Contents
U.S. & World News
ALA News
Booklist Online
Denver Update
Division News
Awards
Seen Online
Tech Talk
Publishing
Actions & Answers
Calendar

Economic uncertainty spreads to library endowments
The stock market losses that have recently hit global markets might be taking some carefully stewarded library endowments along for the ride. Even as the market began its dramatic mid-September seesaw of alarming drops and partial recoveries, two public library executives lost their jobs at one of the few libraries ever endowed personally by Andrew Carnegie. Panicked stock-market sell-offs have paralyzed credit lines and bond markets at the state and municipal levels and only made a bad situation worse for libraries from Oregon to New Jersey....
American Libraries Online, Oct. 14

Gunman kills fellow librarian at Texas community college
A librarian at Northeast Lakeview College in Live Oak, Texas, was shot and killed at the library October 13 by an adjunct librarian at the school. About 15 to 20 students were in the building when Alan Godin, 62, entered the library at about 2:15 p.m., shot Devin Zimmerman, 37, and then sat down and waited to be arrested, said Eric Reno, president of the college. Godin was later charged with murder and held on $250,000 bond....
American Libraries Online, Oct. 14

Timber-payment renewal won’t bail out Oregon libraries
Among the extras added into the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which President Bush signed into law October 3, was nearly $1.7 billion in federal timber payments that had long been sought by four economically devastated Oregon counties dependent on the fiscal safety net for logging-industry losses since the 1990s. “It remains to be seen what the impact is. We’re not celebrating for libraries,” Oregon State Librarian Jim Scheppke cautioned....
American Libraries Online, Oct. 10

American Libraries lifts access restrictions
American Libraries celebrated the first Open Access Day, October 14, by opening up its content on the Web and making its companion weekly e-newsletter, American Libraries Direct, available to anyone for the asking. The current issue of the print magazine is now open to all, as are back issues through 2003; they were all formerly accessible only with a member log-in. Nonmembers may now sign up for AL Direct; ALA members merely need to keep an up-to-date email address in their membership profile....

Wisconsin student wins Step Up to the Plate grand prize
Thanks to a trip to his local library, 11-year-old Oscar Youngquist of Racine, Wisconsin, is about to take another journey—this time to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith (right) drew Youngquist’s name as the grand-prize winner of the Step Up to the Plate @ your library program. Youngquist was randomly chosen from among contestants who correctly answered a series of baseball trivia questions developed by the Hall of Fame’s library staff....

Radio campaign promotes Latino library use
To help bridge the opportunity gap, a new en tu biblioteca (“at your library”) radio campaign encourages Latinos to connect with their local librarians and access free materials and resources available through their libraries. In partnership with Spanish-language Univision Radio, ALA launched the campaign to respond to data that shows Latinos are less likely than other groups to use their local libraries. PSAs are airing in 10 of the top Latino media markets....

Virtual poster sessions: There’s still time
This year, under President Jim Rettig’s leadership, ALA members will have new opportunities to participate and communicate their success stories. One of these opportunities is an ALA-wide virtual poster session. The first of two will debut this fall; its focus is “Community Central.” Share ways you are making your library vital in your community. Submit a proposal to John M. Budd by November 15....

ALA finances
American Libraries Editor-in-Chief Leonard Kniffel writes: “‘Where is the outrage?’ That’s what Garrison Keillor asked recently in his syndicated column, calling the federal bailout of the financial market ‘a calamity people accept as if it were just one more hurricane. . . . It wasn’t their money they were playing with,’ he added. ‘It was yours. Where were the cops?’ It was library money too, and already we are seeing the effect on philanthropy and on budgets at the local level.”...
AL Inside Scoop, Oct. 9

Banned Books Week cartoons and videos
We were pleased that Stephanie Piro, from the Goodwin Library in Farmington, New Hampshire, shared her wonderful cartoons celebrating Banned Books Week with us—and we couldn’t resist sharing one (right). If you haven’t done so, check out Unshelved’s excellent Bland Books Week series from August 11–15. And don’t forget the BBW AL Focus videos....
OIF Blog, Oct. 14

Things to do in Denver
The Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau website could be your first stop when planning your visit for the ALA Midwinter Meeting in January. It offers tips on what to do, dining, nightlife, and special events. For example, dinosaurs are big in D-Town. The city lies on some of the most fossil-rich land in the world, which means finding a piece of prehistoric history is as easy as walking your dog....
Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau

10 Denver desserts
Even in the midst of a Denver winter, you may wish to try out some of the city’s after-meal specialties. Denver Life fashion writer Jessica Rubino has compiled a list of her favorite desserts and the restaurants where they live....
Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau

AASL releases 2008 longitudinal study results
AASL has released the results from its 2008 School Libraries Count! longitudinal study of public and independent school library media specialists. Highlights from the survey include surprising findings about the usage of 2.0 tools in schools at all grade levels. Schools are using such collaborative tools as wikis to support and enhance classroom teaching, and 74.1% of respondents said they offer remote access to the school library media program’s online databases. The survey will be conducted annually to provide data on the health of the nation’s school library media programs....

