Anarchist Bookfair celebrates decade of dissent

"Ten years after it started, the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair has become a popular rallying point for the far left, thanks to shared enemies like the Bush Administration and the Patriot Act." This annual event has created its own culture. This article covers the reasons for the longlasting success of the fair, and the types of businesses represented.

Towards a Learning Revolution in Australia

National Conversation on Lifelong Learning
Adult Learning Australia has taken an initiative to generate a national conversation on future directions for lifelong learning in Australia. This project has involved a discussion paper titled Towards a learning revolution in Australia which was released in December 2004 and consultations in all States during the period 14 March to 8 April 2005. The project is being directed by ALA Visiting Research Fellow Peter Kearns.

Computers in Libraries

The computers in Libraries conference has just closed but you can read details of sessions in the blog posts for InfoToday.

e-learning or working from home

For those of us who prefer to work and study at home, this is a dream come true. An article in the Australian (Study's future online) quotes a “survey of senior executives in 1200 organisations by recruitment firm Chandler Macleod Group [which] found that 60per cent of respondents believed e-learning was the future for employees wanting to study and work full time.” There is a certain excitement in the article ….

“IT has been hyped as the learning solution for people on the move, in the workplace and in far-flung corners of the world.
Now, after a long and often bumpy ride, some of Australia's biggest employers have given e-learning the thumbs up. “

Read the entire article

I just can’t help wondering about the networking and mentoring, the value of getting out of the house, and the stimulation of working with a team. How are our email communication skills without a quirk of the eyebrow??? Otherwise I’m very happy here in front of the computer.

Sacrilege

How could he??!! What was he thinking??!! Tearing pages out of a book in the library? Sacrilege!!?? Would you go into a church and swear or graffiti? No!! Would you go into a library and tear the pages out of a book?? Well what if no-one was looking...?? Sacrilege!! And he only got six months. What is the legal system coming to?? And it was an attorney at that. The article in the Hawaii News reports that an attorney was suspended from practising for six months *ONLY six months??!!) for tearing pages out of a book for his own purposes. Sacrilege, I say!!

Innovative use of ipods in Library

As Librarians, it is our constant challenge to be able to bring material to the patron in the most user-friendly and accurate way possible. We are always on the lookout for better and more efficient, effective ways of matching client with material whether it is information bytes or reading material. Thankyou then, to South Huntington Public Library which is on Long Island, New York for leading the way with ipods. I knew about ipods and their potential in the music field, but did not know that any were available for use in, or loan from, a library. But it goes beyond that. As I reported in News Bytes, on an article entitled Library Shuffles Its Collection ,
“the library ran a pilot program using the portable MP3 devices to store audio books downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store. They started with six shuffles, and now are up to a total of 10. Each device holds a single audio book.” So they have extended the concept to invlude using the technology to making audio books available in what seems to be a fr more user-friendly format. Listen here to an interview with the library’s director.

New forms of search to research

Websearch University is an annual conference. Find out how to use blogs, RSS, and news aggregators as a search tool in your work. Yahoo’s John Glickspoke at the last Websearch university and shared his notes in his blog ….
Class Notes from WebSearch University Conference
-Web search has now become the de-facto starting point for most researchers, …
-There was a lot of focus on data available on the "invisible web," and a lot of interest in what steps we are taking to make this data searchable. To this end, I was able to demo the new partnership Yahoo! has with Worldcat.org that allows Yahoo! searchers to find out if books are available at their local library (part of our Public Site Match Program where Yahoo! partners with numerous not-for-profits).
-With information increasingly available, lots of people were looking for new solutions to better track, store and categorize the information that they have found; traditional IE bookmarks and folders aren't sufficient for many advanced searches.

-News Alerts and RSS feeds are becoming increasingly important for staying on top of areas of interest.

Novels in seventy word bytes

So many authors wrote, in the past, in instalments produced for the popular serials of the time. Undoubtedly it affected the style of writing. But now we have novels for the mobile phone. Thankyou to J.M. Tyree blogging for 3 Quarks Daily, for awakening me to a whole new phenomenon. How long will it last? As long as e-books read on the internet, I would guess. Personally I feel crosseyed at the thought of reading a novel on my mobile phone, but then ....I am mobile illiterate anyway. Many novels apparently have been written for cell phones. But this particular one, from China,"Out of the fortress" appeared on tens of thousands of phones on the day of its release. The Nrw York Times described it as a "marriage of haiku and Hemingway, twice daily in 70-character servings." A literary study crying for attention...

Google the future of libraries?

I don't suppose anyone can foresee the impact of Google's decision to digitise library books and periodicals. It certainly has tones of the demise of the Librarian. And if the report from Bangor University library is also an indiation of future trends then it would seem increasingly likely.
But while all of that would seem a natural response, especially from Librarians, to the Google plans, it was less foreseeable that the French would react quite so strongly. "Here we find a risk of crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations have of the world," [Jean-Noel Jeanneney, who heads France's national library and is a noted historian]wrote, urging the EU to act fast. "He pushed his campaign forward this week by announcing the national library would make editions of 22 French periodicals and newspapers dating back to the 19th century available on the Internet." I'm glad he's in there batting for the non-American world. But I also am thankful that Goggle is doing what it is... Ah the dichotomy of a conservative Librarian excited by the possibilites of a digital world.

Libraries are cool ...

''The library is a great place to socialize," said Sonia Booth, 17, a member of the board. Wow!! What's this. A teenager wants to hang out in the Library??!! "The shopping malls teem with them after school, and the movie theater is their usual Friday night hangout." But the Library??!! Yes according to this article from the Boston.com news site. And congratulations to the Librarian. The article continues "Vicki Solomon wanted to create an environment where teenagers could feel they were doing something a little more constructive, or just relax and enjoy reading.

So she started a teen advisory board to help the Cambridge Public Library become that haven."