• Copyrights, Copywrongs

    Will Femia, author of the "Clicked" blog on MSNBC.com, declares today that: "Lessig is wrong — Lawrence Lessig is a champion of the Creative Commons movement and an advocate for loosening copyright restrictions.  His current battle is over the digitization of books.  Google wants to scan books into a database to make the text searchable. 

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  • English as She is Spoke

    I’m honestly not sure if this is a proper reader’s advisory or not, but, it’s an awesome article: "Moving Forward–and Backward–With the English Language." This comes courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper I’ve been reading (online) for years without ever seeing a single article on christian science.  I must be looking at the

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  • Cataloging Manga & Anime

    The December 2005 issue of TechKNOW (care of Kent State U.’s TSLibrarians listserv)  is out. (It’s actually been out for a while, but the hyperlink I had only started working a short while ago–it’s fixed.)  This quarter Jeanne Poole covers cataloging cleverly selected bits and pieces of the wacky (and not entirely consistent) world of

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  • Rare Books Bound in Human Skin

    I think "Ick!" says whatever the title doesn’t: Human Skin-Bound Books in Many Libraries Apparently this was a big thing in the 19th century.  Enjoy! (or, well . . . whatever.)

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  • Annoying E-Mails Are Now Illegal

    Also new in 2006: it’s now a federal crime to send someone an annoying e-mail anonymously. I’d pay to hear a few FBI agents talking about how’d they go about enforcing this one. I doubt it would stand any realu judicial scritiny (or, I hope it wouldn’t) but it could just be seen as the

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  • New for 2006

    Congratulate me: this is the 100th post of the Rogue Scholar. (Yea!) I started this silly thing last year as a way to help me develop how I thought about library-type work and the issues that relate to it: it gets lonely in the back office sometimes, and it pays to put pen to paper

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  • A. Very. Big. Deal.

    None of these (late again!) tidbits have anything strictly to do with library science, library management, library work, reference work, or other facets of Libraryland’s inner workings (when will I learn to be on topic with this stuff?) but they all have to do with library-related stuff that I think about from time to time.

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  • Do Libraries Matter–Again.

    I know, I’m a day late (again). I came back from vacation yesterday to dive right into integrating our new electronic journal list from our new serials vendor into our catalog, which process includes verifying the back files of each title and making sure that the overlapping databases (our general link resolver, whatever we get

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  • Vista and Metadata

    Found this on Slashdot.org today: " Metadata in Vista Could Be Too Helpful." In part: "Windows Vista will improve search functionality on a PC by letting users tag files with metadata, but those tags could cause unwanted and embarrassing information disclosure, Gartner analysts have warned. Search and organization capabilities are among the primary features of

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  • Google Newsletter for Librarians

    Google has a newsletter for librarians now, which looks like they’ll make into a regular service. Unfortunately, all I have to go on is the link, which doesn’t link to subscription services or even any real information. It might just be an experiment, or there might be pages that I haven’t found yet. I’ve been

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