National Learning 4 Life initiative
AASL is launching a national initiative to support states, school systems, and individual schools in implementing the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. The goal of the initiative, Learning 4 Life, is to increase awareness and understanding of the learning standards and to create a committed group of stakeholders with a shared voice....

Present a program at PLA National Conference
PLA is accepting preconference and program proposals for its 13th National Conference, to be held March 23–27, 2010, in Portland, Oregon. Proposals may be submitted through an online form available on the PLA 2010 Conference website. Proposals may be created and updated until November 30....

AASL sponsors two Emerging Leaders
AASL will sponsor Suzanna Panter and Beth Patin for the 2009 ALA Emerging Leaders program. Panter is currently library information specialist at Dumbarton Elementary School in Henrico, Virginia, and Patin is head librarian at Holy Cross School for Boys in New Orleans. The Emerging Leaders program enables newer librarians from across the country to serve the profession in a leadership capacity....

ALSC picks an Emerging Leader
ALSC will sponsor Madeline Walton-Hadlock as a 2009 ALA Emerging Leader. Walton-Hadlock is youth services librarian at San Jose (Calif.) Public Library, where she coordinates youth services for the English and Spanish speakers in the community. She will receive $1,000 to attend ALA’s 2009 Midwinter Meeting and Annual Conference....

RUSA award honors library labor links
RUSA seeks nominations for the 2009 John Sessions Memorial Award. The award, a plaque supported by a donation from the AFL-CIO, recognizes a library or library system that has made a significant effort to work with the labor community and has consequently brought recognition of the history and contribution of the labor movement to the development of the United States. All nominations must be received by December 15....

RUSA book reviewing award
RUSA seeks nominations for the 2009 Louis Shores/Greenwood Publishing Group Award. The award is presented to a librarian, individual, group, editor, review medium, or organization for their extraordinary contribution to the book/media reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions. All nominations must be received by December 15....

2007 Arab American Book Award winners
Six Arab-American authors will be honored with book awards at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, November 1. The Arab American Book Award program encourages the publication of books that preserve and advance the understanding and knowledge of the Arab-American community. The winner for the best children’s/YA fiction was Ibtisam Barakat, for Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (Farrar Straus Giroux)....
Arab American National Museum, Oct. 13

Ethiopian librarian is one of CNN’s Top 10 Heroes
Born in rural Ethiopia to an illiterate cattle merchant who insisted upon his son’s education, children’s librarian Yohannes Gebregeorgis (right) established Ethiopia Reads in 1988 to open reading centers and donkey-pulled mobile libraries. A blue-ribbon panel chose him as one of CNN’s Top 10 Heroes for 2008. The public has the chance until November 20 to vote for Gebregeorgis or one of the other nine heroes as CNN Hero of the Year....
CNN, Oct. 9

Schools soon required to teach web safety
Schools receiving e-rate discounts on their telecommunications services and internet access soon will have to educate their students about online safety, sexual predators, and cyberbullying, thanks to federal legislation passed in both the Senate and the House. The Broadband Data Improvement Act (S.1492), sponsored by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), requires the Federal Trade Commission to carry out a national public awareness program focused on educating children how to use the internet in safe and responsible ways....
eSchool News, Oct. 13

Publisher donates $20 million for new Norfolk library
Frank Batten Sr. has donated $20 million to help Norfolk, Virginia, build a $50-million downtown library complex a decade sooner than expected, Mayor Paul Fraim announced October 7. Batten is the retired chairman of Landmark Media Enterprises LLC, which publishes the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. He challenged the city to use the money to build the most advanced library in the region, with high-tech research capabilities unavailable elsewhere....
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Oct. 7

