It’s just an eye-candy sort of day. Here are some old photos of libraries from the San Joaquin Valley sent in by Michael Farrelly. [technocratic]
kinja guide to netlib 2004
Got to stay home and mind the store while Internet Librarian is happening in Monterey? Richard Akerman has set up this Kinja Digest that pulls together the posts of people who are attending. If you’re already an RSS fanatic, Kinja may not be what you need, but if you’re curious about feeds and blogs but you’re not quite sure how to get started, check Kinja out.
what to do when your husband is out hunting – go to the library!
I rarely link to library programming ideas here, but I mist say that the Friday night events that the La Crosse WI library is holding for the wives of deer hunters really sounds like something libraries out this way should be thinking about.
republishing scholarly articles without proper attribution hurts all of us
I recently published something in a journal put out by Emerald Publishing. According to a new paper written by a Cornell librarian, Emerald has been republishing journal articles across its periodicals without identifying the articles as having been republished. This is no good. They have published this response.
Simple keyword title searching has led the author to over 400 examples of this behavior, in 67 of the publisher’s journals taking place over a period of at least fifteen years. The publisher has claimed that it has ceased the practice of article duplication Libraries spend considerable sums of money to purchase academic journals. Skyrocketing journal inflation coupled with stagnant acquisitions budgets have resulted in massive cancellation in our libraries. The results of this research suggest that we may have collectively spent vast sums of money on duplicated materials from Emerald and didn’t know it. [lisnews]
why don’t people read, part one in a series
As an outreach librarian, I try to figure out why people aren’t coming to the library. Some of these reasons are obvious: can’t park, bad hours, building too cold, don’t read…. When I get to answers like “don’t read” my next question is always “why not?” The answers are all over the map, but the one that drives me the craziest — since I work with a lot of seniors — is “can’t find large print titles in anything that interests me”. Now, our library has maybe a thousand large print titles, even some new ones, which is not a bad collection for a library our size. It’s mostly fiction. Non-fiction circulates less, and it’s also harder to get. Our largest request that comes to me is “more computer books in large type” followed by “more poetry” If you’re blind in the US, you can get books on tape delivered to you for free, but you often can’t choose the exact titles [think Netflix] and you don’t get the tactile experience of reading which many people really like. According to the Royal National Institute of the Blind in the UK 96% of all books are not available in large print, audio or braille editions. They have started a Right to Read campaign complete with arresting graphics and sound clip by Michael Palin, to raise people’s awareness of lack of access to reading materials for the blind and otherwise visually impaired. [pscott]