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Editor’s Note: Due to staff training, next week’s AL Direct will mail on Thursday, September 27.

Sandpiper caged in Alabama
An Alabama girl is refusing to return Ellen Wittinger’s Sandpiper to her school library, claiming that the novel goes into too much detail about sex for high school students. Brookwood (Ala.) High School sophomore Lysa Harding recently picked out the book at random for a book report. Harding’s grandmother, Pam Pennington, has filed a complaint with the school and will argue her case before a review committee....

Georgetown branch to reopen in 2010
Renovation of the District of Columbia Public Library’s Georgetown branch, which was severely damaged by an April 30 fire, is expected to be complete by September 2010. DCPL officials said that the damage to the branch’s map collections, photos, and oil paintings was not as extensive as they had originally thought. Branch Manager Mary Hernandez estimated that more than 80% of the holdings in the Peabody Room, which contained irreplaceable artifacts and documents on Georgetown’s history, had been saved....

Treasure your freedom to read
According to the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, more than one book a day faces removal from free and open public access in U.S. schools and libraries. During Banned Books Week, September 29–October 6, thousands of libraries and bookstores throughout the nation will celebrate a democratic society’s most basic freedom—the freedom to read. There were 546 known attempts to remove books in 2006, and more than 9,200 attempts since OIF began to compile and publish information on book challenges in 1990....

Banned Books Week in Chicago
OIF Director Judith Krug and Shawn Healy, resident scholar from the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago, discuss Banned Books Week on Chicago Access Network TV. They also mention the Banned Books Week Read-Out! on Michigan Avenue, a September 29 event where authors will read from their favorite banned and challenged books....
Chicago Access Network TV, Sept. 17

Banned Books Week in the virtual world
OIF is offering Banned Books Week activities for librarians and the general public in virtual worlds Second Life and Teen Second Life, and on the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. ALA is working with other library partners—Alliance Library System, Alliance Second Life Library, TAP Information Services, and the new ALA membership group Virtual Communities and Libraries—to provide an interactive experience centered on Banned Books Week, September 29–October 6....

Jim Rettig and ALA
In Episode #21 of the District Dispatch podcast (6:26), ALA President-Elect Jim Rettig takes time out from his visit to D.C. to tell the Washington Office’s Andy Bridges about some of his ideas for ALA and for librarianship in the coming years....
District Dispatch blog, Sept. 14

Library patrons face long lines for computers (MP3 audio)
WBEZ arts and culture reporter Gianofer Fields talks with Larra Clark, project manager for the ALA Office for Research and Statistics, on key findings of the Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study 2006–2007, conducted by ALA and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University....
WBEZ-FM radio, Chicago, Sept. 13

Banned Books Week read-out!
Authors Chris Crutcher, Robie Harris (right), and Carolyn Mackler—who all know a thing or two about banned books—invite you to come to Chicago September 29 to participate in the Banned Books Week Read-Out! Chicago celebrities will join authors 1–4 p.m. to read passages from their favorite banned and challenged books. Admission is free. This video announcement (1:53) was produced by the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom....

Every Child Ready to Read PR kit
A promotional kit is now on hand to help you publicize materials and workshops for the “Every Child Ready to Read @ your library” program—developed by PLA and ALSC—to parents, grandparents, preschool teachers, childcare providers, and others in your community who are interested in early childhood literacy. The kit contains customizable materials to use in library publications or on your website....

Survey calls for targeted school library support
The average school library today is a well-connected facility with significant numbers of computers for students and staff to do research, according to an AASL survey of school library media centers. But the survey also suggests that school district leaders need to pay more attention to their elementary school libraries and that larger schools should be spending more per pupil on their libraries than they do now....
eSchool News, Sept. 18

Nancy Pearl to present “Book Buzz” at PLA 2008
Literary taste-maker and librarian action-figure model Nancy Pearl will present “Book Buzz” at PLA’s 12th National Conference in Minneapolis on March 26, 2008. Pearl will be joined by representatives from top publishers to discuss some of the best forthcoming books. The event is open to all attendees and requires no advance registration. Pearl will also deliver the keynote address at the Young Adult Luncheon March 28....

Kevin Nealon will keynote PLA Closing Session
Actor, comedian, and writer Kevin Nealon will present the keynote address at the Closing General Session of PLA’s 12th National Conference in Minneapolis on March 29, 2008. Nealon is best known as one of the longest-running cast members in the history of Saturday Night Live....

Promoting diversity in academic libraries
ACRL has released a white paper on “Achieving Racial and Ethnic Diversity among Academic and Research Librarians: The Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement of Librarians of Color” (PDF file). Authors Teresa Neely and Lorna Peterson discuss efforts to promote, develop, and foster workplaces that are representative of a diverse population. The paper stresses empirically supported and assessable solutions to increasing the diversity in the academic library workforce....

