Wow! In an age of shrinking budgets and shrinking staffs, the Phoenix Public Libraries has secured $175,000 to hire one full time professional librarian and three paraprofessionals to police their no-porn policies. The professional, this “Internet Resource Specialist”, would monitor people’s use of the Internet and deal with people’s requests to turn off the filters …

Here is a disappointing story about the licensing and intellectual property rights . The award-winning documentary, Eyes on the Prize, about the civil rights movement, can no longer be aired on TV or sold on DVD (or new VHS’s) because the filmmakers could only afford to pay for a few years of rights to the …

I’m not one of those people who really notices the sound my computer makes. All through college I practically slept with my laptop on the bed next to me (how romantic!). My husband, on the other hand, is really sensitive to noise, and has made it his life’s mission to build silent and cool running …

Here’s an interesting article from the San Francisco Gate about how Google has so far undertaken their Herculean digitization task. According to the article, at the rate they’re going at the University of Michigan, it will take approximately 19 years to do all 7 million books in the collection (and at $10 a book will …

Since I was up for a teen librarian position (which I did not get, sigh…) I’ve been thinking a lot about what libraries do for teens. The library I was interviewing at had a small area by the DVDs that was called the “teen section.” All this consisted of was YA books and magazines and …

According to the Curmudgeony Librarian, the FCC has declined a request by a Saul Levine — a California radio station owner — to apply the same standards to satellite radio as they do to AM/FM radio. Essentially, he wanted satellite radio to be censored just like AM/FM radio: Levine argued among other things that this …

The ALA president-elect, Michael Gorman, has expressed his opinion on Google print and book digitization in an op-ed piece in today’s Newsday. He essentially thinks that the Google deal is a lot of hype and that putting most of these books online really won’t offer that much to users: The nub of the matter lies …

I don’t always agree with everything Free Range Librarian writes, but I think she is pretty darn right in her entry today about confidentiality and discretion. We librarians are all about free speech. But the First Amendment won’t make you less of a chump for kiss-and-tell blogging, and it won’t expunge the stain to your …

Here is an interesting article I found via Resource Shelf. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) and Google Scholar by Nick Luft looks at one positive effect Google (and specifically Google Scholar) may have on digital publishing. One of the greatest barriers to retrieving and exchanging scholarly information online is the fact that database vendors (and …

The New York Times has a quite interesting piece today about what we lose and what we gain with the growth of digital libraries. In Questions and Praise for Google Web Library, the author explores a variety of viewpoints regarding Google’s recent announcement about digitizing the works of five of the great world libraries. I …

This is also huge digital library news, but, with the Google frenzy, they’ve really been the victim of bad timing. International Libraries and the Internet Archive collaborate to build Open-Access Text Archives Today, a number of International libraries have committed to putting their digitized books in open-access archives, starting with one at the Internet Archive. …

I’ve been quietly reading about the Google deal with the libraries of Stanford, University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and New York City, and the resultant debates/rants on various blogs. I didn’t really want to go off on a half-cocked rant of my own, so I’ve spent the last few days thinking about what Google’s digitization …

According to Wired, a four-year study of the 2.6 Linux production kernel by Stanford University researchers has determined that there are 985 bugs in the 5.7 million lines of code. While this may seem a lot (it’s 0.17 bugs per 1,000 lines of code), compare that to the average piece of commercial software, which has …

Apparently, an executive at Time Warner has been shopping around a new idea of fair use that would benefit the television industry. It’s called “transitional fair use.” According to Rick Ellis at All Your TV, the cable companies are looking for ways to justify limiting how long people can view shows recorded with a DVR. …

There has been some blogging about blog popularity this week. Blake of LISNews looked at the popularity of library blogs – within the entire blogosphere and versus other library blogs. He looked at site stats in order to figure out how significant LISNews is. He realized that there are a number of ways of measuring …

I just found this lovely site with snowflakes created by children’s book illustrators. Each snowflake will be auctioned off (on Ebay) to support the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. I’m sure some of the illustrators will be familiar to many of you, and their work represents the variety of styles of children’s book illustrations. My favorite …

Chris Jowaisas of TechnoBiblio brought up an important point about implementing Wi-Fi in libraries (or anywhere for that matter): the need for power. Sure, it’s great to have Wi-Fi, but with the terrible battery life many laptops have, not offering power outlets around the library may make it difficult for people to actually enjoy using …

According to Slashdot, the American Chemical Society is suing Google over their use of the title Google Scholar. The American Chemical Society has a product called SciFinder Scholar, and they feel that Google Scholar infringes on their trademark. Wow, this is like Spike Lee thinking he has the sole right to the name Spike and …

When I looked at my page stats (which this time actually told me that someone other than my husband was reading my blog – woo hoo!) I found that people in Denmark had visited my site. I actually studied in Copenhagen for almost a year, and I think it is one of the best places …

Wow, so today is the day I graduate. Being that my whole library educational experience was virtual (except for my internship and a trip to the ALA conference in June) it all feels somewhat unreal or surreal. Since I’m not driving up to Tallahassee for graduation, there really isn’t going to be any fanfare. Maybe …