Did anyone see the moronic former Attorney General Ed Meese on this morning’s Today Show? He was pitted against Nadine Strosser, the current president of the ACLU, for a discussion of the infamous PATRIOT ACT. Somewhere towards the end of the heated discussion, Meese takes a jab at librarians, accusing us of being “more interested in pushing pornography on kids than fighting terrorism.” Now, up to this point in the interview, Mr. Meese had simply come off as an Ashcroft puppet. Once he made that claim, he came off as an ignorant, desperate Ashcroft puppet. Generally speaking, I take this as a good sign.
Sabrina mentions the story and points to a press release that includes a response by ALA prez Carla Hayden. The quote offered by Sabrina differs significantly from what I heard this morning. It has, however, come to my attention, that my version is corroborated by this Salon article, which I can’t check due to my lack of subscription. Can anyone confirm?
Update: Sabrina appears to have modified/corrected her quote, but I’d still like confirmation on what the Salon article says.
I’m sure this story is going to be all over the LIS blogosphere, but I can’t help myself this time. It looks like OCLC, apparent owners of the Dewey Decimal System, are suing The Library Hotel, accusing the hotel of trademark infringement for their egregious use of DDC. Here’s an article about it: Newsday.com - Library catalog system owner sues book-based New York hotel
And here’s a quote from the article: “I would term it straight-out trademark infringement,” said Joseph R. Dreitler, a trademark lawyer with the Columbus office of Jones Day, which represents the Online center.
“A person who came to their Web site and looked at the way (the hotel) is promoted and marketed would think they were passing themselves off as connected with the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification system.”
OK, first of all, the average website visitor will be surprised to learn that the DDC has an owner at all. In fact, I think most librarians-in-training are surprised to learn that. Then the aforementioned visitor will be surprised to learn that our profession, working so hard for the propagation of the public domain, is largely under the thumb of a corporation (calling itself nonprofit) that goes out of its way to maintain its singular domination over a system of representing/organizing knowledge. They won’t be surprised, however, to see that the library profession is represented by classification militants with a penchant for bad publicity and an ability to squeeze the fun right out of any good idea. Just the message we need to be sending…
Well, in another astonishing development in my very brief writing career, my Webjunction article was featured in the Clips and Pointers section of this month’s D-Lib. I am humbled, again.
Also in Clips and Pointers, there’s a link to the Music Information Retrieval Research Bibliography (MIRBIB), which happens to be a project of my friend, UIUC GSLIS Professor J. Stephen Downie. MIR is a really interesting multidisciplinary pursuit that concerns, amongst other things, constructing music as searchable data and developing methodologies to search and access that data. Check out this book chapter Downie wrote (warning: .pdf) that provides a nice introduction to the field.
Well, I’ve been home for two days now and I’m still catching up on the news. There were about 3000 headlines in my aggregator, which I’ve whittled down to about 900. By the time I get home tonight, there will likely be about 400 more.
Looks like lots of good things happened in my short absence from the blogosphere:
1. My dmoz LIS Weblog category has been fully updated and now shows 277 entries. Thanks to Steven for noticing/promoting.
2. My response to the Distributed Library Project was given linkage by Jessamyn and subsequently Rory. Thanks!
3. My WebJunction article was mentioned in the most recent Internet Resources Newsletter. Again, thanks. I should also take this opportunity to thank Walt for his gracious write-up of the same article in the latest Cites and Insights (pdf).
4. I learned that two of my fellow Kentucky librarian bloggers, Catherine Lavallee-Welch of Englib and Anna Creech, the eclectic librarian, will be presenting at this year’s Kentucky Library Association conference, which is conveniently located in Louisville. I’m definitely hoping to attend (perhaps making use of the aforementioned funding opportunity).
I just learned that Seattle librarian, Nancy Pearl, now famous as the model for the “librarian action figure,” will be paying a visit to our library to talk about her
That little article I wrote for Webjunction has been published.
I’m trying to avoid any pre-emptive commentary about how it might have been different. There’s one edit that was made that, having read it again, doesn’t sit quite right with me. But that’s OK - I had the chance to contest and it didn’t bother me then. I’m mostly just pleased that they liked it enough to add it to their site.
Opinions are welcome.
OK, I have been brimming with anticipation all week toward making this announcement. It is my profound pleasure and privilege to introduce a new collaborative effort between myself and the estimable Steven M. Cohen:
LIS Blogsource - The library weblog about library weblogs (RSS feed)
The idea is to provide a portal for all things LIS bloggery: new blogs, redesigns, software migrations, what have you. As we have both devoted much bandwidth to covering this stuff in our respective blogs, the time seemed right to join forces and give you a one-stop news source on the ever-growing and changing LIS blogosphere.
It’s a work-in-progress, but there is already some worthwhile content to check out. Suggestions are welcome, as are any notices about new or changing LIS blogs: greg at lishost dot com.
So here’s the scoop on dmoz.org. On Monday, the public cgi scripts became active again, which means that the public is once again able to submit sites. However, edited categories are only now being updated on the public servers, one at a time, from the mirror dmoz site. This process should be completed sometime Thursday afternoon, so look for a current category listing then. Again, sorry for the misguidance.
Those of you who use dmoz regularly have probably noticed that there have been no changes to any directory in over a month. Sites that have been added or changed by editors in the past month or so have, up to this point, been invisible to the public. This was due to a system-wide upgrade that was apparently quite involved. The good news is that the freeze is expected to end tomorrow at noon PDT. Amongst other things, this means the count of LIS Weblogs should jump from the current 217 to over 250! When I started as an editor in March, this count was under 100. I see no indication that this growth has plateaued and look forward to seeing what the future holds for our little part of the blogosphere.
Update: It appears I misinterpreted the recent forum discussion, as nothing has changed at dmoz. Sorry for the apparent misinformation - I’ll keep checking in and keep you posted.
Nice to see that my soon-to-be city of employment, Louisville, KY, ranked 8th in a study of America’s Most Literate Cities. This gives me hope.
Courtesy of LISNews.com.