Last chance to save $50 at AASL
September 28 is the advance registration deadline for the AASL 13th National Conference and Exhibition, October 25–28, in Reno, Nevada. AASL members can save up to $50 off the regular on-site registration prices....

YALSA gears up for Midwinter
YALSA will kick off the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, January 11–16, with “Taking Teen Services to the Next Level,” a one-day preconference focusing on advocacy on January 11. The division’s annual Gaming Night has become a hotly anticipated event for Midwinter attendees as well. Finally, Midwinter marks the announcement of the 2008 Youth Media Awards....

Visit the CLENE blog, CEBuzz
CEBuzz is a group blog brought to you by the Continuing Library Education Network and Exchange Round Table. Launched in June and coordinated by Peter Bromberg, its mission is to provide a thought-provoking resource for those interested in and responsible for CE and staff development in libraries....

Cleveland Public Library receives preservation award
The Cleveland Public Library has been selected to receive the 2007 Award for Outstanding Commitment to the Preservation and Care of Collections. This annual award is presented jointly by the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and Heritage Preservation. The Cleveland Public Library is the first public library to receive this prestigious national award since its inception in 1999. As part of its preservation program, the library reaches out to professional conservators at the Intermuseum Conservation Association and the Northeast Document Conservation Center for expert treatment of their special collections....
Heritage Preservation, Sept. 19

Diversity Research Grants announced
The Office for Diversity has named Karen E. Downing, Mark Winston and Allison Rainey, and Allison M. Sutton as recipients of the 2007 Diversity Research Grants, a $2,000 award for original research and a $500 travel grant to attend and present at ALA Annual Conference....

2008 AASL awards program
More than $50,000 is available in 2008 through the annual AASL awards program. Eleven awards, grants, and scholarships recognize and support outstanding contributions to the school library media field in a variety of categories, including leadership, reading, information technology, and distinguished service to the profession....

Kilgour Research Award
Nominations are invited for the 2008 Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology, sponsored by OCLC and LITA. The award recognizes research relevant to the development of information technologies. The deadline for nominations is December 31....

LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award
Nominations are open for the LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award. Sponsored by Thomson Gale, this award is given annually to recognize a librarian or library that demonstrates exemplary entrepreneurship by providing an innovative product or service through the skillful and practical application of information technology. The deadline for nominations is December 1....

More censorship by check-out
A Maine woman wants to keep local children from seeing an acclaimed 1993 sex education book, It’s Perfectly Normal, written by Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Michael Emberley, so she checked out copies from the Lewiston and Auburn public libraries. And she won’t give them back. In an August 22 letter to the newspaper, JoAn Karkos cited a war on morality and called the volume “pornographic.”...
Lewiston (Me.) Sun-Journal, Aug. 22, Sept. 18

Ashland approves library tax levy
Jubilant library backers in Ashland, Oregon, say their branch of the Jackson County Library should open in late October—November 1 at the latest—after nearly three-fourths (74.6%) of voters September 18 approved a property tax levy to supplement the library budget. The money raised by the levy will boost operations at the Ashland library to 40 hours per week from the 24 proposed by Jackson County, retain outreach services to Head Start and senior centers, and offer living wages for workers. Jackson County is expected to approve a contract with the Maryland firm LSSI on September 26 to manage the entire library system....
Medford (Oreg.) Mail Tribune, Sept. 16, 18, 19

Shortfall for San Francisco branch renovations
Lack of oversight, staff vacancies, and construction delays have contributed to a $50-million shortfall in San Francisco’s ambitious project to overhaul its branch libraries, according to a report released September 17 by the Office of the Controller. To date, the program has resulted in five completed projects, with four under construction and three to begin construction this fall, according to City Librarian Luis Herrera....
San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 18

Suburban Chicago libraries use IM reference service
Hoping to connect with younger patrons, the Evanston (Ill.) Public Library is shelving tradition for a new role: instant messenger buddy. Working under the screen name EPLRef, librarians have ventured into the domain of teen gossip, offering reference services in IM format. The effort, rolled out in August, may help libraries attract the internet generation....
Chicago Tribune, Sept. 13

Sculpture found in library crawl space may be from 1860s
A broken, white marble bust and pedestal discovered in a nearly inaccessible crawl space during recent restoration work at the Manchester-by-the-Sea (Mass.) Public Library could be a piece of Civil War–era art worth nearly $200,000. An expert said the sculpture, inscribed “America Honoring Her Fallen Brave,” could be a twin of a bust of Columbia created by James Henry Haseltine that is owned by a New York art gallery....
Gloucester (Mass.) Daily Times, Sept. 13

