American Libraries Direct is the e-newsletter of the American Library Association (ALA),
March 11, 2009.
Highlights:
Library technology unconference
Have you ever been “speed-geeking”? Struck by “lightning-talks”? Join keynoters Joan Frye Williams and John Blyberg at the first-ever LITACamp, “The Everywhere Library: Creating, Communicating, Integrating,” May 7–8, in Dublin, Ohio. Participants determine the topic and format of the sessions on-site, sign up for time slots, and pitch session ideas to all. Registration is accepted online and onsite. A special housing rate is available until April 10….
Beverly P. Lynch receives 2009 Lippincott Award
Beverly P. Lynch, professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is this year’s recipient of the Joseph W. Lippincott Award. The award, founded in 1938, is given annually to an individual for distinguished service to the profession of librarianship. Lynch served as ALA President in 1985–1986 and has made a remarkable personal commitment to providing widespread service to libraries, educational programs, and the profession at large….
2009 Kilgour Award winner
The winner of this year’s Frederick G. Kilgour Award is William H. Mischo, head of the Grainger Engineering Library and Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The award, jointly sponsored by LITA and OCLC, is given for research relevant to the development of information technologies. The award committee chose Mischo from a strong field of nominated leaders and praised his three-decades-long work on the design of user-centered information retrieval tools and services…
David Smith: NYPL’s librarian to the stars
David Smith has worked at the 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library for 30 years, starting as a clerk and eventually landing at the General Research Division. Currently he’s a supervising librarian (and librarian to the stars), a vault of information, and a teller of some fascinating stories. Recently he spoke about giving Werner Herzog an insider’s tour of the NYPL, how stacks run all under Bryant Park, and his friend Joey Goldstein (the New Yorker he most admired)….
The Gothamist, Mar. 6; New York Times, Dec. 31, 2007
Google Docs suffers privacy glitch
Jason Kincaid writes: “In a privacy error that underscores some of the biggest problems surrounding cloud-based services, Google has sent a notice to a number of users of its document and spreadsheet products stating that it may have inadvertently shared some of their documents with contacts who were never granted access to them. According to the notice, this sharing was limited to people ‘with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document’-a vague statement that sounds like it could add up to quite a few people.”…
Browsers are changing to accommodate powerful applications
Erica Naone writes: “We’ve come a long way from the flat documents that made up the web in its early years. As internet access has expanded and bandwidth has increased, designers and programmers have figured out ways to build sophisticated, interactive applications that run in the browser. Nowadays, these programs include web-based word processors, photo-editing software, money-management tools, and much more. The next generation of HTML promises to make web applications work even better.”…
Technology Review, Mar. 10 TechCrunch, Mar. 7
Five sites for experiencing the web in real time
Frederic Lardinois writes: “One of the most interesting trends on the internet right now is a move toward a more real-time experience. We have seen a lot of discussion lately about how Twitter is leading the charge by creating a search engine for the real-time web, for example. However, there are also a good number of other services that already expose some of the promises of the real-time web.”…
ReadWriteWeb, Mar. 6
Click here to see the entire March 11, 2009 issue in html.