Frank Gehry’s Princeton science library
James S. Russell writes: “Saw-toothed glass dances in a conga line above leaping arcs of metal roof at the newly opened Peter B. Lewis Science Library at Princeton University. The signature hand of Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry is unmistakable. One never expects a Gehry design to be a sober monument to scholarship, and the Lewis library is no different. Its gregarious explosion of forms sits among a growing complex devoted to a broad range of sciences and related fields.”...
Bloomberg, Oct. 14

Google library partners to offer digital backup
A group of major universities has been quietly working for the past two years to build one of the largest online collections of books ever assembled, by pooling the millions of volumes that Google has scanned in its partnership with university libraries. One of the most important functions of the project is to create a stable backup of the digital books should Google go bankrupt or lose interest in the book-searching business. The project is called HathiTrust, and so far it consists of the members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation....
Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 13

The Massachusetts green library initiative
Massachusetts is offering $5 million to entice municipalities to go green when they renovate or build new libraries. The green incentives are available to 31 cities and towns that were awarded $95 million in construction grants in August by the state Board of Library Commissioners, said director Robert C. Maier. Municipalities that were awarded library construction money must submit a letter of intent by November 3 to qualify for the incentive....
Boston Herald, Oct. 12

New York bookmobile to end its rural run
Legislators were told October 8 that bookmobile service throughout the Chautauqua-Cattaraugus (N.Y.) Library System will be reduced in the first six months of 2009 and will cease in June due to escalating costs. Members of the system’s Board of Trustees said the decision was necessary due to an anticipated decrease in state funding, rising fuel costs, and the fact that the aging bookmobile will cost an estimated $250,000 to replace....
Buffalo (N.Y.) News, Oct. 9

Mississippi’s first public library: Biloxi or Port Gibson?
What city in Mississippi can claim the first public library? The answer is a matter of interpretation. In 1818, when the Mississippi Literary and Library Company of Gibson Port gained state approval, it was a subscription library. But Jamie Bounds Ellis, local history and genealogy librarian for the Harrison County (Miss.) Library System, believes the Biloxi Library (above) is correct in its claim to be the first (1898) free public library in the state. The key word is “free.”...
Biloxi (Miss.) Sun-Herald, Oct. 13; Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, Nov. 21, 1976

Champlain map cleared for auction
Harvard University experts have determined that a rare 1612 map of Canada to be sold November 13 at a Sotheby’s auction in Britain is not the one found missing from Harvard’s special collections in 2005. The loss of the Harvard copy of explorer Samuel de Champlain’s map of New France came to light during an FBI investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Massachusetts antiquarian E. Forbes Smiley. Harvard spokeswoman Beth Brainard said curators “have found enough discrepancies” to clear the map for sale....
Vancouver (B.C.) Sun, Oct. 14

China opens digital library for the blind
A digital library for the blind, where the visually impaired can listen to electronic books, music, or online lectures for free, has opened in Beijing. Situated in the National Library, the facility was jointly set up by the Information Center of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation, the National Library, and China Braille Publishing House. It opened October 14, on the eve of the International Day of the Blind....
Xinhua, Oct. 15

Thumbspeak: Is texting here to stay?
Louis Menand writes: “Is texting bringing us closer to the end of life as we currently tolerate it? The texting function of the cell phone ought to have been the special province of the kind of people who figure out how to use the television remote to turn on the toaster: It’s a huge amount of trouble relative to the results. In some respects, texting is a giant leap backward in the science of communication. It’s more efficient than semaphore, maybe, but how much more efficient is it than Morse code?”...
New Yorker, Oct. 20

Optimize your web connection
Your broadband connection screams compared with the dial-up days of yore, but it could be faster. These days, your internet connection can’t be fast enough. The Wired How-to Wiki suggests some ways to tweak the hardware and software you are using, find data download shortcuts, and manually offload your connection to a less-burdened server....
Wired How-to Wiki, Oct. 14

Five old-fashioned web concepts that need to die
Rafe Needleman writes: “Wake up! It’s 2008. There are things we’ve become accustomed to doing and seeing on websites for years that really should have vanished by now. Five things come to my mind that are user interface disasters. When I am president I will make sure the Supreme Court outlaws them: refresh, save, log-in, one-size-fits-all site design, and blocker ads.”...
Webware, Oct. 14

Make Vista great: Fix Windows Explorer
Windows Vista is everyone’s favorite tech punching bag, and not without reason. Surprisingly, most of Vista’s annoyances are fixable. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do some tweaking, you can turn Vista into a pretty great OS. First up Windows Explorer, and part 2 is fill in the missing pieces....
PC Magazine, Oct. 14–15

