Strange little bit of news that came to me via the “copy and paste a press release into my mailto form” Allibris will be offering books for sale via OCLC’s WorldCat so librarians can buy a book instead of ILLing it. OCLC will bill you, making it even stupidly simpler. No postage, no mailing & return envelopes, no messy labelling. Is this the future of interlibrary loan? Is it really cheaper to buy the book than ILL it?
wacky wiki
Wacky and weird subject headings, a collaborative wiki-project from the folks at The Marginal Librarian. [thanks beth]
reading lists redux
I have a somewhat hard time keeping my reading list updated. Sometimes it’s a choice between writing about one book, or reading another one. Patricio on Flickr has found another way of keeping track of his reading for 2005.
more on folksonomy, earlier examples
Speaking of folksonomies, I would like to mention that the very first time I came across this group tagging phenomenon, it was not at del.icio.us or flickr, it was at the Gimp Savvy Copyright-Free Photo Archive where they have selections of unindexed images and invite users of the site to help classify them. Just by looking at their list of tags, which they call master keys, you can see how this works and does not work. In specific, see this example.
salinas!
At ALA Council on Wednesday, Council passed a resolution that was strongly critical of the Salinas library system closing and written by Michael McGrorty. Eventually the resolution in its final form will be online, in the meantime, the situation in Salinas is still looking pretty contentious, as are other libraries getting severely reduced hours such as the ones in Philadelphia.
Councilman Sergio Sanchez, who cast the lone vote of opposition to the libraries’ closure, said Salinas residents should practice civil disobedience and physically take over the city’s three library branches to keep them from closing. “We got to prepare for another fight,” Sanchez said. The libraries are scheduled to close this spring, sometime before June 17, the last day library employees can work.