librarian.net

This whole “review policy” thing from a few days ago came about because I had gotten yet another press release in my inbox. I wrote back with a short but polite reply and asked to not be the recipient of any more press releases but sure, go ahead and send me a copy of the magazine. Got a polite and friendly reply and then a few days later a few copies of Bookmarks Magazine showed up in my mailbox. I was almost embarassed to like it so much because I hate being marketed to and, worse yet, I hate being accurately marketed to. In any case, the magazine is a review magazine more in the vein of Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust — which I am also reading this week — than Booklist or Library Journal’s reviews.

Their tastes run more to the independent, their layout tends more towards the creative, and their scads and scads of reviews are interspersed with interesting articles that give you in-depth coverage of an author or two; the Brontes and George Orwell were features in two of mine. One of the issues I read had an absolutely ingenious mystery section which included a graphical “historical mystery series timeline” as well as a US map showing the locations of many well-known fictional detectives with, of course, some capsule reviews of the books they appear in. Many of Bookmarks Magazines’ reviews also come with pullquotes from other major review sources so you can balance their reviewers’ perspectives with other well known “experts.” Without blathering on, I have to say I was really pleasantly suprised at how much I enjoyed this magazine. I don’t like most magazines aimed towards readers — they’re too ad-heavy and seem to exist for pushing product, not for fostering reading — and this one was different. You’ve read my review policy, no one paid me to say this, go check it out if you’re looking for book lust-ish recommendations, delivered bi-monthly.

OCLC has really been doing some outreach. First off, remember that they have a blog. Second of all, they have managed to work out a co-branded Yahoo toolbar with a worldcat search embedded in it. I’d send you to the OCLC link but it’s an annoying requesting-all-your-personal-info page, so I’ll just link to Gary Price’s comments and links about it. Lastly, and my favorite, they’ve got some top titles lists. Top ten, top 1000, top 1000 with all the cover art [giant page].

Maybe someone could give me some data, what level of markeet penetration does OCLC have? When they say “top 1000 titles owned by libraries” what is the difference between saying that and “top 1000 titles owned by OCLC libraries”? According to their site, they have 52,000 libraries worldwide [9134 outside the US], and according to the ALA, there are at least twice that many libraries in the US alone. The nearest “OCLC library” to me that has the #2 book, the Bible, is 40 miles from here. From there, I also found Project Gutenberg’s Top 100 lists which tells a different story, somewhat.

Political satire in a no-royalty play. Laura’s Bush is a lesbian sex farce featuring an absurdly prudish librarian and, of course, the First Lady. [thanks tom]

Our library got our settlement CDs today. This is, of course, particularly poignant because we do not have a music collection, we have a book on tape/CD collection. Now we have a music collection and it is bad, very bad indeed. Andrei Codrescu has an essay on the wrongness of this settlement for public libraries. Music industry, shame on you for dumping your unwanted products on the public libraries of the country in an effort to clear your warehouses and supposedly make good on what you did wrong. Remember when they were calling this CD dumping a computer glitch? What ever happened to that defense? [thanks robert]

In addition to your REF shirt [I'm wearing one today] the well-dressed librarian might also wear a Librarian pin. I’ll buy mine when the price drops to something a bit more reasonable, or when Fredflare starts accepting barter. [thanks pauline]

Attention librarians, please do not buy any compilations of overpriced public domain titles from the likes of e-reader unless you really, serioously, want someone to charge you four dollars to copy a free text onto a CD for you.

I would be happy to see robots in libraries fetching and shelving the books for me, though I think the term “mechanical husher” [see the actual URL name] may not catch on.

Please keep in mind that any non-fiction you read last year would not have been counted as “literary reading” for the purposes of the NEA’s Reading at Risk report that has been getting a lot of discussion lately. While I think it’s really important to try to raise a nation of readers, creating distinctions like “literary reading” and then handwringing over its decline as if it were reflecting an actual drop in literacy [it isn't] seems disingenous and divisive. I’d like to see the NEA take on the incredible backwardness of No Child Left Behind to see what effect incredible testing pressure in schools has on kids’ interest in reading for fun. Or do some statistical analysis into how many Americans feel they have time to do anything for fun lately. [thanks eoin]

I would be remiss at this juncture if I did not mention the Librarians for Kerry-Edwards Yahoo group that has been picking up steam lately. In the interests of full disclosure I’d like to say that while the Kerry-Edwards ticket has my support, Kucinich or Dean were really who I was rallying for. I’ve embraced national level voting for tactical reasons lately. [thanks kathleen]

In the Bloodhag vein, it’s Harry and the Potters, coming soon to a library near you with their quirky brand of rock.