"... Within the scholarly communications ecosystem, scholarly publishers are a keystone species. University presses—as well as academic societies, research institutions, and other scholarly publishers—strive to fulfill the mission of making public the fruits of scholarly research as effectively as possible within that ecosystem. While that mission has remained constant, in recent years the landscape in which it is carried out has altered dramatically....."
March 09, 2011
March 05, 2011
Top 10 Jailbird Books: From Michel Foucoult To Piper Kerman [Huffpost Books]
"People end up in prison for a variety of reasons; some for political crimes, others for robbery, murder, or rape, and even more for drug-related offenses. Then there are those who find themselves working at prisons, and they've been able to tell different, but no less compelling, tales. Whatever the reason, the following list of ten authors have written thought-provoking, disturbing, and even hilarious books about the prison system in the US and abroad.
February 18, 2011
On Measure L: Yes to saving L.A.'s libraries - latimes.com
How do you assess a city's quality of life? I love Los Angeles. I've always lived here, my whole life, and I grew up being nurtured by one of its great institutions. It was free, available and welcoming, and I took it completely for granted.
I spent my childhood hanging out at the Los Angeles Public Library. I could ride to three different neighborhood branches on my bike. I read and read, enough to worry my mother.
All this prepared me, in an offhand and different way than school did, for life; it prepared me to want to become a librarian and a writer. I didn't know it, but I was being pleasurably introduced to big ideas. Quality of life for me as a child was determined in large part by the availability of public libraries, by their open doors. That access to books allowed me to think, in my own dreamy way, about choices and decisions, humanity, community and our shared, short ride on this planet.
via www.latimes.com
February 14, 2011
The Alexandria Library | A Symbol for the New Egypt | By Michael Z. Wise - WSJ.com
Looking like a massive computer chip or the disc of the sun rising up from the Mediterranean coast, the hypermodern successor to the ancient library of Alexandria stands out as a beacon of hope, efficiency and enlightenment among the crumbling buildings of Egypt's second-largest city.
This revived storehouse of knowledge, destroyed at least twice in classical antiquity, has been spared damage in the country's current violent unrest after Egyptian youths held hands last week to form a human cordon around the massive building on the Alexandria Corniche. "Not a single stone has been thrown at the glass facade," said Ismail Serageldin, the Harvard-educated polymath who directs the library, by phone Monday from his office inside the building. "We are revising our work program to be able to continue to serve as a focal point for the promotion of reform and for civil liberties."
Photos of students and others guarding the building from potential vandals and looters have been posted on the library website (www.bibalex.org). By contrast, over the past two weeks antigovernment protesters set fire to the Alexandria governorate headquarters and torched police stations around the city. "The population loves the library and they protect it," said Mr. Serageldin. "It says a lot that people reacted this way."
via online.wsj.com
February 09, 2011
California Correctional Crisis: "Art from Within": SF Inmates' Art Show
"Art from Within": SF Inmates' Art Show Coming up on Weds the 16th from 5:30-7:30 at the SF Public Library at 100 Larkin, the 2nd annual "Art from Within" show of art by SF inmates in the Five Keys Programs:
[ I love the San Francisco Public Library ]
December 09, 2010
SCOCAL | Stanford Law School Robert Crown Law Library
SCOCAL is a joint project between Justia and Stanford Law School Library. With annotations written by the Advanced Legal Research class at Stanford Law School, SCOCAL is where readers can locate free opinions from 1934 to the present, annotations, briefs, documents and news relating to California Supreme Court opinions.
November 04, 2010
carl malamud for president
Public Information for All: An Interview with Carl Malamud
(Interview by Debbie Rabina. November 1, 2010. Library Journal) "Since the early 1990s, Carl Malamud has made it his business to return to the public what is rightfully theirs: free access to public information. Despite legislation that mandates such access to government information, some categories of information have been excluded, notable among them court opinions (with the exception of the U.S. Supreme Court) and state laws. Working most recently through his foundation, PublicResources.Org, Malamud is spearheading several initiatives to digitize or otherwise make government information available. Some of his most recent initiatives include digitizing government videos available from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and National Archives (NARA) and making them available through the Internet Archive and YouTube, freeing fee-based court decisions available from PACER (Paper Access to Court Electronic Records), and bringing Oregon State information into the public domain. LJ spoke to Malamud recently about some of these initiatives...." (RESTOFINTERVIEW)
October 10, 2010
June 09, 2010
May 22, 2010
"It's not that many of today's librarians routinely dress in sunglasses and black leather (though some do)"
the cybrarian and the future ...