Microsoft’s next OS to be called Windows 7
Jason Kincaid writes: “Microsoft has announced that the latest version of Windows, due in the next couple of years, will be called—drumroll please—Windows 7. It’s about time Microsoft adopted a naming system that might actually make some sense to users, but I can’t wait for hordes of customers to start asking if they somehow missed Windows 1 through 6.”...
TechCrunch, Oct. 13; Windows Vista Team Blog, Oct. 13

Scan those old negatives
The great thing about old 35mm photos is that most of us have them backed up on negatives stuffed in forgotten drawers. The bad thing, however, is that most of us can’t remember what’s on the negatives until we hold them up to the light and squint. And even then it’s hard to tell. Enter the ingenious USB Negative Scanner....
Firebox

Books to read to children during a financial crisis
Erica S. Perl writes: “The first time I heard the word recession, I was 10 years old and it was 1978. Many of the books I discovered during the late 1970s featured themes of economic hardship that made my circumstances seem manageable by comparison. A review of popular American children’s books of the past century reveals a recurring theme in the children’s publishing industry: When times are tough, cue the stories about times that were even tougher.”...
Slate, Oct. 9

The discovery of America: Alternative histories
Lauren Davis writes: “We all know that Leif Ericson beat Christopher Columbus to the New World, but Chris gets his own holiday because his voyage marks the beginning of Europe’s influence in the New World. But what if someone had beaten the Europeans to the punch? What if the Americas’ indigenous peoples formed a federation and dealt with Europe on an equal footing? Fortunately, alternate historians have cooked up plenty of speculative American discovery narratives.”...
io9, Oct. 12

Why e-books will eventually succeed
Reading e-books from e-book readers similar to the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader will eventually be the preferred reading method for millions worldwide, predicts Knowledge Center analyst J. Gerry Purdy. He thinks we will see 75% worldwide adoption less than 10 years after e-book readers contain the right set of technologies. Here, Purdy explains what features will someday make these gadgets ubiquitous....
eWeek, Oct. 13

Who has the biggest dictionary?
Victor Mair writes: “The East Asians have an ongoing contest propelled by dictionary size envy. Everybody wants to see who can produce a dictionary with the most entries. Koreans at Dankook University have just compiled a dictionary that has outstripped anything yet generated by the Japanese or the Chinese themselves. After 30 years of labor and investing more than 31 billion KRW (more than $25 million U.S.), the South Koreans have just published the Chinese-Korean Unabridged Dictionary in 16 volumes. This humongous lexicon contains nearly half-a-million entries composed of 55,000 different characters.”...
Language Log, Oct. 9

Style from the Stacks at ILA
The 2008 Illinois Library Association Annual Conference, September 23–26, featured a “Style from the Stacks” fashion event, based on the popular Bravo television series Project Runway. Conceived by Maria Pontillas of the Glenview Public Library and hosted by Project Runway Season 4 contestant Steven Rosengard, the show featured three categories of design inspired by libraries and literature. Thirty-six models walked the runway, including Adrienne Zaucha (right) from the North Suburban Library System, who modeled “Sex in the System.”...
Illinois Library Association

LC’s THOMAS offers permanent links
Fulfilling one of the recommendations of the Open House Project report, the Library of Congress has published on their THOMAS web page directions for creating permanent links. This matters, because linking is one of the most basic components of online dialog. Without citations and primary sources, commentary and analysis are just opinion and rumor. The “handles” allow a simple procedure for linking to specific legislation, without that link expiring....
The Open House Project, Oct. 9

Hurricane recovery in Houston
Leonard Kniffel writes: “Sandra Fernandez, manager of public relations for Houston Public Library, gave us an update on what the library has done to aid in recovery from Hurricane Ike, which made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast shortly after midnight September 13. As of today, six HPL neighborhood libraries remain closed, she said, but they expect to have all but one open within the next week or so. Most, if not all, library employees and library users have regained power.”...
AL Inside Scoop, Oct. 14

So you wanna be a librarian blogger star
Steven Bell writes: “Let’s say you are a librarian and decide you want to have a well-known blog. With the field as crowded as it is, how do you get noticed? What do you need to do to make it to the A—or even the B or C—list? Maybe you just want a blog that uniquely covers some new, unknown territory. I got to thinking about these things because a newer-to-the-profession academic librarian recently posed these questions to me.”...
ACRLog, Oct. 13

