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Archives for May 2006

The Library: Next Best Thing to an MBA

May 31, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

From this week’s BusinessWeek (link & excerpt):

The Library: Next Best Thing to an MBA
Across the country, public libraries are giving would-be entrepreneurs a helping hand with resources and expert guidance…

Five years ago, Farid Ali was a Web designer for a
Manhattan law firm when a friend, George Constantinou, suggested they
open a restaurant together in Brooklyn. For Ali, however, there
appeared to be a couple of small hurdles. First, his entire restaurant
experience amounted to a brief stint as a busboy some 20 years before.
Second, he had never owned his own business.

"I had always worked for other people," he says. "To
become an entrepreneur was very challenging, I wasn’t in that mindset."
So he enrolled in an online workshop for budding entrepreneurs and came
across a librarian who told him about the resources available at the
public library.

For the next two years, Ali spent three hours a
day, four days a week, poring over reference material, databases, and
digital tools at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Business Library.
Constantinou joined him frequently. Together, they learned how to write
a business plan, create a Web site for their business, and, as Ali
says, "open a restaurant." Moreover, he says, "I realized by scanning
the shelves that owning a business takes a lot more than just raising
money and finding a location."

Filed Under: Articles & Nifty Links

New NYAM Website

May 30, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

The Academy has redesigned its web site (***APPLAUSE***) for the first time in two years: take a look.  Here’s the official announcement from Kathryn Cervino, NYAM’s Associate Director of Communications:

"I invite you to visit and explore the Academy’s newly redesigned website at
www.nyam.org.
The sitewide facelift has made our website more visually and functionally
appealing. Among the most significant changes:
 
-The homepage has been completely restructured to give much-deserved
emphasis to the endeavors of the Academy’s five most active divisions focused on
health research and promotion. You’ll notice that text and photos describing
each division continually rotate through the "Divisions" section on the
homepage.
-The Library has been given a significant presence on the homepage. We now
offer five easy entry points to different functions of the Library, tailored to
consumers’  most common  requests. Webstat tracking software shows that the
Library is the most-visited section of our website.
-The search engine has been upgraded to provide results that are much more
helpful than before. With that, the search bar has been moved to a more
prominent location at the top of each page. The new search engine is now
provided through Google and provides more accurate content summaries.
-More Academy events are highlighted on the homepage (three, rather than
one).
-A new color scheme has been implemented throughout the site, making the
pages crisper, cleaner, and easier to read.
-The banner on the top of each page is now smaller , clearing more room for
content.
 
This is the Academy’s first sitewide upgrade since the then-new website was
launched in January 2004. I hope that you like it, and welcome your feedback. As
always, I am eager to work with each division to make specific upgrades and
changes within your section of the website.  These can include (but are not
limited to) adding new photos, creating new pages, and restructuring parts of
your section.
 
Thanks to those of you who helped with the changes, and to our webmaster,
Mike Wu, and his staff for making these upgrades possible."

Filed Under: NYAM Bulletins

Blogging the Bible

May 23, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I found this project by David Plotz on Slate.com this morning (I’m already behind the curve as he started this weeks ago), but it’s interesting to me since I started reading The Bible Unearthed by Neil Asher Silberman and Israel Finklestein over the weekend.  The Old Testament (as you non-Jews call it) is not history . . . but it is, sort of. On the other hand, it’s not mythology . . . but it is, sort of. And it’s not rules and regulations on how to be a decent person (but it is, sort of.) And the archaeological record deals with all of it, but not in the way the raw text of the bible leads one to expect if one takes it as a completely reliable history book.

I’ve started to read the Torah portions at home on Shabbat, like a good Jew is supposed to. Technically, I’m supposed to study with a group, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet. But all things in time.  And it’s interesting to me to do this because it’s the first time I’ve actually sat down to do this, so I see where Plotz is coming from in his own research. It’s especially interesting having grown up the only believer in a family of Jewish atheists. However one feels about religion in general, I think the bible is still a powerful cornerstone to Western Civilization (notice the capitalization there) and it’s worth a read. That is, the bible (as we Jews call it) and Silberman and Finklestein’s book on the archeology of ancient Israel and Judah are worth a read.  I find it’s handy to keep the bible nearby as one goes through the other book too; that’s a trick I learned dealing with Joyce in college: when reading Ulysses, have a copy of the Odyssey handy.

Updates as they happen.

Filed Under: Articles & Nifty Links

Celebrating the Beats

May 23, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

If the names Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady don’t ring an immediate bell with you, go and read this article by Donald W. Miller. Actually, even if they do ring a bell, read the article anyway; it’s a nicely organized, compact overview of some of the Beats’ better (and lesser) known history. You’ll notice at the bottom of the page, Miller notes that the article is adapted from a longer paper presented at the Fellowship of American Bibliographic Society’s Annual Symposium this past week, which makes me want to write to him to see if that paper’s to be made available anywhere any time soon.

Personally, the heaviest work I’ve ever done on the Beats was in college when Prof. John Tytell presided over the 1992 English Honors seminar, which I took. (Took it? I was at the meeting that chose his proposed seminar out of eight or nine others.) The seminar’s thrust wasn’t to the Beats particularly, although he did spend a big chunk of his life researching them (Ginsburg in particular). 

Now that I think of it, that was a pretty decent seminar: it was titled "Some American Antinomians" and spanned three hundred years of American literature.  ‘Antinomians’ in this  sense being those who go against generally accepted moral law. We covered Melville (Billy Budd, Bartleby), Emerson and Thoreau, Pound (of course–with Tytell everything comes back to Pound sooner or later), The Beats, both as a group and individually, and I’m likely forgetting bits and pieces of other worthwhile writing. But those were the biggies. The antinomian aspects of any of all these folks are debatable, but it wasn’t a bad seminar.

This entry has been waiting to be posted for over a week so I’ll hit the publish button now, but I promise I’ll write more about the seminar itself at some point in the future.

Filed Under: Articles & Nifty Links

Ohio Library Council Technical Services Retreat

May 15, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

This comes from Margaret Mauer over at the Kent State TSLIBRARIAN listserv:

"Many of the speakers at the recent Ohio Library Council
Technical Services Retreat at the Mohican State Park and Resort
have graciously agreed to allow OLC to post those presentations to the
internet. They are now available at:

 

http://www.library.kent.edu/mohican2006

 

Enjoy!"

 

Filed Under: Library Resources

Happy Birthday, Sigmund

May 12, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Okay, today was not Freud’s 150th birthday, this past Saturday was. (Meghan Daum writes a rather awkward birthday greeting for him here.) In any case, the "Freud on Fifth" exhibit at the Academy is now in full swing and open to the public (Alan Alda stopped by to see the collection for a half hour or so yesterday.) If you’re in the neighborhood and have the time, this is definitely worth checking out.

[Read more…] about Happy Birthday, Sigmund

Filed Under: Events

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