Library pioneers strove for a place in history- MassLive.com.

Library pioneers strove for a place in history
Monday, July 28, 2008
By STAN FREEMAN sfreeman@repub.com

One's name is imprinted on history. The other's is not.

After all, almost everyone has heard of the Dewey Decimal System. But who can say that he or she has ever heard of the Cutter Expansive Classification System?

Melvil Dewey, director of the Amherst College library in the 1870s, and Charles Ammi Cutter, director of the Forbes Library in Northampton in the 1890s, were friends, co-founders of the American Library Association, and recognized visionaries in the library sciences. But they were also rivals for the same narrowly defined place in history.

They both sought to make their names as the inventor of the system that would standardize the classification of books in libraries around the world.

But, in the end, character may have been destiny.

"You would have liked Cutter if you met him; you wouldn't have liked Dewey," says Wayne A. Wiegand, a professor of library and information sciences at Florida State University and the author of "Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey."

Note to self: The therapeutic effects of reading other people's to-do lists - Healthy Living, Health & Wellbeing - The Independent.

Note to self: The therapeutic effects of reading other people's to-do lists
Sasha Cagen has spent the past decade collecting other people's to-do lists – she reveals why the simplest form of therapy may be index-linked
By Kate Burt, Sunday, 3 August 2008

Other people's to-do lists can be endlessly fascinating – but pinpointing exactly why isn't always easy, admits Sasha Cagen, an American writer who has spent the past nine years collecting hand-written "notes to self" from hundreds of strangers.

Yet, just a few minutes browsing through those lists on the blog Cagen has dedicated to her pursuit goes some way to providing the answer. "Get car headlamp fixed, mop hall, call cat psychic," reads one. In another, a trainee psychotherapist bullet-points some fears about her impending career that, intriguingly, include "I hate having to think about my clients in relation to my clothes and hair," while the classic "Girls I've kissed" list (complete with names, descriptions, nationalities and the year the kissing took place) is reassuring in its familiarity – who hasn't done the same?

The fascinating blog from this article is at http://todolistblog.blogspot.com

Administration Contacts | San Diego Public Library.

Administration | San Diego Public Library
Library Director Deborah Barrow

[Left, screenshot, Library Director page, SDPL]

Deborah Barrow is the Library Director for the City of San Diego's public library system, which is composed of the Central Library, 35 community libraries, and the literacy program - Project Read. With over 20 years experience in public library service, Barrow has served 13 years as the director of library systems in Northern California. She served at the City of Watsonville from December 1995 to February 2005, and the City of Sunnyvale from February 2005 to July of 2008. Barrow joined the San Diego Public Library system on July 21, 2008.

Shatner's Denny Crane TV's best fiction.

Shatner's Denny Crane TV's best fiction
Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun, Published: Wednesday, July 30, 2008

In television, as in life, the memorable characters stay with us forever, their delightful idiosyncrasies ingrained in the part of our brain that stores the quirky stuff.

The truly great characters of the small screen, for instance, include ribald Karen Walker of Will & Grace, neurotic George Costanza on Seinfeld, brazen Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous, and the frenetic Dust Bunnies that live under The Big Comfy Couch.

But there is one character that stands above the rest, by far the best work of fiction created by a scriptwriter since television became a universal North American household appliance in the 1950s and forever changed the cultural landscape.

That would be Denny Crane, the skirt-chasing, politically incorrect, stogie-puffing tough but tender lawyer on Boston Legal.

It's Friday last, early in the afternoon, and William Shatner has just left the Los Angeles set of Boston Legal and is heading home, chatting on his Bluetooth headset as he navigates through traffic.

Love the show, grown to love Shatner as never before.. I want to be him at my own 77, laugh.. I treasure "Boston Legal," and as the last season unfolds on my TiVo, I'll be there.. just finished a book I'd meant to read for a long time, "Star Trek Memories," by Shatner.. I'll have to grab his new autobiography...

Visiting Charleston, S.C., on a Budget - NYTimes.com.

