Library Resources

Tony Gill, Director of the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History posted this announcement on the METRO Digital Collections Special Interest Group mailing list:

The Center for Jewish History recently
completed a METRO-funded pilot project to digitize and make freely
accessible online 40 Yiddish and Hebrew children’s books, many of which
are richly illustrated, from the collections of two of the Center’s
Partners: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Yeshiva
University Museum.

The collection, which is still growing rapidly, can be found online.

The books were digitized and made
available by the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, the Center’s
state-of-the-art in-house digital collections-building facility. In
addition to making the children’s books available through CJH Digital
Collections, the books were also uploaded to the International
Children’s Digital Library (www.icdlbooks.org), thereby making them even more widely accessible to current and future generations.

The Children’s Books Pilot Project at
the Center for Jewish History was supported in part by funds from the
Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State
Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. Thanks to the success of this
METRO-funded pilot project, the Center has since received a generous
gift from the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund to digitize a further 50
children’s books.

Please let us know what you think of this new digital collection by completing our brief online survey.

Take a look at the collection and take the survey (I did.)  Enjoy!

This came in this morning from Gary Price over at Resourcesshelf.com:

"Google Generation" is a Myth, Says New Research
Google is in the title but that’s an attention grabber. The primary focus of the report is about younger people and access to info.

"A new report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the Google Generation — young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web."

The report, which Gary links to in his post, is worth a good, long look, especially if you are wondering why your bibliographic database instruction sessions don’t go quite the way you hoped more often that you’d like.  The reason why kids today don’t do much better at database searching than anyone else is a complicated one, but if I had to make a snap guess I’d say because kids today (in my experience, of course, as everything on this blog is in my experience) don’t generally have much in the way of programming skills, or  very much skill with systems analysis, logic, deductive reasoning, or–perhaps especially–curiosity about how the darned thing works.

There’s more to be said about this–a lot more, and I’d like to come up with a more substantial post regarding the whirlwind that’s spinning around my brain right now–but read the report first.  Two things strike me as being worthy of further discussion: first, why some knowledge of cataloging can make a real difference in crafting top notch search strategies, and second, why ease of use does not necessarily imply usefulness.  More on those topic (I hope) tomorrow.

Anyway, read the report.  Enjoy!

This note came over the LITA-L listserv from Charles W. Bailey over at Digital Scholarship.  It’s worth reading.  In the interest of getting this out to as many folks as possible, I’ll just post the e-mail in its (slightly edited) entirety, active links and all:

Peter Suber reports that the NIH open access mandate may be deleted or weakened by last-minute amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill.

Click here for Peter Suber’s report

If you are a US citizen and you support the mandate, there is an urgent need for you to contact your senators by the end of business on Monday, October 22.

You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.

You can easily contact them using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ text about the amendments or you can use the same form to write your own text.

Click here for the web form

Not to push both my readers, but I think you could do worse than to forward this to someone.

Sure you have heard of it by now, haven’t you? You haven’t? All right then, read all about it here. And let me know what you think. (I’m still deciding how I fell about it.)

(Thanks to Ian Fairclough for this tidbit.)

Looking for a real challenge? Try being the Director/Head Honcho/Guy in Charge  of the Iraqi National Library.  This is not a job for the faint hearted.

In lighter news that’s closer to home (for me, that is) the Academy has won honors for our website. In the words of our communications director:

"The Academy’s website has been awarded the 2007 Cyber Space Award from the New
York Society of Association Executives, an honor for which the entire staff
should be proud. The award recognizes "outstanding immediacy of overview, ease
of navigation, aesthetics, consistency, timeliness of content, internal search
capabilities, usefulness, interact-ability, originality, and Internet vision."

Woot for us! [APPLAUSE]

If you’re looking to renew your knowledge of Dewey Decimal classification–which can be a drag, but plenty of libraries continue to use it and it’s a good skill to retain over the long haul–then you might want to take a look at the WebDewey Tutorial over at OCLC’s web site.  They cover Dewey in a fair amount of detail.  From the web site description:

WebDewey offers easy-to-use, World Wide Web-based access to the Dewey
Decimal Classification (DDC) and related information, with searching
and browsing capabilities; Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
intellectually and statistically mapped to Dewey numbers; and links
from the mapped LCSH to the corresponding LCSH authority records. You
can also add your own notes to WebDewey and display them in context,
which allows you to both record valuable information about local
classification practices and have it available for ready reference.

The only problems that I can see is that the tutorial won’t work on any Macintosh or UNIX system and it’s selective as to which PC browsers it works with. You may have to tweak your preferences a bit.

Enjoy!

This article comes out of of today’s edition of the Christian Science Monitor:

As EPA Libraries go Digital, Public Access Suffers
By Mark Clayton

For a new Democratic Congress facing big environmental issues from
global warming to dwindling fisheries, the first step may be keeping
the nation’s top environmental libraries from closing – and saving
their myriad tomes from ending up as recycled cardboard.

