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Zeds Library News – 1 Aug 2010

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I’m trying something new this weekend – each week I’m going to post a recap of pertinent news in librarianship.  It will only be a short list of links with one or two lines of editorial attached, but it should be enough to accomplish my two goals:

  1. To make better use of my feed reader. I’ve grown tired of the wayward reading and bookmarking that happens with RSS feeds.  Hopefully, I can increase my ‘uptake’ from site feeds, on a more-regular basis, once I start typing up a few thoughts on the posts I come across.
  2. To share what I’m reading with others. Like most of us out there, I like blogging and I like reading blogs.  But sometimes I don’t think we’re as connected to one another as we let on.  Even with all the social media we use to create communities, I often feel like we’re all stranded on our own desert islands; every now and again something washes up on our shore that had washed up on someone else’s shore previously.  Maybe by posting a weekly “best of library science blogs” post, I’ll be able to bring more people together.  We’ll see if it sticks.

So here we are: a Zeds Library News recap for Aug 1, 2010!

  • Wired magazine reports on Penguin Books’s 75th Birthday. Of note: Penguin’s success was built on the idea of making books of all sorts – fiction, literature, histories – affordable to all people. Penguin Books “democratized literacy by making good books as accessible as the daily newspaper.”
  • LISNews aggregates the press release that kept us buzzing late this week: III/SkyRiver’s antitrust suit against OCLC.  Monopoly? Non-for-profit consortium?  A Systems Godzilla?  You Decide.  (K.G. Schneider offers a good POV, noting that OCLC may be a behemoth, but at least “OCLC is our behemoth – yours and mine . . . [rather than a] for-profit behemoth in it for itself.”)
  • The Library of Congress tells us it’s okay to jailbreak our iPhones.  The Chronicle reports that the The Copyright Office has completed its triennial review (what a word..) of what should have DMCA exemptions and has determined that wireless phones may be jailbreaked, and DVDs may finally be lawfully be copied for educational, noncommercial, or documentary use.  Read the entire LOC press release here.
  • The summer political season in Canada has been more than just barbeques and rodeos.  The Conservative government’s decision to throw away the mandatory long-form census has put the entire nation up in arms, and our Chief Statistician resigned when gov’t leaders suggested he approved such a measure. In the mean time, the National Statistical Council of Canada, a government oversight body of sorts, has been trying to reach a compromise before it’s too late.  Tracey Lauriault at datalibre.ca has done some digging for everyone else so we can look behind the curtain at the NSCC.
  • Does anyone still use Ask.com?  CNN Money reports that the search engine is rolling out an “Ask the Community” feature where your questions are answered by real live human beings.  Kind of like a library reference desk, eh?   (Thanks to Points of Reference for connecting the dots on this one.)

{n.b.  It would be incredibly wrong of me not link to my friend, Jhameia, whose regular rounds of links in a different field inspired me to give it a shot for LIS.]

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