Librarian helps inmates escape—through books
You’ll need a calculator to count the number of days Margo Fesperman has spent inside the Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, jail. With a master’s degree in library and information science, she manages the jail library system. Fesperman’s mission, as she says, is to “fight crime with literacy.”...
Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, Sept. 16

Chicago’s Festival of Maps
Abraham Lincoln’s 1836 plat map of a town that was never built (Huron, Illinois) will be available for reference starting November 2 at the Chicago Field Museum as part of the city’s Festival of Maps, billed as the biggest show of rare and important maps ever assembled. Thousands of maps are to be featured in coming months at 30 institutions. The unusual collaboration of so many cultural organizations around a single topic was the brainchild of the Field Museum, the Newberry Library, and private collectors who for years had dreamed of launching such an exhibition....
Chicago Tribune, Sept. 18

Michigan Supreme Court won’t hear Bloomfield case
The Michigan Supreme Court on September 19 denied Bloomfield Hills attorney George Goldstone’s request for a rehearing of his case against the Bloomfield Township Public Library. Goldstone had sued the library, saying that all residents of the state should have access to the full range of services at any public library in Michigan under the state constitution....
Detroit Free Press, Sept. 19

Search startup ready to challenge Google
One startup company, Powerset, is pursuing a challenging goal: It’s aiming to outshine the internet’s brightest star with a new search engine built to outsmart Google. Powerset’s algorithms are programmed to understand search requests submitted in plain English, a change from the keyword system used by other search engines....
Associated Press, Sept. 17

Yahoo invites us into Mash
Mark Hendrickson writes: “A little more than two months after rumors circulated about Yahoo’s new social network Mosh, the company has given us a preview of a social network with a slightly different name: Mash. The service includes features common to Facebook, MySpace, and My Yahoo. You can load a set of modules onto your profile page and move them around drag-and-drop style.”...
TechCrunch, Sept. 14

Google Presentations goes live
Google Presentations, Google’s free competitor to Microsoft’s PowerPoint software announced last April, was added to the Google Docs suite September 17. Some of its features are of interest to anyone preparing a conference presentation: “Create and keep presentations in one place on the Web that’s accessible anytime, from any internet-connected computer. Edit together online and in real time, or contribute at different times to the same presentation on the Web. Present and control slide shows for all viewers over the Web, with no special setup required.”...
Google Blog, Sept. 17; Webware, Sept. 17

Digg is overhauled
Social news site Digg headed for a major overhaul September 19. As promised multiple times by founder Kevin Rose, the site is launching social-networking features that will make the site a lot more personal: complete MySpace-style social-networking profiles with a comment section, and the ability to share stories with a group of friends, rather than banking on a homepage hit....
Mashable, Sept. 18

Preserving Virtual Worlds project
The Library of Congress has awarded a $590,000 grant to Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) to explore the issue of digital preservation of video games and virtual worlds. The Preserving Creative America Initiative will fund the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, administered by LC under the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program....
Rochester Institute of Technology, Sept. 19

Virtually virtual reference
Andrew Pace writes: “I will admit that I used to be pretty down on virtual reference. When the notion that librarians could get on board with unsolicited virtual conversation first started, the grandiose nature of the uptake—punctuated by prolonged navel-gazing discussion of this supposed paradigm shift—made one think that librarians had invented online chat. But now, rather than pretending to have invented chat, some libraries are reverse-engineering the best parts of the products that are out there.”...
Hectic Pace blog, Sept. 19

Creative 404 error pages
After showcasing a few user-friendly 404 error pages in July, Smashing Magazine decided to ask its readers to design their own clever and creative 404 pages. Here are 40 of the best ones submitted, arranged by appeal, poetry, emotion, irony, explanation, and other categories....
Smashing Magazine, Aug. 15

Under the hood of Web 2.0
Ryan Deschamps lists 10 programming concepts that could help librarians who have a basic knowledge of social-networking tools get a better understanding of what brings Web 2.0 about (with a minimum of three-letter acronyms and technical jargon). In simple language, he covers object-oriented programming, client-side scripting, Open Source software, and other challenging topics....
The Other Librarian blog, Sept. 6

PSA for New Jersey’s online reference service
New Jersey’s statewide virtual reference service, QandA NJ, ran this 30-second commercial during the MTV Video Music Awards September 9, comparing the service to a 24-hour fast-food restaurant. “Now your library is open late night too!”...
QandANJ.org

Are most published research findings flawed?
Robert Lee Hotz writes: “We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations [published in PLoS Medicine], most published research findings are wrong. Flawed research, for the most part, stems not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from miscalculation, poor study design, or self-serving data analysis.”...
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 14

