Is that just a game? No, it’s a cultural artifact
When Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, started preserving video games and video-game artifacts in 1998, he thought it was closer to professional oblivion than a bold new move into the future. On March 8 at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Lowood announced a game canon, an idea closely modeled on the work of the National Film Preservation Board, which every year compiles a list of films to be added to LC’s National Film Registry....
New York Times, Mar. 12

Come for the Xbox, stay for the books
Lauren Mechling writes: “As a young adult author, should I be happy or worried that libraries across America are using video games, music, and movies to capture the attention of teens? As I type this, R&B singer Jaheim’s new album Ghetto Classics is blaring from a speaker overhead. A dozen or so teenage boys are clustered around a honeycomb of computers, chewing the fat while a couple of them watch an Akon music video and the rest surf MySpace.”...
Boston Globe, Mar. 11

Alaskan gamer gets laptop back
Brian Tanner, the web surfer whose computer police seized after chasing him twice from the Palmer (Alaska) Public Library parking lot, has his laptop back. Tanner said Palmer police called March 3 saying he could pick the machine up after police checked it for child pornography....
Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News, Mar. 10

Speck-tacular fun in Oswego
There were squeals of excitement at the Chinese New Year’s party at the Oswego (N.Y.) Public Library February 16 from children as well as the guest of honor—a miniature pot-bellied pig named Speck. Monique Frey, an English teacher at Pulaski High School, brought her pet for the celebration, as 2007 is the Year of the Pig. Judi Furnari, children’s program coordinator at the library, arranged the event....
Oswego (N.Y.) Daily News, Feb. 19

Abandoned books still in old East St. Louis library
For the 7,000 books sitting in a storage unit on State Street in East St. Louis, Illinois, it’s abandonment all over again. The books were among at least 10,000 items including magazines and record albums left in a shuttered city library for more than three years. Many of the items became makeshift beds or fire starters for homeless people, who broke into the library for shelter....
St. Louis Post-Disptach, Mar. 11

Rockford College to auction rare books
Six months after auctioning off about 2,000 pieces of art, Rockford (Ill.) College now has plans to put the school’s rare book collection on the block. Liquidation of the rare books is the latest attempt at reducing the sizable debt that’s plagued the private liberal arts college for decades. The first of two book auctions will be March 16, when 14 rare books will be sold; other titles in the collection will be auctioned in mid to late April....
Rock River Times, Mar. 7

The Wikipedia scandal
Wikipedia’s latest scandal is the revelation that a high-ranking administrator, and employee (until March) of the associated commercial venture Wikia, had falsified his academic credentials. It turns out the contributor nicknamed Essjay was not a tenured professor at a private university but a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan who holds no advanced degrees....
The Guardian (U.K.), Mar. 8

All SirsiDynix roads lead to Rome
Andrew Pace writes: “SirsiDynix announced March 13 (PDF file) that it would begin developing a ‘holistic platform’ for its automation system, code-named Rome. That means that Horizon 7.3 and Unicorn 3.1 (right) will be the last versions of those products from SirsiDynix. Horizon 8/Corinthian and Unicorn 3.2 will not be released. That said, Rome will be built (not in a day, I venture) upon the architecture of the Unicorn system. The problem, to me, is that all the descriptions of Rome sound a lot like the descriptions of Horizon 8.0.”...
Hectic Pace blog, Mar. 13

Viacom sues Google over YouTube clips
Viacom slapped YouTube and parent company Google with a lawsuit March 13, accusing the wildly popular video-sharing site of “massive intentional copyright infringement” and seeking more than $1 billion in damages. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that nearly 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s entertainment programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. But whether the DMCA’s wording will let Viacom win is a surprisingly open question....
C|net.news, Mar. 13

Flickr debuts Collections
Flickr has launched a way to categorize and organize your photo sets or “collections.” A collection is a container into which you can place either sets or other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy as deep as five. Collections get a spiffy new “mosaic” icon (like the Flora example here) to represent them....
Flickr blog, Mar. 13

Not so fast, Comcast tells bandwidth hogs
Amanda Lee of Cambridge, Massachusetts, received a call from Comcast in December ordering her to curtail her Web use or lose her high-speed internet connection for a year. Lee, who said she had been using the same broadband connection for years without a problem, was taken aback. But when she asked what the download limit was, she was told there was no limit, that she was just downloading too much....
Boston Globe, Mar. 12

Congress to issue digital TV coupons?
Brushing aside congressional suggestions that the nation is ill-prepared for the conversion to digital TV in 2009, the Department of Commerce March 12 unveiled its plan to help subsidize the switchover from analog. In the National Telecommunications and Information Administration plan, each household can claim two $40 coupons that they then can use toward the purchase of a set-top box that can translate digital signals so television shows can be viewed on analog TVs....
Reuters, Mar. 13

LC Bibliographic Control meeting
Karen Coyle writes: “No one defined the term bibliographic control during the meeting of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and in fact it was rarely voiced as a term. By the end of the day, none of us in the audience could have made a clear statement about the day’s topic. The speaker who seemed most on track (and who was the most interesting, IMO) was Timothy Burke, professor of history. Burke talked about how he searches for information, but most importantly he talked about why he searches for information.”...
Coyle’s InFormation blog, Mar. 9

Computer-savvy search database launched
Metaweb, a new company founded by technologist Danny Hillis, is creating a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated internet. On Freebase, information will be structured to make it possible for software programs to discern relationships and meaning. For example, the database could field a query about a child-friendly dentist within 10 miles of one’s home and yield a single result....
New York Times, Mar. 8

