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"Times are bad.
Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."

- Cicero








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2001
jan : feb

2000
jan : feb : mar
apr : may : jun
jul : aug : sep
oct : nov : dec

1999
apr : may : june
jul : aug : sep
oct/nov : dec

31mar01

Today is moving day where I move cross-town and apologize to all my friends who are helping me about the absurb amount of boxes that are filled with encyclopediae and dictionaries. Not everyone is lucky enough to have the unabridged OED. They'll thank me one day....

Almost the first EBay link I've had here: "Almost entire law library" for sale. [ thanks jen ]

Brad Pitt's ex-lover is a librarian. [ thanks mk ]

Have we seen this before? If so, it deserves another look anyhow: Library Science Jargon that Sounds Dirty. [ thanks james ]

And from librarians' favorite sugar daddy, 3M, comes Check-it-Out-Yourself day... [ thanks victoria ]

Mark -- aka my new best friend -- lends books from his personal collection through the mail. Or at least he did before I linked to him and sent 500 librarians knocking on his door. One of these books is about a member of my family, want to guess which? [ thanks lisa ]

Police want cop manual pulled from library shelves. Please note the name of the town is spelled wrong in the headline. Guess I'll need to send this to the Human Spellchecker. [ thanks rblood ]

Constant Reader has a Commonplace Book.

28mar01

Bye bye browsing. New shelving system allows for robot retrieval of books which are stored [wait for it] completely randomly! [ thanks rebecca ]

Live and uncut: Interview with Judith Krug about CIPA. [ thanks iboy ]

Fun. Play with Melvil Dewey's face. From the why-haven't-I-heard-about-it-before Bibliozine.

The decline of the print encylopedia. [ librarystuff ]

26mar01

Book burning alive and well at Pennsylvania church.

Animated alphabet evolution. Wow.

An interview with the other Drudge, from refdesk.com

This just in, celebrities read books!

National Library Week theme contains phrase "@your library" for fifth straight year.

Apparently 3M is a gigantic co-sponsor.

Please enjoy the proclamation. My favorite part "In a world that's information rich, [librarians] are information smart" Sure, because no one would call a librarian rich under any circumstances.

"Librarians, the ultimate search engine". Eesh.

25mar01

Few day old SF Gate editorial: "Robotic software is no substitute for the judgment of a parent. Or a librarian. "

Who is calling librarians pea-brained? It's the ... um ... "right thinkers"."...the world doesn´t change to such an extent every five years that library shelves have to be purged like Stalin´s Politburo." [ thanks rebecca ]

More conservative anti-librarian reporting. Mona can be emailed here. [ thanks brad ]

"This Tolkien kid is a hack"

"Oh yeah, Wizards of the Coast should sue his sorry ass" [ thanks david ]

Cite-Writer makes bibliographies as well and you can choose your own styles. [ thanks jessie ]

22mar01

Bibliographies no longer need to suck to write. Easybib is on the scene. Has anyone used this cool looking resource? [ thanks matt ]

Librarians don't get it? Rare manuscript -- used for library's Christmas card -- suddenly gets "discovered" [ thanks jesse ]

More variations on a library theme: the VCL Anthropomorphic Image Library. [ thanks erica ]

People live for headlines like this: Library Smut Snit Heats Up. "Some conservatives [say] that the ALA is acting as any other well-funded interest group that's demanding $3 billion-a-year handouts from the federal government -- and they shouldn't be surprised when some strings are attached." [ thanks molly ]

I know you've seen this by now: Library Buries Books to Cut Costs. You can email the Unverstity Librarian here: Liz Curach [ thanks everyone ]

20mar01

Man uses library computers to rob from rich and give to ... himself. [ thanks margie ]

"Dean of America's librarians" dead at 94. [ thanks ryan ]

CNN poll on filters in public libraries. 68% [as of now] say "yes, make filters mandatory!" [ thanks jama ]

By the way, a good one-site look at the Children's Internet Protection Act can be found at the Center for Democracy & Technology. [ thanks sarah ]

"I Was an AOL Censor" Fun fun reading from the Village Voice. "This is such a paradoxical time right now. It is the age of information and the age of misinformation. There was a time when people thought that something printed in a newspaper must be true. It's not like that online, but it almost is." [ thanks steve ]

Quick, before they require your library card number... the Q and A cafe lets you chat with real live librarians to get your reference questions answered. I tried this out today and was helped by a very courteous and quick librarian named Nancy who answered my questions about Ceili dancing in no time flat. The interface is easy and allows co-surfing so the librarian can deliver a page to your browser and ask you if it's what you were looking for. Amazing. [ thanks katherine ]

19mar01

Mmm Mmm, tasty open source library software. And a review of same. Koha means gifs in Maori, smart librarians! [ thanks karl ]

Everything you wanted to know about cholera and leptospirosis in the Virtual Disaster Library, part of the larger and excellent New Zealand Digital Library. [ thanks again karl ]

Noisy library drives one reporter to religion. "I so loved the feeling of serenity that the library used to promise. You came home feeling productive and accomplished and convinced of the value of immersing yourself ocasionally in a huished sacred place like a house of worship." apparently, according to this reporter "...being considerate of others is neither politically repressive nor injurious to self-expression." You think so? Considerate to whom? The author can be contacted at pamwrites@hotmail.com.