So you think you’re an expert
Steven Bell writes: “I never thought much about expertise in academic librarianship or what it might possibly mean. My guess is that most of us academic librarians don’t go around thinking we are experts and—based on an interesting article I recently read—I think there’s a good chance that there’s no such thing as an expert academic librarian.”...
ACRLog, Sept. 17

New Michigan Libraries Wiki
The Michigan Libraries Consortium has launched a wiki as an online resource for librarians in the state. The Michigan Libraries Wiki shares information on what services libraries are offering, ranging from coffee shop services to MySpace pages and digitization projects, as well as sample library policies, consultant lists, and RFP resources. The wiki is open for librarians and others to add content to its pages....
Michigan Library Consortium, Sept. 18

Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization
The Council on Library and Information Resources seeks public comment by October 5 on a white paper that examines preservation issues relevant to large-scale digitization projects such as those being done by Google, Microsoft, and the Open Content Alliance. The paper, Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization (PDF file), was written by Oya Rieger, interim assistant university librarian for digital library and information technologies at Cornell University Library....
Council on Library and Information Resources; Digitization 101, Sept. 15

Register for free civics and citizenship toolkit
Public libraries can register for a free Civics and Citizenship Toolkit, which contains educational materials that will help permanent residents learn more about the United States and prepare for the naturalization process. The toolkit is an initiative of the Task Force on New Americans, a federal partnership that includes the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Government Printing Office....
Institute of Museum and Library Services, Sept. 18

Laura Bush 21st-Century Librarian grant applications
The Institute of Museum and Library Services invites libraries, archives, library agencies, associations, and consortia to apply for the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant program. The program supports efforts to recruit and educate the next generation of librarians, as well as the faculty who will prepare them for careers in library science. The deadline is December 17....
Institute of Museum and Library Services, Sept. 18

Gaming and the academic library
Brian Mathews writes: “I’ve recently started to turn against gaming in academic libraries. I think it’s fine for special events or if you want to disguise it as a ‘study break’ session, but trying to brand your library as someplace cool because of Madden Tournaments or that you have a Wii or Playstation available for checkout is weak.” Wayne Bivens-Tatum agrees, calling it a “conceptual incommensurability.”...
Ubiquitous Librarian blog, Sept. 16; Academic Librarian blog, Sept. 16

Space marine librarians of Warhammer 40,000
In the tabletop miniature wargame Warhammer 40,000, space marine librarians are responsible for maintaining and adding to a Chapter’s annals and the collective knowledge built up over millennia of service. In battle, they are able to rip apart space and slow down time, and are thus a force to be reckoned with. My favorite: Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, who journeyed through the galaxy looting artifacts and who turned the entire Thousand Sons Legion into mindless automata with his infamous Rubric of Ahriman....
Games Workshop; Wikipedia

IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership grants
The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities on September 17 announced the first three grant recipients under “Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership,” a funding opportunity that brings together museum, library, archive, and IT professionals with humanities scholars to spur innovative digital projects. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Tufts University, and the University of California at Berkeley will receive a combined total of $1,047,455 for their work....
Institute of Museum and Library Services, Sept. 17

A conversation with Jeff Krull
Jeff Krull, director of the Allen County (Ind.) Public Library, reminisces about his childhood library in North Tonawanda, New York, in this first (4:38) of a new video series by ACPL. He also talks about his early reading experiences and their influence on his later life....
YouTube

Borders Educators Savings Week
It will soon be Borders Educators Savings Week, September 26 to October 2, and librarians (current and retired) are included in the 25% discount offer on books and other materials (some restrictions apply) purchased for personal or professional use. The bookstore chain is also honoring educators by donating $50,000 to First Book, a nonprofit that distributes new books to children from low-income families through community-based mentoring, tutoring, and family literacy programs....
Borders

“Guybrarian” submitted to Merriam-Webster
The word “guybrarian” has been proposed for approval in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. “Guybrarian (noun): A male librarian in a female dominated field. ‘With so many women studying library science, Tim felt conspicuous as the only guybrarian in the class.’” The Open Dictionary site is a place where you can submit and share entries that aren’t already in Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary and browse entries submitted by other members of the Merriam-Webster Online community....
Merriam-Webster Online, Sept. 12

Join us in Philadelphia for the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting, January 11–16. Exhibitors check here for past attendance numbers and future conference dates.

Less than one week to save school libraries. All librarians and library advocates are asked to contact their Representatives to ensure the inclusion of the Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries (SKILLs) Act in the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act on September 24. This is the single most important piece of legislation concerning school libraries that will come before Congress this year.

Through October 5, Illinois State University’s Milner Library is hosting “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation,” a traveling exhibition sponsored by the ALA Public Programs Office, in conjunction with the university’s yearlong 150th celebration. The large-panel exhibit offers reproductions of rare historical documents, period photographs, engravings, lithographs, and political cartoons.