Here are some highlights from the January 3, 2008 issue of American LibrariesDirect.
National Film Registry selections for 2007 Librarian of Congress James H. Billington on December 27 named 25 motion pictures-classics from every era of American filmmaking-to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, including Bullitt, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Grand Hotel, Oklahoma!, and 12 Angry Men. The selections were made as part of a program aimed at preserving the nation’s movie heritage. This year’s selections bring to 475 the number of motion pictures in the registry….
Library of Congress, Dec. 27
You mean I can’t throw these out?
Marc Meola writes: “James Cortada, a historian of computing who works for IBM, has a nice screed at the American Historical Association that heaps a bit of anger on us lil’ old academic librarians. Fresh from reading Nicholson Baker and full of Google digitization anxiety, Cortada charges that a new spectre is haunting libraries: heartless librarians ruthlessly discarding old PC-DOS manuals. Apparently no one told Cortada that when librarians discard books it’s called deselection.”…
ACRLog, Dec. 18
Thomas Jefferson’s library added to LibraryThing Tim Spalding writes: “An unusual member has finished adding his 4,889 books to LibraryThing-the third president, Thomas Jefferson. He was assisted by 16 LibraryThing members, who worked from scholarly reconstructions of Jefferson’s 1815 collection, tracking down records in 34 libraries around the world. As is well known, Jefferson sold his books to the Library of Congress, replacing the one the British destroyed during the War of 1812.”…
LibraryThing blog, Jan. 1
From virtual reference to participatory librarianship R. David Lankes discusses the possibility of moving virtual reference toward participatory librarianship. He suggests that VR can be done by answering questions using pools of expertise provided by different sources. Librarians are one type of source. Users might also be able to see the answers to their questions coming from different sources with different contexts and points of view….
ASIS&T Bulletin 34, no. 2 (Dec./Jan.)
DLF to survey moving-images archives With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Library Federation has begun an environmental scan of traditional moving-image archives, major public and university libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions (such as public television broadcasters) with significant film and video collections in the United States. The goal of this project is to summarize which moving-image collections are potentially available for digitization, with an emphasis on open access to increase the volume of online content for teaching and learning….
CLIR Issues 60 (Nov./Dec.)
Do you live in a literate city?
Jack Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, has once again released his rankings of America’s Most Literate Cities, based on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and internet resources. The library stats are based on the FY 2005 Public Libraries Survey and Library Statistics Program, released by NCES in 2007….
America’s Most Literate Cities
Sexy librarians will help you upload videos to YouTube Marshall Kirkpatrick writes: “Imagine a future when you go to the library with a five-minute video you’ve just made about last night’s Presidential debates and that librarian says to you: ‘You should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags-two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written about the debates.'”…
ReadWriteWeb, Dec. 20
Retail and publisher metadata Karen Coyle writes: “There’s been talk and action lately around libraries making use of data provided by publishers or retailers. We need to do some serious studies of bibliographic metadata created outside libraries. For example, libraries use the title on the title page, while others focus on the cover title. Retailers and publishers use the form of the author’s name on the book itself and do not concern themselves with unique identification.”…
Coyle’s InFormation, Nov. 30
NYPL to get a façadelift The New York Public Library is undertaking a three-year restoration of the Fifth Avenue façade of the historic building now formally known as the Humanities and Social Sciences Library. The project will include a complete cleaning of the building’s Vermont marble, repair of almost 3,000 cracks, protection and preservation of the many sculptural elements, and repair of the building’s roof, stairs, and plazas. The restoration will be completed in time for the building’s centennial in 2011….
New York Public Library, Dec. 20
Evolution of the card catalog Larry Nix offers a timeline of card catalogs from 1789 to 1925. Did you know that Harvard College Librarian Thaddeus William Harris (right) made the first reference to a card catalog in an American library in 1840? It was called a “slip catalogue” back then, and it was in use at Harvard until 1912….
Library History Buff
What do you know about copyright?
‘Brary Web Diva Kelli Staley summarizes the results of her Survey Monkey survey on copyright and libraries. She asked members of the Rutgers Online MLIS program, Rutgers’ LISSA mailing list, PubLib discussion list, the SLA-Illinois mailing list, and readers of her blog to participate. Staley found that nearly 80% thought that in order to get a copyright, the author must publish the work (incorrect)….
‘Brary Web Diva blog, Dec. 4
To see the entire issue, click here.