To meet a proposed 2007 budget cut, the Environmental Protection
Agency has in recent months shuttered regional branches in Chicago,
Dallas, and Kansas City, Mo., serving 15 states, and has cut hours and
restricted access to four other regional libraries, affecting 16
states. Two additional libraries in the EPA’s Washington headquarters
closed in October.

Until these closures, the EPA had 26 libraries, brimming with a
trove of environmental science in 500,000 books, 25,000 maps, thousands
of studies and decades of research – much of it irreplaceable, experts
say.

EPA officials say the closures are part of a plan "to modernize and
improve" services while trimming $2 million from its budget. Under the
plan, "unique" library documents would be "digitized" as part of a
shift to online retrieval.

But while electronic databases are easy to access, they could end up
being more costly to use – and thousands of those "unique" paper
documents may now sit for years in repositories waiting for the funding
needed to "digitize" them, critics say. Meanwhile, the closings are
proceeding so quickly that key materials are likely to be lost or
inaccessible for a long time, EPA librarians say.

The rest of the article is here.  I’m not sure what I thinkof the words unique and digitized being in quotes in the fifth paragraph–they’re both accepted terms in Libraryland these days.  I’ll be nice and assume the writer and maybe his editor were not aware of that.  Doesn’t matter, it’s still worth the time spent reading it.

This article from Kelpie Wilson hit a particular note with me because until 2 years ago my wife worked as a reference librarian at the NYC EPA Region 2 library on Broadway.  She watched for 3 years as a staff of three librarians, one media specialist and one tech services paraprofessional were relocated, outsourced or just plain let go.  There may be one librarian there now–there were two the last time I checked, about a year ago.  Here’s an excerpt–the rest of the story is here.

    First, Re-Open the Libraries
    By Kelpie Wilson
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Wednesday 15 November 2006

    It
never got down to actual book-burning, but the Republican choke-hold on
government would clearly have taken us there. In August, under the
guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection
Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public
and to its own staff.

    The
EPA’s professional staff objected strongly, insisting that closing the
libraries would hamstring them in their jobs. In a letter to Congress
protesting the closures, public employees said, "We believe that this
budget cut is just one of many Bush administration initiatives to
reduce the effectiveness of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and
to continue to demoralize its employees."

    The
EPA’s precipitous move to close the libraries was based on a $2 million
cut in Bush’s proposed $8 billion EPA budget for 2007. EPA bureaucrats
did not wait to see if Congress might restore the funds or shift budget
priorities in order to save the libraries; it acted immediately to box
up documents for deep storage, and shut the doors.

    While
the official EPA line is that all of the documents will be eventually
be digitized and made available online, this will cost money that the
agency does not have, so for practical purposes, all of the thousands
of reports and maps that now exist only on paper or microfiche will be
lost to the public and to agency scientists. They might as well just
burn them.

This comes from Richard Kim over at the New York Metropolitan Library Council:

"METRO recently launched a digitization blog which will highlight
digitization activities in and around the METRO region. If you're
institution has something interesting you'd like us to report on, drop
us a line at digitization@metro.org".

The blog is here.

First, the good news: Lily the NYAM Special Projects Librarian has let it be known that the presentations from the 2006 August RLG Members Forum are now available as MP3 files. The talks include The Future of MARC by Bill Moen and Sally McCallum, and and topics such as Folksonomies, visual resource cataloging, and describing and sharing digital images in a musem setting. Good stuff.

Now some bad news for those of you who, like me, work in the world of Technical Services: I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the following e-mail. It was forwarded to me by a coworker, and apparently appeared on the AUTOCAT  LIBPROC-LIST listserv of SUNY Buffalo. The list owner says that the poster requested anonymously, and that he has no further information.

I’ll say this once more: I have no idea of this email is authentic, or if it accurately describes the situation at Hampton University.  I hope it doesn’t–the administrator who thinks that merely converting the collection from print to electronic resources absolves them from having to keep a TS department on hand including catalogers who are familiar with such materials is likely in for a rude awakening at some point.  On the other hand, neither do I doubt that such people exist and it’s something we’re going to have to deal with at some point as catalogers. That said, the email has been posted in its entirety behind the edit.

[Read more…] about Good News, Bad News

This just in:

OCLC acquires DiMeMa, developer of
software
for digital media management

 

CONTENTdm Digital Collection
Management Software
key component of OCLC digital solution
set

 

"DUBLIN, Ohio, August 15, 2006—OCLC Online
Computer Library Center has acquired DiMeMa (Digital Media Management), the
organization that developed and supports CONTENTdm, the leading digital
management software for libraries distributed by OCLC.

CONTENTdm software
offers a complete set of tools to store, manage and deliver digital collections
such as historical documents, photos, newspapers, audio and video on the Web. 
OCLC has been the exclusive distributor of CONTENTdm software to libraries,
cultural heritage organizations and other nonprofit organizations since
2002."

The full press release is behind the cut. Enjoy!

[Read more…] about OCLC Acquires Home of Content DM

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!"