The Most Beautiful Books of 2011

I'm a sucker for books with the uneven pages... they just look neat! :)

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The Most Beautiful Books of 2011:

The Most Beautiful Books of 2011

A recent New York Times article described the effort of publishers to make printed books more handsome, in an attempt to pry readers’ hands off their Kindles (good luck with that). One publisher was quoted as saying, “If we believe that convenience reading is moving at light speed over to e, then we need to think about what the physical qualities of a book might be that makes someone stop and say, ‘well there’s convenience reading, and then there’s book owning and reading.’ We realized what we wanted to create was a value package that would last.”

I am not exactly sure what a “value package” is, but I’d like to think I know a beautiful book when I see it. Here are two that resist the diminishment of the printed page. And both are extremely clever riffs on classics, artfully approaching canonical fiction with a curious design sense that never diminishes the original work itself.

Emory student arrested in library

Emory student arrested in library:

Emory student arrested in library

An Emory University was arrested last week after defending a homeless woman in the school’s library. Cellphone footage of his arrest has gone viral on the Internet.

Do Men Get Library Jobs More Easily than Women?

There were deffinately more men in my Library School classes then I expected, but wasn't that because SOIS is more "tech oriented"...? In the libraries where I've worked - the trend is more women, but I can see how that is a bit of a disadvantage when you're a woman searching for a job. Is "equal opportunity" swinging the other way? Or, are the men more qualified?

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Do Men Get Library Jobs More Easily than Women?: A kind reader wrote with a question I decided to share: Do males have a any easier time getting jobs, as I have heard, or is that another library myth?
I’m not sure how we could actually answer that question without extensive research. Unfortunately, librarians don’t have time to do extensive [...]

Baby it's cold outside!

http://www.hawaii247.com/2011/12/13/winter-weather-advisory/

--
-Erin
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"Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?"
~Gertrude Stein

Study Raises Doubts About Effectiveness of Facebook as Outreach Tool for Academic Libraries

"A new analysis of user comments on the Facebook page of academic libraries indicates that most students 'appear to reject connecting with their libraries on Facebook.'

The study, which appears in the current issue of D-Lib Magazine, by Michalis Gerolimos of the Alexander Technological Educational Institute in Thessaloniki, Greece, examined 3,513 posts on the Facebook pages of 20 U.S. academic libraries.
Significantly, Gerolimos found that 91 percent of the posts did not generate any comments, and the few comments that do appear are primarily by library personnel rather than by faculty or students."

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So, do you agree? It seems to me that libraries need to connect to their patrons any where (and any WAY) they can. We show (by our presence on social media of all kinds) that we're relevant and useful. The reference department in my library even conducts reference interviews and offers help via chat - however, Gerolimos' findings do seem to ring true on our campus. Most of the libraries' posts are "liked" by other staff members or by librarians at other locations. What can we do to alter this? Public libraries seem to have more interaction with their patrons, but even there - the patrons that do react are not of the demographic we deal with on college campuses. The social media pages do succeed at one thing though which warrants mention: they are still disseminating information that the other libraries/librarians (the folks who apparently DO read the posts, and "like" them) SHARE these things with their patrons.

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Study Raises Doubts About Effectiveness of Facebook as Outreach Tool for Academic Libraries:
A new analysis of user comments on the Facebook page of academic libraries indicates that most students “appear to reject connecting with their libraries on Facebook.”

The study, which appears in the current issue of D-Lib Magazine, by Michalis Gerolimos of the Alexander Technological Educational Institute in Thessaloniki, Greece, examined 3,513 posts on the Facebook pages of 20 U.S. academic libraries.

Full article

Headphones

YES, Pandora - I'm STILL LISTENING!! :)

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Headphones:

Google Changes Search Algorithm, Trying to Make Results More Timely

Interesting changes in Google, better late then never! :)

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Google Changes Search Algorithm, Trying to Make Results More Timely:
Acknowledging that some searches were giving people stale results, Google revised its methods on Thursday to make the answers timelier. It is one of the biggest tweaks to Google’s search algorithm, affecting about 35 percent of all searches.

The new algorithm is a recognition that Google, whose dominance depends on providing the most useful results, is being increasingly challenged by services like Twitter and Facebook, which have trained people to expect constant updates with seconds-old news.

It is also a reflection of how people use the Web as a real-time news feed — that if, for example, you search for a baseball score, you probably want to find the score of a game being played at the moment, not last week, which is what Google often gave you.

Read more

His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives

This makes me happy to read - not only for the great opportunity Room to Read is affording, but also because I helped! When I purchased Andrew's wedding gift (a pair of super awesome cuff links) All the proceeds were donated in our name to Room to Read!

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His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives:
Room to Read, a charity founded by John Wood, builds libraries and fills them with books.

Nicholas Kristof piece in the NYT: His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives

Awww... last year...

I am sitting here transferring posts from my old travel blog and I ran across a post that had a link to this song and I wanted to share!

Enjoy!

These Islands - Danny Couch