A library of natural sounds.

16mar01

Civil Engineering Magazine has an article about the new Alexandria library. [ thanks robert ]

Electricity library, and museum. [ thanks chris ]

A Library of Skulls: "Shelves and stacks and shelves of skulls, a Dewey Decimal number inked on each unfurrowed forehead." [ thanks chris ]

"People who think the digital era doesn't need librarians haven't met Eugenie Prime." Hewlett Packard librarian. The article is a big improvement over this ad, same concept (pdf file). [ thanks celia ]

14mar01

Securing Mozilla in the public library. An excellent how-to by Andrew Mutch who is also the part-designer and hoster of Reading Rants! a really great collection of unusual teen booklists. [ camworld ]

I don't get this glossary exactly, but it is fun. [ thanks margaret ]

Metafilter has been discussing the huffy book clerk [linked from yesterday] quite a bit.

13mar01

Library clerk hates smut, quits. "It’s precisely people like this who make the First Amendment necessary" says ACLU. [ thanks steve ]

Library stays open later, more people use it... amazing!

"Protester stopped from reading library book" More to the point, cranky guy objecting to nastiness in library books prevented from reading explicit paragraphs out loud at a county comissioners meeting. [ thanks thaddeus ]

12mar01

More on the Library Hotel. "The rooms are even numbered according to the [DDC] system, with a bit of literary license taken, with Slavic languages in 400.001 and Native American religions in 1200.005" [ thanks laura ]

Did you know that Neil Gaiman has a weblog about the writing of his new book?

I'm fond of the Wordwizard -- love love love this article on the Dictionary Wars.

10mar01

Berkeley Public Library has a tool library. You can now even renew your tools online!

Tim wants to date a young librarian. [ thanks rebecca ]

08mar01

note: I am in San Francisco this week. Infrequent updates.

"A state appeals court ruled yesterday that public libraries in California did not have to block minors' access to Internet pornography." [ thanks halsted ]

Gargantuan booksale. The hype, and the take. [ thanks jen ]

Library trustee charged in lottery ticket theft. [ thanks amylinda ]

Presidential library contributions seem to be ripe fodder for swapping for pardons no matter what party you're in. [ thanks jen ]

Innovative programming at the Queens Borough Public Library. "...the little-known secret behind the Queens success story is that its libraries are thriving because they have moved beyond books and the age-old dictum of silence is golden. So expect very little shushing. Do expect jokes at open-microphone night, lessons on dancing the mambo and visitors practicing yoga." [ thanks laura NYT user/pass: librariansrule/yestheydo ]

07mar01

You may remember we were speculating about the Library of Congress being on fire last month. Well Salon finally picked up the story at least a month after it was in the Post.

You would not know this if I did not tell you, but the best 404 page ever is a picture from a library [the Lamont Library I'm told].

How do you get started on your writing? "Simenon, the author of hundreds of detective novels, would have sex with two or three different women (simultaneously, to save precious writing time), then sit down at his typewriter with a bottle of XO cognac."

05mar01

UW library earthquake damage photos:

"A list of alternative and small book publishers with links to their web sites". Thank you, thank you.

Porn, steganography, Osama bin Laden, and you.

"...a management oaf who probably thinks that Dewey-decimal is a polygon" ? [ thanks owen ]

If you are in San Francisco consider not missing Nicholson Baker speaking on April 19th. [ thanks steve ]

Please note, authors only get mad at book critics, never, ever at librarians.

02mar01

Jason Kottke invites comments from people who still use the library, or don't....

Poetry vending machine. Astute readers may notice that they saw this type of thing here once before. [ thanks jen ]

An Archivist in Alaska. [ thanks jen ]

Pennsylvania introduces bill to force filters into libraries. Here's the text of that bill. [ thanks aaron ]

Oh my my, here's a radio show which featured me, surfing for porn in a public library!

An aside: I was in the University Branch library today doing some work. The computer that was closest to me was the filtered one they have available for children to use. Well, always curious, I checked to see if I could get to my site [yes], librarian.net [yes], the naked librarian page [no] or jason's page for the link above [no]. I could also very clearly see the nasty words from my 02feb entry as well as the naked librarian images if I knew where to find them [the ones not named nakedlib.jpg that is]. The filtered terminals use bess.net -- who has a very odd page including links to sample blocked sites, where the links are shown but disabled. The library has a very good Internet Use Policy that does a good job of explaining that the filters are imperfect.

"putting the rarin' back in librarian since 1993"

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