North America > United States > South Carolina > Charleston
Charleston on the Cheap
By CHRIS DIXON, Published: July 25, 2008

WHEN celebrities and other well-heeled travelers fell in love with Charleston, S.C., drawn by its air of 19th-century elegance and its palm-fringed seacoast setting, the $400-a-night hotel room and the $100 dinner entree inevitably followed. But this progressive and mystically lovely city, surrounded by water and wilderness, can still be a destination for the budget-conscious, too.

[Above, screenshot of article photograph...]

Many of the area’s most captivating historic attractions are essentially free. Beaches and an outstanding farmers’ market are open to all, and the sweet tea and fabulous food can be found in off-the-beaten-path restaurants well known to the locals. With some careful shopping in advance, even a hotel room or condo can be affordable.

About NASA Images.

About NASA Images

[Editor's note: The main site is at http://www.nasaimages.org/]

[Left, screenshot of image of auroras from space, source:
http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/detail/nasaNAS~20~20~120199~226898:Auroras-Underfoot]

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA's images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

Support NASA Images
NASA and Internet Archive entered into a Space Act Agreement in 2007 to create this service, but the Internet Archive receives no financial support from NASA. The project is currently funded through a grant from the Kahle-Austin Foundation. We are actively looking for additional financial support in the form of grants and sponsorships. If your organization would like to support this important project, we want to hear from you. Please contact us at info@archive.org.

To Come:
Continuous updating of the media collections. Custom prints of the images with NASA Images.org.
Space and science-related books and other merchandise through affiliate relationships.
We will encourage visitors to use these services to help support this project. To Contact the Internet Archive regarding NASA Images, please send email to: info@archive.org

The Comic-Con Hour - washingtonpost.com.

Live From San Diego
The Comic-Con Hour
Jen Chaney and Liz Kelly, 'Lost' Bloggers, Pop Culture Wonder Twins
Friday, July 25, 2008; 11:00 AM

Whatever is happening in pop culture happens at Comic-Con.

The annual convention, held in San Diego this year from July 23 through July 27, brings sneak peeks at major upcoming movies ("The Spirit," "The Watchmen," "The Pineapple Express"), panel discussions about beloved TV shows ("Heroes," "The Office," and, of course, "Lost") and scores of authors, artists and fans to the San Diego Convention Center for an entertainment feast of epic proportions.

I recommend that line above as "quote of the season," .. "Whatever is happening in pop culture happens at Comic-Con."

eFoundations: Does metadata matter?.

Does metadata matter?
Posted by Andy Powell at 17:19 18 July 2008 in Metadata , Open Access , Persistent Identifiers , Repositories , Resource Discovery | Permalink

This is a 30 minute slidecast (using 130 slides), based on a seminar I gave to Eduserv staff yesterday lunchtime.  It tries to cover a broad sweep of history from library cataloguing, thru the Dublin Core, Web search engines, IEEE LOM, the Semantic Web, arXiv, institutional repositories and more.

It's not comprehensive - so it will probably be easy to pick holes in if you so choose - but how could it be in 30 minutes?!

The focus is ultimately on why Eduserv should be interested in 'metadata' (and surrounding areas), to a certain extent trying to justify why the Foundation continues to have a significant interest in this area.  To be honest, it's probably weakest in its conclusions about whether, or why, Eduserv should retain that interest in the context of the charitable services that we might offer to the higher education community. Nonetheless, I hope it is of interest (and value) to people.  I'd be interested to know what you think.

BiblioCommons Emerges: “Revolutionary” Social Discovery System for Libraries - 7/19/2008 - Library Journal.

BiblioCommons Emerges: “Revolutionary” Social Discovery System for Libraries
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 7/19/2008

    * Offers “easy readers’ advisory”
    * System layered on top of ILS
    * Users new to social web take to tagging

BilbioCommons, a new social discovery system for libraries that replaces all user-facing OPAC functionality, allowing for faceted searching and easier user commenting and tagging, has gone live in Oakville, ON, a city of 160,000 outside Toronto. It is expected to be used by public libraries serving more than half of Canada’s population—and some libraries in the United States, too. “This is revolutionary, as far as I’m concerned,” Gail Richardson, Oakville PL’s acting director of online services, told LJ. “People don’t want a library that acts like just a glorified card catalog online. They want a catalog that’s as good as Google and Amazon.”

