Please join me and others in congratulating Michael Stephens on his new job as an instructor at Dominican University, starting this Fall.
EPA libraries slated to close under new budget proposal
Big ugly news in the Government/Special libraries sector. The proposed US Budget includes slashing the EPA library budget by 80% which means no more library and no more electronic catalog.
The size of the cuts will force the Headquarters library and most of the regional libraries to shut their doors and cease operations. Each year, the EPA libraries
- Handle more than 134,000 research requests from its own scientific and enforcement staff
- House and catalog an estimated 50,000 “unique†documents that are available nowhere else
- Operate public reading rooms and provide the public with access to EPA databases.
“Access to information is one of the best tools we have for protecting the environment,” added Ruch, calling the cuts the “epitome of penny wise and pound foolish.” “By contrast, closing the Environmental Protection Agency libraries actually threatens to subtract from the sum total of human knowledge.”
Add to this the proposed elimination of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science by rolling it into the Institute of Museum and Library Services and you have to wonder what sort of price we’re paying for the deep budgetary hole the country has been falling in to.
librarian mention in the movies
“Yesterday, an 80-year-old librarian broke my penis.” (link 100% safe for work unless the word penis isn’t safe for work, in which case you’re sort of screwed already aren’t you?)
ipods and itunes @ your library
I hope you can excuse my informal tone, but this interviewer for this article — Libraries Turning to iPod and ITunes — did the entire interview over IM, which was really pretty great.
me: 4 x 4 x 4
People must have caught on that I’m not usually the web-meme type. But then, it’s easy to say that and then wonder “Why doesn’t anyone want to know what *I* watch on teevee?” Anyhow, thanks to Rebecca Blood (and maybe others who I somehow missed) here’s some minutiae about me.
Four Jobs I’ve Had
I scored the essays on the achievement tests, I slung packages for UPS, I set up a news library in Romania, I am a librarian. (more)
Four movies I can watch over and over
I don’t really watch movies over and over, here are a few I’ve watched more than once or twice, historically: Repo Man, Princess Bride, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Liquid Sky
Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
I don’t love to watch any TV shows regularly. I do love to download stuff from the Internet that resembles television (without commercials) and watch it all at once on long cold winter weekends. Current faves: The IT Crowd, The Office (American, we’re done with the British Office), The Wire and that may be it.
Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation
Alabama, Budapest, Alaska’s Inside Passage, the woods
Four Favorite Dishes
saffron risotto, bacon cheeseburgers from the Miss Florence Diner, whatever is on special at The Wayside, fresh baked bread (is bread a dish?)
Four Websites I Visit Daily
Ask Metafilter, Flickr, Wikipedia, Google News
Four Places I’d Rather Be
right here in the spring, right here in the autumn, right here in the summer, Australia
Four Books I Recommend
Time Traveler’s Wife, Gold Bug Variations, How Things Don’t Work, The Book on the Book Shelf
Four Bloggers I’m Tagging
my sister, my boyfriend, my colleague and my frequent roommate.