Archives for May 2005

Resource Shelf = Da Bomb!

May 4, 2005 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I don’t know when or if Gary Price actually sleeps, but I’m glad he doesn’t (or sddesn’t seem to, anyway.) His Resource Shelf website is one of the best things I’ve seen in online Libraryland in a long while. (Not that I get out that often but when I do, and I find something like this, it’s doubly cool.)

Price and his editors have made it their goal to seek out and report on every single reference source on every subject known to mankind, and make all these links available to poor time-starved slobs like you and me (well . . . okay, like me. I’m sure you are not a slob . . . and if, on the remote chance that you are a slob, I’m positive that you manage your time a helluva lot better than I manage mine. That’s probably why people are not coming up to you on the street, flashing shiny gold bages in your face, demanding answers to questions like "What’s Number 6 up to? We know you know, now tell us!") And if that’s not enough for you (and if it’s not, then what kind of freak are you anyway?), they have a weekly e-mail service that dumps the latest week of daily links and annotation into your mailbox every Thursday.

This is one of the best sites ever.

At any rate, I’m linking this site to the Library Resources typelist . . . NOW!

An Open Letter to Deroy Murdoch of the National Review Online

May 3, 2005 by Jon Frater 1 Comment

A few days ago I found this article from the National Review online, where Deroy Murdoch claims that the only way to defend the lives of Americans is to limit access to our libraries to nice people. How we’d do this is to make sure the PATRIOT Act applied to libraries. The upshot is that librarians interested in defending our civil liberties are actually aiding and abetting terrorists.

Being an M.L.S., my first reaction is: get real. My second and third reactions are not that different, so I won’t bother writing them here. What I think is (short version) that Murdoch and his masters at the NRO are trying to freak out their readers to increase their daily ratings (call them "hits", "click-throughs", "eyeballs", they’re synonymous) and use the increased traffic to sell more ad space. Am I being a cynic? You bet, but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily wrong (I worked in publishing too, once upon a time–and my wife works in publishing now, so maybe I’m not talking entirely out of my ass).

Even if Murdoch is correct and the Patriot Act really is the best law since the 1st Amendment, what he proposes is at best partial solution–remember there were 19 hijackers that day, and if 5 did their research here, 14 of them did not. If we ban every last Arab from our public buildings, well, that leaves the white Muslims, doesn’t it? My point is that this sort of thing doesn’t work in real life and we should know better than to try.

Anyway, my letter to Murdoch is behind the link.

Do Libraries Still Matter? You Betcha!

May 2, 2005 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

A coworker turned me on to an article by Dan Akst in the most recent Carnegie Reporter. The article is entitled “Do Libraries Still Matter?”, and one would hope that the answer to the question is still ‘yes!” although one can also see the questioners point of view. It’s definitely worth looking at, and not just because the author gets heavily into Andrew Carnegie’s contribution to American library development. There’s a rule of thumb for you: capitalists like libraries and everything (well, many things) they represent, totalitarians do not. The next time you hear a politician talking about reducing funds for libraries or limiting how they may be used and by whom, remember that little rule and much becomes clearer.