See my previous post for a similar article on library catalogs, and what's needed in libraries today...

Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize - Tennant: Digital Libraries - Blog on Library Journal.

Tennant: Digital Libraries
Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize
July 22, 2008

As I often do, I'm working on a presentation I must give tomorrow morning. Actually, I'm a bit ahead of myself. I mean, I like have hours left. But anyway, that isn't my point. My point is taken straight from my presentation:

Why do we try to differentiate on stuff that doesn’t matter... in ways users find annoying?

Let me explain. No one in their right mind wants to use a library catalog. Yes, you read that right. No one wants to use a library catalog. They want to find a book. Or an article or whatever. They only use a library catalog because they have to. And actually, they often just use it to find out a) if you have a particular book they've already discovered elsewhere, and b) whether it's on the shelf.

This is the second time today I've seen similar thoughts; here was the other quote: “People don’t want a library that acts like just a glorified card catalog online. They want a catalog that’s as good as Google and Amazon.” And a link to that article...

The 25 Most Modern Libraries in the World | Best Colleges Online.

The 25 Most Modern Libraries in the World
By Christina Laun

Libraries aren’t just musty places to store books with librarians shushing anyone who makes a peep. They’ve become much more than that and the modern library is often home to sleek architecture and the latest technology. These 25 libraries, in no particular order, demonstrate how libraries have become part of the cutting edge of information management, design and Web technology, and all of them can help you get some ideas on how to bring your library into the future.
...

Technology and Innovation

These libraries have found new and creative ways to use technology and design.
...
17. San Diego Public Library: This library was one of the first to embrace wireless technology, offering free wifi at all of its locations. The website for the library is extensive with services for live online homework help, a variety of ebooks and audio books, online assistance and more. Sleek modern design at its present location, plans to build an ultra modern facility and self checkout systems help make this a modern facility.

What Makes a Man » Ernest Hemingway: A Celebration.

July 21, 2008
Ernest Hemingway: A Celebration

Ernest Hemingway, a tribute on his birthday

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers.  He changed the shape of American literature for all time.  In his novels and stories he defined the heroic modern man, a definition that in large part, holds sway to this day.  His influence on American literature and men in general, has been immense.

       There are many better qualified than me to write about Ernest Hemingway.  But Ernest Hemingway helped shape my life and has been an important part of my journey as an adult man.  I cannot let this day pass without a celebration of a writer who wrote so elegantly and expressively about the lives of men. 

Hemingway birthplace restored from memories.

Hemingway birthplace restored from memories
Sunday, July 20, 2008 By Joyce Gannon, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

OAK PARK, Ill. -- In the Hemingway home in suburban Chicago at the turn of the 19th century, both parents had careers. So on many mornings when the family finished breakfast, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, a physician, went off to see patients and his wife, Grace, retreated to the parlor to teach her music students.

Young Ernest Hemingway and his siblings often remained at the table with their maternal grandfather, "Abba" Hall, who regaled the youngsters with stories about animals and Bible readings. Ernest's grandfather and the other adults who resided at the Queen Anne Victorian home in Oak Park, Ill., were strong influences on the boy, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in literature.
...
For more information, go to http://www.ehfop.org/.

In 'Replay,' A Life Full Of Second Chances : NPR.

You Must Read This
by Brad Meltzer

In 'Replay,' A Life Full Of Second Chances
Listen Now [4 min 7 sec]

All Things Considered, July 10, 2008 · When I was 19 years old ... Oy, I already sound like an old man. But that's the point. When I was 19, my dreams were even bigger than my hair, which is saying something. And it was in the midst of those dreams that I first read the novel Replay, by Ken Grimwood.

Replay has a simple premise: In the first chapter, the main character, a 43-year-old man, sits at his desk and drops dead of a heart attack. When he wakes up, he feels odd, taking in familiar smells and old sights. He spots a Playboy centerfold of a brunette on the wall, and he realizes he's back in college, in his freshman dorm room. He's 18 again — with all the memories of his 43-year-old self. He gets — as the title says — to replay his life.

