friday night short link list
Here in the frozen north Friday nights can often be a time to cook a big meal and curl up with a book and/or laptop while people in more populated areas do whatever people in more populated areas do. Here are a few of the things I have been reading this evening.
- Testing the THOMAS Beta by Peggy Garvin – no RSS feeds, but the beta does seem to have some new useful features and an improved search.
- Help for Librarians Receiving Law Enforcement Requests Revisited by Don Wood, ALAOIF whose blog is really worth reading
- Surveying non-users, Sarah Houghton-Jan points to a library who is trying to figure out who is NOT using their library. I did a little bit of this during National Library week. I set up a library card sign-up table outside of Wal-Mart and met a LOT of non-library users. The main reason people didn’t go back to the library? Fines, especially for younger patrons.
- ALA Read Write Connect. Not sure why this is a wiki, exactly, but it’s a great starting point for all of ALA’s newish bloggish and social content. There is a lot more than you would think!
- Library Director Quits – Cites WiFi Dangers – I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not sure how you accept a job if you are extremely sensitive to electromagnetic radiation and don’t think to inquire whether there is an active WiFi network. I’m also not convinced by the downloadable Word documents that are provided on the Council on Wireless Technology Impacts’ science page
January 20th, 2007 at 7:26
On the Wi-Fi scare-mongering, this is a medical issue — not a library issue. It’s for the medical experts to fight over. If there’s no body of medical evidence suggesting Wi-Fi is a danger, then I’m happy to live with what we have.
We’ve been living with radio waves for a hundred years. It hasn’t killed us yet. It’s unfortunate when people get fired but the person in question might as well have been arguing about the presence of air-conditioning.