Toward an interplanetary internet
Teams from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are hammering out a networking standard that will form the backbone of a future interplanetary system of internets. Dubbed InterPlaNet, the standard would enable spacecraft communication and the sharing of information across the solar system. Today, NASA spacecraft carry telecommunications equipment that enable them to correspond with Earth, but these devices lack the ability to link with those on other spacecraft....
American National Standards Institute, Feb. 27

Mashups for health librarians (PDF file)
Allan Cho discusses medical mashups, or hybrid applications that take two information sources and merge them to create a third, more useful tool. He writes, “Although they are part of Web 2.0 and share Web 2.0’s openness, participation, and collaborative aspects, mashups build on a technological base dating back to the earliest days of the Web.”...
Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association 28, no. 1 (Winter): 19–22

Who’s watching your space?
A video summary (2:53) of the OCLC Symposium at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, January 19, in Seattle. More than 400 people attended this discussion of social networking practices and trends. Participants included moderator Michael Stephens (right) and panelists Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, and Marc Smith....
YouTube, Mar. 9

Government agencies violate online information law
Ten years after Congress enacted the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments, only one in five federal agencies actually complies with the law, according to a new survey released March 12 by the National Security Archive. Many agency web links are missing or just wrong—one FOIA fax number checked in the survey actually rang in the maternity ward of a military base hospital. The government-wide audit, File Not Found, was conducted with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation....
National Security Archive, Mar. 12

How the library changes lives (PDF file)
Last spring, as part of its ongoing partnership with ALA, Woman’s Day asked its readers to send in stories about how the library affected their lives. The 2,000 heartfelt, funny, and touching essays submitted prove that the library isn’t just the place you go to check out books. Ellen Breslau presents four stories of hope and inspiration....
Woman’s Day, Mar. 6

Alternative careers survey
Rachel Singer Gordon is writing a book on alternative careers for librarians and she wants to hear from anyone who has pursued a nontraditional path—those who have embarked on a new career after working for some time in libraries, those who earned an MLS but never worked in a traditional library setting, those who pursue alternative opportunities as a supplement, those who work in a traditional setting but do nontraditional work, and those who work in nontraditional settings...
Liminal Librarian blog, Mar. 9

Rachel Carson Online Book Club
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, along with Friends of the National Conservation Training Center, launched the Rachel Carson Online Book Club in March and continuing through November 2007. The book club will “focus on the life and work of Rachel Carson, including her role as a female leader in science and government. Through the study of her writing, the Book Club will provide an opportunity for dialogue and discussion of current environmental issues in light of Carson’s legacy.”...
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Feb. 26

NCAC report discusses censorship of science
The National Coalition Against Censorship has issued a report that details the censorship of government scientists, suppression and distortion of research, intimidation in federal science agencies, and the serious First Amendment implications of such practices. Political Science (PDF file) comes in the wake of an action by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which on February 26 issued an internal memo to its biologists and other employees instructing them not to publicly discuss climate change, Arctic polar bears, or the status of sea ice unless they are specifically authorized to do so....
National Coalition Against Censorship, Mar. 12; Federal Times, Mar. 13

Santa Barbara reads for Earth Day
Faculty and students at the University of California at Santa Barbara are reading the same book this spring to spread the awareness of global warming. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury, 2006) will be the focus of events and discussions leading up to Earth Day, April 22. The Santa Barbara Public Library is also joining in a series of community conversations throughout April....
University of California at Santa Barbara

CUPA-HR survey finds senior academic salaries up
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources 2006–2007 administrative salary survey shows median base salaries have risen by 4% for senior-level administrative jobs. The median salary for a director of library services was $79,560 over all institutions reporting....
CUPA-HR, Feb. 27

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, librarian
The U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp on March 15 to commemorate the bicentennial of American poet Longfellow’s birth. Longfellow served as librarian of Bowdoin College Library in Brunswick, Maine, from 1829 to 1835 during the same period in which he taught modern languages for the college. It was typical for colleges to tap a faculty member to serve as librarian on a part-time basis....
Library History Buff, Mar. 6

IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program
Applications are being accepted until March 16 for a fellowship program that provides early career development and continuing education for LIS professionals from countries with developing economies. Up to five individuals will be selected to participate in this five-week program that will take place in Dublin, Ohio, and Leiden in the Netherlands....
OCLC

Murder in the library, part 2
More skullduggery in the stacks of academic and research libraries, as George Eberhart concludes a brief review of detective bibliofiction. In Gaudy Night, unusual happenings at Shrewsbury College, Oxford University, include missing manuscript proofs from the library tended by Miss Burrows, who complains, “The trouble is, that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.”...
Britannica Blog, Mar. 12

IMLS Conservation Bookshelf initiative
The Institute of Museum and Library Services invites proposals for a cooperative agreement to purchase and distribute a set of conservation-related books, bibliographies, DVDs, and online resources as part of its Connecting to Collections initiative. The cooperator will also mount a promotional campaign about the initiative, with special attention to raising awareness and soliciting requests for the bookshelf from small to medium-sized museums, libraries, and archives....
Institute of Museum and Library Services, Mar. 13

Bizarre titles of 2006
They are not the kind of titles that are likely to top the bestseller charts. But half a dozen bizarre tomes, including a guide to stray shopping carts and a history of a Coventry ice-cream business, may win their 15 minutes of fame as contenders for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The competition, which has been run by The Bookseller magazine since 1978, invites publishers, booksellers, and librarians to submit their choices of the strange and odd....
The Independent (U.K.), Mar. 9