Art - William Butler Yeats’s Relationship With Maud Gonne Is Explored at the National Library of Ireland - NYTimes.com.

Art
Yeats Meets the Digital Age, Full of Passionate Intensity
By JIM DWYER Published: July 20, 2008

DUBLIN - SO here, under airtight, light-shielding glass, is a notebook given to William Butler Yeats in 1908 by Maud Gonne, the beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary and object of Yeats’s infatuation across five decades, the muse — well, really, the furnace — for his poetry of yearning and his willing partner in what they called a mystical marriage. As far as actual marriage, Gonne became expert at wielding the word “no.”
...
Yeats taped the letter into the notebook. Now, a century later, that book is on display at the National Library of Ireland, opened to a page that is just barely visible under the indirect lighting prescribed for aged ink treasures. Yet every syllable — every comma-deprived sentence, every curve in her script, every ampersand — is legible. Next to the display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry. If needed, Gonne’s handwriting can be deciphered on a pop-up screen that types out her fevered scrawl.

The notebook is one of thousands of elements in a dazzling exhibition, “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats,” more like a life-size, walk-through Web site than an ordinary museum show. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The National Library of Ireland - The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats - Online Exhibition.

An amazing online exhibition, for fans of poetry, Ireland, literature, Yeats.. you can wander, read, examine, study in here for hours.. left, a screenshot from the exhibit's online opening scene...

Film - After 10 Years, ‘The X-Files’ Returns to the Big Screen - NYTimes.com.

Film
Still Out There (in Movie Theaters)
By MARK HARRIS, Published: July 13, 2008

CHRIS CARTER, the creator of “The X-Files,” has a message for anyone who, some time during the show’s nine-season run, threw up his hands trying to figure out exactly what was going on with the extraterrestrial abductions, the black-oil aliens, the metal sinus implants, the Syndicate, the Cigarette Smoking Man, Mulder’s sister, Scully’s baby, Mulder’s father, Scully’s cancer, the colonists, the Lone Gunmen, Deep Throat and all the rest of the show’s staggeringly complex and often murky mythology:

You can come back now.

The Dark Knight - Movie - Review - The New York Times.

Movie Review
The Dark Knight (2008) NYT Critics' Pick
Showdown in Gotham Town
By MANOHLA DARGIS, Published: July 18, 2008

Dark as night and nearly as long, Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind — including “Batman Begins,” Mr. Nolan’s 2005 pleasurably moody resurrection of the series — largely by embracing an ambivalence that at first glance might be mistaken for pessimism. But no work filled with such thrilling moments of pure cinema can be rightly branded pessimistic, even a postheroic superhero movie like “The Dark Knight.”

Lives and Letters: The Lion and the Mouse: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

Lives and Letters
The Lion and the Mouse
The battle that reshaped children’s literature.
by Jill Lepore, July 21, 2008

Anne Carroll Moore was born long ago but not so far away, in Limerick, Maine, in 1871. She had a horse named Pocahontas, a father who read to her from Aesop’s Fables, and a grandmother with no small fondness for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Annie, whose taste ran to “Little Women,” was a reader and a runt. Her seven older brothers called her Shrimp. In 1895, when she was twenty-four, she moved to New York, where she more or less invented the children’s library.

In Gettysburg Cyclorama, a Big Touch-Up for the Blue and the Gray - NYTimes.com.

Big Touch-Up for the Blue and the Gray
    By LISANNE RENNER, Published: July 7, 2008

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — The pair of soldier’s shoes is battered and hard-worn; a hole in one leather sole suggests the many miles trudged en route to battle with a rifled musket and canteen.

These Civil War-style shoes are being pressed into duty for a battle that ended 145 years ago — not for last weekend’s re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg but for a conflict that still rages on the canvas of an enormous painting in the round. The Gettysburg Cyclorama, as it’s called, is to reopen on Sept. 26 after a five-year restoration, and for the first time in more than a century, viewers standing in the middle of the wraparound canvas will see it as its artist originally intended.