Putting the world in WorldCat
Karen Calhoun writes: “OCLC has been increasingly successful at establishing partnerships with national libraries around the world.  We introduced a new set of web pages devoted to national libraries recently. The new website’s timeline charts the progress of national library participation. An OCLC interactive WorldMap (above) shows the national libraries that participate in the OCLC cooperative by contributing data to WorldCat.”...
Metalogue, Oct. 8

What can you do with a Facebook page?
David Lee King writes: “My library has a Facebook page, and I’ve been experimenting with it lately. I have loosely broken down what I’ve done into three sections—basic info, Facebook functionality, and social stuff. I also asked my twitter friends for input—what were they doing with Facebook pages, and what other innovative library Facebook pages have they found.”...
David Lee King, Oct. 9

The Red Lending Menace
Stephen Colbert’s October 7 Colbert Report on Comedy Central compared public libraries lending books to a “pervasive communist threat” and urged patriotic patrons everywhere to check out books and not return them in order to incur replacement fees and foil leftist aims of providing something for free. The tongue-in-cheek news story (4:40) was filmed at the Rutherford (N.J.) Public Library and featured Arlene Sahraie (above), library services director for the Bergen County Cooperative Library System, and RPL Director Jane Fisher. (The Cyrillic caption is gibberish, by the way)....
Colbert Nation, Oct. 7; Rutherford (N.J.) South Bergenite, Sept. 10

Work Like a Patron Day
Brian Herzog writes: “Last week, a library volunteer and I were working on a project together. We each needed to work on a computer, but be close enough together to talk. The only arrangement like this in the library are the public workstations, so we worked out there. This experience reminded me how important it was to put ourselves in our patrons’ shoes, so we can see the library as they see it. That’s why I’m proposing Work Like A Patron Day on October 15.”...
Swiss Army Librarian, Oct. 7

A new library for America’s oldest law school
Paul Hellyer and James S. Heller write: “Using a combination of state funds, private donations, and student fees, the College of William & Mary Law School budgeted $16.8 million for an expansion and complete renovation of its library, built in 1980. The new Wolf Law Library was dedicated in December 2007. It does a much better job of accommodating technology, with a redesigned computer lab, a computer classroom, audiovisual equipment in study rooms and work areas, and access to power outlets at most tabletops.”...
I Love Libraries

Learning and unlearning
Wayne Bivens-Tatum writes: “One of the most difficult things for me as I grow older and presumably more experienced is unlearning what I have learned. It’s very easy for people well-versed in the research process to forget that new college students aren’t. I’ve become much more minimalist in my instruction over the years, because I’ve come to believe that students have to learn how to do research by doing research, and trying to get them to memorize a treatise on library research for their first 10-page essay is folly.”...
Academic Librarian, Oct. 13

“Voices of Open Access” video series
In conjunction with Open Access Day, October 14, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Public Library of Science have released a new video series that presents six perspectives on the importance of open access. The video from the library’s perspective features Trinity University Librarian Diane Graves (right)....
SPARC, Oct. 14

You need to know about open access
Walt Crawford writes: “The fundamental idea behind open access is that people—all people, not just inner circles—should have access to published, peer-reviewed, journal articles. The traditional journal system is broken. Too many of the journals cost too much and the net result is that fewer people have access to less of the research over time. That’s not good for people seeking out information.”...
Walt at Random, Oct. 14

RDA/FRBR cataloger scenarios
Diane Hillmann has added a sixth cataloger scenario to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative website. The goal is to assist catalogers in visualizing how their work might flow in a setting that used RDA Vocabularies and FRBR relationships. The new scenario involves some complex relationships among 19th-century criminal trial materials....
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Alberta’s libraries: Books and beyond
This series of three videos from the Alberta Library consortium promotes “Books and Beyond,” a PR message emphasizing the variety of books, DVDs, and other materials you can discover at your local library. The subtext is also to handle the information you find with great care, lest consequences ensue. The examples include CPR, mountain climbing, scrapbooking, and the Kama Sutra....
The Alberta Library, Oct. 14

ALA Midwinter Meeting, Denver, January 23–28. Thinking about taking a train or a bus? The California Zephyr Amtrak train route passes through Denver, and Greyhound buses arrive and depart 24 hours a day.

Join the Readergirlz for Night Bites, a MySpace chat series featuring several popular YA authors each night through October 17, in honor of Teen Read Week. Check out the Readergirlz trailer.