The Rogue Scholar

More Awards and a Bit About the Iraqi NationalLibrary

Looking for a real challenge? Try being the Director/Head Honcho/Guy in Charge  of the Iraqi National Library.  This is not a job for the faint hearted.

In lighter news that's closer to home (for me, that is) the Academy has won honors for our website. In the words of our communications director:

"The Academy's website has been awarded the 2007 Cyber Space Award from the New York Society of Association Executives, an honor for which the entire staff should be proud. The award recognizes "outstanding immediacy of overview, ease of navigation, aesthetics, consistency, timeliness of content, internal search capabilities, usefulness, interact-ability, originality, and Internet vision."

Woot for us! [APPLAUSE]

Calling Mr. Decimal

If you're looking to renew your knowledge of Dewey Decimal classification--which can be a drag, but plenty of libraries continue to use it and it's a good skill to retain over the long haul--then you might want to take a look at the WebDewey Tutorial over at OCLC's web site.  They cover Dewey in a fair amount of detail.  From the web site description:

WebDewey offers easy-to-use, World Wide Web-based access to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and related information, with searching and browsing capabilities; Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) intellectually and statistically mapped to Dewey numbers; and links from the mapped LCSH to the corresponding LCSH authority records. You can also add your own notes to WebDewey and display them in context, which allows you to both record valuable information about local classification practices and have it available for ready reference.

The only problems that I can see is that the tutorial won't work on any Macintosh or UNIX system and it's selective as to which PC browsers it works with. You may have to tweak your preferences a bit.

Enjoy!

EPA Libraries and Public Access

This article comes out of of today's edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

As EPA Libraries go Digital, Public Access Suffers
By Mark Clayton

For a new Democratic Congress facing big environmental issues from global warming to dwindling fisheries, the first step may be keeping the nation's top environmental libraries from closing - and saving their myriad tomes from ending up as recycled cardboard.

To meet a proposed 2007 budget cut, the Environmental Protection Agency has in recent months shuttered regional branches in Chicago, Dallas, and Kansas City, Mo., serving 15 states, and has cut hours and restricted access to four other regional libraries, affecting 16 states. Two additional libraries in the EPA's Washington headquarters closed in October.

Until these closures, the EPA had 26 libraries, brimming with a trove of environmental science in 500,000 books, 25,000 maps, thousands of studies and decades of research - much of it irreplaceable, experts say.

EPA officials say the closures are part of a plan "to modernize and improve" services while trimming $2 million from its budget. Under the plan, "unique" library documents would be "digitized" as part of a shift to online retrieval.

But while electronic databases are easy to access, they could end up being more costly to use - and thousands of those "unique" paper documents may now sit for years in repositories waiting for the funding needed to "digitize" them, critics say. Meanwhile, the closings are proceeding so quickly that key materials are likely to be lost or inaccessible for a long time, EPA librarians say.

The rest of the article is here.  I'm not sure what I thinkof the words unique and digitized being in quotes in the fifth paragraph--they're both accepted terms in Libraryland these days.  I'll be nice and assume the writer and maybe his editor were not aware of that.  Doesn't matter, it's still worth the time spent reading it.

First, Re-Open the Libraries

This article from Kelpie Wilson hit a particular note with me because until 2 years ago my wife worked as a reference librarian at the NYC EPA Region 2 library on Broadway.  She watched for 3 years as a staff of three librarians, one media specialist and one tech services paraprofessional were relocated, outsourced or just plain let go.  There may be one librarian there now--there were two the last time I checked, about a year ago.  Here's an excerpt--the rest of the story is here.

    First, Re-Open the Libraries
    By Kelpie Wilson
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Wednesday 15 November 2006

    It never got down to actual book-burning, but the Republican choke-hold on government would clearly have taken us there. In August, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public and to its own staff.

    The EPA's professional staff objected strongly, insisting that closing the libraries would hamstring them in their jobs. In a letter to Congress protesting the closures, public employees said, "We believe that this budget cut is just one of many Bush administration initiatives to reduce the effectiveness of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and to continue to demoralize its employees."

    The EPA's precipitous move to close the libraries was based on a $2 million cut in Bush's proposed $8 billion EPA budget for 2007. EPA bureaucrats did not wait to see if Congress might restore the funds or shift budget priorities in order to save the libraries; it acted immediately to box up documents for deep storage, and shut the doors.

