Ran across this great essay by Jonathan Letham. His basic premise is that copyright has strangled creativity and the pursuit of learning. He talks a great deal about the creative commons and the pursuit of the gift economy. It is worth the investment of time to read this.
PRESS Release
DATE: 5/14/07
FROM: Crawford County Federated Library System
TO: Members of the media
CONTACT:John Brice System Administrator jbrice@ccfls.org
SUBJECT:Koha User Group Organizational Meeting
An organizational meeting of users of the Koha Integrated Library System (ILS) will be held during the American Library Association Convention in Washington D.C. The meeting will be held June 24, 2007 at 1:00 pm at the Best Western Georgetown Hotel and Suites (see below for address).
Koha is an Integrated Library System written using the open source model. Libraries from around the world have contributed to develop an ILS that can be distributed freely throughout the world. Libraries across the US are now starting to implement the Koha ILS. To gage whether there is sufficient interest in forming a Koha User Group CCFLS has developed an on-line interest survey.
Please feel free to fill the survey out, if you do not plan to attend the Organizational Meeting.
The purpose of the organizational meeting will be to introduce other users of the Koha ILS and review of the Koha ILS Interest Survey. If sufficient interest in forming a formal group is expressed then the meeting may develop an action plan for future tasks and actions.
The Meeting is being sponsored by a new user of the Koha ILS the Crawford County Federated Library System located in rural northwest Pennsylvania. Anyone needing additional information should contact John Brice at the Meadville Public Library 814-336-1773.
Location of the meeting:
Best Western Georgetown Hotel and Suites
1121 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington D.C.
(Located two blocks from the Foggy Bottom Metro Station)
Have you ever purchased a book and wondered if you could find it cheaper somewhere else? I know I have. Well thanks to the “bots” on the Internet you can now price shop for both new and used books at a site called Booksprice.com. Both new and used books can be looked up. Not only is the price of the book shown but also the shipping price so you can see the total price of acquiring the book.
Ran across this slide presentation entitled Future Tech Trends for Public Libraries by Sarah Houghton. Covers some very interesting ground concerning the future of library provided computers and OPACS.
Sarah Houghton is the e-Services Librarian for Marin County Free Library, President of the California Library Association’s Information Technology Section, serves on LITA’s Top Technology Trends Committee, and is a consultant instructor for the Infopeople Project. If you know what’s good for you, read her blog about libraries and technology, Librarian In Black.
Looking for new things to blog I typed “Meadville” in the Google news web page and found an interesting article about Channellock in the Mid County Chronicle in Nederland, Texas.
Here is the article.
When I started my library career, way back in the eighties, the hardest working books in the library where the encyclopedias. Even in a small library the encyclopedias would become discolored through use and would be replaced every year or so. The publishers would update the books using dozens of editors and hundreds of experts.
In the past few years the use of print encyclopedias has fallen dramatically. But, at the same time, the on line encyclopedia called Wikipedia has become one of the top ten web sites. What is interesting about Wikipedia is that all of the articles are generated by anyone who wishes to spend the time and effort to write one. Though this method is unorthodox, compared to traditional encyclopedias, it has produced a pretty effective encyclopedia. The Washington Post article Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles illustrates some of the issues using Wikipedia, especially for controversial information.
In the library world OPAC stand for On-line Patron Access Catalog, which is a fancy term for computerized card catalog. MPL will be updating our OPAC in the next few months and I have been doing some research on the topic. One of the more interesting article I found was How OPACs Suck by Karen Schneider. Though the title is rather blunt her article details features that are needed in future OPACs.
When we started our new web site the idea was that certain people, me included, would write and blog about our favorite articles. Since I am the Director of the library, I thought I would blog about current trends and ideas in the library universe. Obviously what I planned to do has not happened. However, in the future I do plan to get back to task and start making this a part of my normal routine.
Popular Science magazine has just printed its latest what’s new article just in time for the Christmas shopping season. So if you don’t know what to buy for the person who has everything just check this article out.
This week’s Business Week has an article on the 50 best practices of the web. Feel free to view it on the web or stop in the library to take a look at it.
John J. Brice, III
Executive Director
Meadville Public Library