Summer Doldrums (well, maybe not so dull)

August 16, 2013

Conventional wisdom is that work slows down in August, especially in Washington, D.C., with the departure of Congress. But for the ALA Digital Content crew (DCWG), the summer doldrums have passed us by.

It’s always busy for ALA staff members after Annual Conference, just because of follow-up activities, which often consume a month or more afterwards. DCWG was also engaged in planning. In continuing to press the library community’s case to publishers, ALA and DCWG leadership will be venturing forth to New York City in early October with ALA President Barbara Stripling leading the delegation. On October 23, ALA will be hosting a Virtual Town Hall on Ebooks, also featuring ALA and DCWG leadership.

Many outreach activities are forthcoming, and I will mention a few here. ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels will explore the future of ebooks on a panel on August 19 at the IFLA conference in Singapore. DCWG member Jamie LaRue has a pair of appearances in Pennsylvania in the next few weeks before presenting in September at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Chris Harris will explain ebooks at a workshop of the Massachusetts School Library Association in September. Fiels, with Deirdre Brennan and Larra Clark of the Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), will talk ebooks at the Illinois Library Association Annual Conference in October. That same month, DCWG Co-chair Sari Feldman will discuss all things digital at the Pennsylvania Library Association Annual Conference (PDF link), and Carrie Russell of OITP likewise at the Indiana Library Federation Annual Conference (PDF link).

Additionally, here are a couple of news items from the past few weeks:

Macmillan Publishing expanded its library ebook program to include some romance and young adult titles;
Follett has partnered with Hachette Book Group and Random House (part of Penguin Random House) to offer ebooks to school libraries;
Check out “A Rational Framework for Library eBook Licensing,” by former DCWG member Eric Hellman;
And here’s the latest ebook pricing report from Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries.

As always, there is more to come. Several publications are in the works—we’ll let you know when they are released in the coming months. We are digesting and cogitating input from a brainstorming session DCWG held at Annual about digital preservation, and so you can expect to hear more about that too. And, of course, the 2014 ALA Midwinter Meeting is just around the corner. . . .

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17h

Genevieve Trainor writes: “The Guinness World Record holder for Most Prolific Book Thief is Ottumwa (Iowa’s) Stephen Blumberg. The 23,600 volumes he accumulated between the 1970s and his arrest in March of 1990 were all stashed in his 17-room home. Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, got involved with Blumberg as part of the FBI’s efforts to return the stolen manuscripts and rare books to their museums and libraries. Referred to as the Omaha Project, the information science proving ground involved four weeks, 44 catalogers and reference librarians and 600 volunteer hours to determine who might be the rightful owners.”

Little Village (Dubuque, Iowa), Dec. 4
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Casey Newton writes: “At the moment, no one knows for sure whether the large language models that are now under development will achieve superintelligence and transform the world. And in that uncertainty, two primary camps of criticism have emerged. The first camp, which I associate with the external critics, holds that artificial intelligence (AI) is fake and sucks. The second camp, which I associate more with the internal critics, believes that AI is real and dangerous. Today I want to lay out why I believe AI is real and dangerous.”

Platformer, Dec. 5
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Latia Ward writes: “One way to keep current with what students think of the library and its services is through Student Library Advisory Committee meetings. These meetings are a way to gather feedback and reinforce the library as a welcoming place. How do librarians create a welcoming environment within Student Library Advisory Committee meetings? Librarians create a welcoming environment through community, purpose, and dedicated space.” Also see part 1 of this blog post.

RIPS Law Librarian Blog, Nov. 13, Dec. 5
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Eleanor Hecks writes: “Few things are as frustrating to a user as when a site won’t respond. Unfortunately, it’s also an all-too-common scenario. Graceful degradation is a design approach that ensures the basics of a website will still function even if specific individual parts of it stop working. The approach removes single points of failure: just because one thing stops working doesn’t mean the system as a whole fails. A site following this principle fails in pieces instead of all at once, so the most important features remain available when some components encounter an error.”

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3d

Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

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ALSC Blog, Dec. 9

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Summer Doldrums (well, maybe not so dull)

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