    While the official EPA line is that all of the documents will be eventually be digitized and made available online, this will cost money that the agency does not have, so for practical purposes, all of the thousands of reports and maps that now exist only on paper or microfiche will be lost to the public and to agency scientists. They might as well just burn them.

METRO Digitization BLog

This comes from Richard Kim over at the New York Metropolitan Library Council:

"METRO recently launched a digitization blog which will highlight
digitization activities in and around the METRO region. If you're
institution has something interesting you'd like us to report on, drop
us a line at [email protected]".

The blog is here.

Good News, Bad News

First, the good news: Lily the NYAM Special Projects Librarian has let it be known that the presentations from the 2006 August RLG Members Forum are now available as MP3 files. The talks include The Future of MARC by Bill Moen and Sally McCallum, and and topics such as Folksonomies, visual resource cataloging, and describing and sharing digital images in a musem setting. Good stuff.

Now some bad news for those of you who, like me, work in the world of Technical Services: I can't vouch for the authenticity of the following e-mail. It was forwarded to me by a coworker, and apparently appeared on the AUTOCAT  LIBPROC-LIST listserv of SUNY Buffalo. The list owner says that the poster requested anonymously, and that he has no further information.

I'll say this once more: I have no idea of this email is authentic, or if it accurately describes the situation at Hampton University.  I hope it doesn't--the administrator who thinks that merely converting the collection from print to electronic resources absolves them from having to keep a TS department on hand including catalogers who are familiar with such materials is likely in for a rude awakening at some point.  On the other hand, neither do I doubt that such people exist and it's something we're going to have to deal with at some point as catalogers. That said, the email has been posted in its entirety behind the edit.

OCLC Acquires Home of Content DM

This just in:

OCLC acquires DiMeMa, developer of software
for digital media management

 

CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software
key component of OCLC digital solution set

 

"DUBLIN, Ohio, August 15, 2006—OCLC Online Computer Library Center has acquired DiMeMa (Digital Media Management), the organization that developed and supports CONTENTdm, the leading digital management software for libraries distributed by OCLC.

CONTENTdm software offers a complete set of tools to store, manage and deliver digital collections such as historical documents, photos, newspapers, audio and video on the Web.  OCLC has been the exclusive distributor of CONTENTdm software to libraries, cultural heritage organizations and other nonprofit organizations since 2002."

The full press release is behind the cut. Enjoy!

Ohio Library Council Technical Services Retreat

This comes from Margaret Mauer over at the Kent State TSLIBRARIAN listserv:

"Many of the speakers at the recent Ohio Library Council Technical Services Retreat at the Mohican State Park and Resort have graciously agreed to allow OLC to post those presentations to the internet. They are now available at:

 

http://www.library.kent.edu/mohican2006

 

Enjoy!"

 

Google Newsletter for Librarians

Google has a newsletter for librarians now, which looks like they'll make into a regular service. Unfortunately, all I have to go on is the link, which doesn't link to subscription services or even any real information. It might just be an experiment, or there might be pages that I haven't found yet. I've been looking at their website for a while,  but if there's more to this, I can't find it.  I'll update this post as I learn more. And if anyone reading this does have more info, please post a comment with what you've heard.

Thomas Gets a Face Lift

It's a short work week this week, so I have no excuse not tp post at least an article or two. In that spirit, here's something I picked up by accident.

THOMAS, one of the more amazing  government legislation research tools available to internet users, has gotten a significant face-lift. You can still search for legislation by bill number or textual content, but now there are pull-down menus that allow one to search for material that's been sponsored by a particular lawmaker as well. If you're interested in the legislative history of a given senator or representative this makes life considerably easier if all you have is the name of the congressperson in question.

Update: Something major that I overlooked in my brief once-over of the site is that those drop-down menus that make it so simple to browse through legislation by representatives or senator have a substantial shortcoming: they do not include the names of past elected individuals.  So even if a bill proposed by Dan Rostenkowski (remember him?) over a decade ago lies in the database, you can't access it from those particular menus. Granted, you can still locate the bill in question with some patient searching by text or name or bill number, but it's a bit of a let-down just the same.