t Fast Enough To Ensure Robust Access”. The […]
While the news that the Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari for the case Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. goes back to April, it was only last week that Publishers Weekly reported that the Library Copyright Alliance had filed an amicus brief for the case. If you hadn’t heard of this case […]
In the FCC/ALA/Digital Corps debacle unfolds before my very eyes, allow me to sum up as quickly as I can before I make my points. A couple of weeks ago the New York Times wrote an article called Wasting Time is New Divide in Digital Era. The quote that caused a thousand tweets to sail: […]
From the New Yorker: Zuckerberg’s business model requires the trust and loyalty of his users so that he can make money from their participation, yet he must simultaneously stretch that trust by driving the site to maximize profits, including by selling users’ personal information. The I.P.O. last week will exacerbate this tension: Facebook’s huge valuation […]
From the Cites & Insights April 2012 entitled “Public Library Closures: On Not Dropping Like Flies”: “For those who don’t have the patience for a long, rambling essay with lots of background and detail, here’s the tip of the pyramid: As far as I can tell, at most seventeen public libraries within the United States […]
The chart above comes from a recent post on The Atlantic hilariously labeled, “The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart”. The numbers come from a 2005 Gallup survey which will provide a great baseline for re-doing the survey in a social media and Kindle-Nook-iPad-eBook world that has developed […]
