reeling and writhing

what a picture

Emdashes reports regarding a new blog at the New Yorker that has a rather apt provenance: as one of its authors says, "We like to think of the book bench as a state of mind, too: a place for considering literary matters great and small—and for occasionally baring our teeth." I'm subscribing.

Over at Libraries Interact Kathryn Greenhill (of Librarians Matter) announces a prize for the booklover or librarian whom the Gale publishing company decides can best justify their love for books in song and video.

And this is just here because it's a damn good read, being something of a classic post from a great Australian blogger. Note the blog saving the accommodation crisis, slap bang in the middle. Rock and roll will satisfy my soooo-oul.

i do love a good book deal

I went and commented on this post when I first saw it in my reader, then revisited after Maud linked to it. There are now 350-odd comments, and they make for good reading for anyone who was interested in the State Library's Text Appeal literary speed-dating events in early 2007.

I have managed to find Marieke Hardy's fabulous article about this too - no surprise that our royal Ms Fits has cracked an International Bloggie, either. About bloody time. And what a funny blog awards page, no permalinks??? that freaking page goes on forever.

Anyway. Rachel Donadio's NY Times article, which she refers to in her post, is also quite funny:

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”

All important material to consider, if you feel a row over The Corrections is brewing between you and a loved one sometime soon. (And I'm not suggesting that's the subject of the last link, either - it's just a damn good post on that book, and other matters.)

borrowers alive, and occasionally buying as well

$85,000 from lending rights to one Australian author is not too shabby, is it?
Susan Wyndham is enjoying speculating who that author might have been in 2007. (The Age rather drily informed us on the weekend that said author remains anonymous).

And while Max Barry certainly isn't English, he might be pleased to hear about this.
A spokesperson for MLA, the UK government's advisory body for libraries, claims that due to the cheaper prices of books,
"people who couldn't afford books before and borrowed them are now buying them on the high street."

I occasionally worry about what will happen when all the old Australian Book Reviews crumble to dust, as there is no comprehensive digital preservation policy operating for it at present. I'm not quite sure I should be so concerned after reading bits of the Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004) which has been published online.

In chapter 37, a general introduction to issues of preservation in humanities computing, Abby Smith writes:

Preservation by benign neglect has proven an amazingly robust strategy over time, at least for print-on-paper. One can passively manage a large portion of library collections fairly cheaply. One can put a well-catalogued book on a shelf in good storage conditions and expect to be able to retrieve it in 100 years in fine shape for use if no one has called it from the shelf. But neglect in the digital realm is never benign. Neglect of digital data is a death sentence. A digital object needs to be optimized for preservation at the time of its creation (and often again at the time of its deposit into a repository), and then it must be conscientiously managed over time if it is to stand a chance of being used in the future.

(Link via Grand Text Auto, where the publication of a new Companion to Digital Literary Studies is also announced.)

where content is king

From Jessamyn West, this link to a post by Rochelle, a librarian in the States who is asking some very sensible questions about the download system on the Kindle, and how its digital content management affects lending between family members, or in libraries.
Bud Parr reports that a Brooklyn bookshop employee has won the Brooklyn Public Library's startup competition grant of $15,000 to start her own bookstore.
On visiting Jessica's blog to read about this happy news, I find she's added a section to her links list of bookseller blogs.
(In usual Blogger style, the links list is not visible on separate post pages, only on the home page.)
So if there are bookshops out there wondering how they do it in Brooklyn, I recommend you start on this page, on the right, and work your way down.

a few library things

Over at the Great Victorian Summer Read blog, author blogging is in full swing. One of my favourite posts is here, from Alex Miller - really belongs in a biography, I'm sure that's where it will end up one day.
I did get a bit hot under the collar when I read Max Barry's post about libraries though. He sure got me big time.

Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has got all down and dirty with Flickr, in case you hadn't heard already - for those pictorial bloggers out there who would like some free copy, cop this.The beauty of this initiative is that all images in the LOC Flickr collection are already cleared for copyright, so you are saved the trouble of trawling through the general collection to check what's clear and what's not.

In other library news, the next anthology of Best of Technology Writing is now online at digitalculturebooks, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library. It can also be purchased in hard copy.
Link via if:book.

new victorian sunscreen is a book

And it's on again - Reading Victoria has a new name and a smart new blog. The Summer Read at the State Library of Victoria has been launched for 2007-8.

There are no huge surprises on the program, apart from a reduced Celebrities and Critics section, nicely repackaged and retitled as 'Reviewers' Views', and including, this year, Good Reading Magazine editor Alison Pressley and ABC books interviewer Ramona Koval. (I note however that there is a "Celebrities Reading Day" slotted in for Australia Day.) But first prize for most evocative contribution to the Reviewers' section definitely goes in my book to Claire Sutherland, books writer for the Herald Sun:

My teenage summer holidays always meant a banana lounge, sunglasses and an eventual book-shaped white patch on my torso. The white patch could have been left by anything from Stephen King's latest frightfest to a George Orwell novel (I devoured his entire canon in an Orwell orgy one Christmas holidays. Geek? Moi?).

Bless her boots, she also states a firm preference for the meaty, rather than the escapist, summer read, and has named Matt Condon's recent Snowy tract, Trout Opera, as her seasonal viand. (She could, of course, follow that up with Dorothy Porter's El Dorado from the list, if the brain is still feeling undernourished. What a pleasure to see a verse novel on a list like this.)

Along with the books (of course), the best new feature, in my opinion, is the introduction of author posts to the Summer Read blog, which augurs well for a continued increase in popularity in the application of this special new sunscreen called  Victorian reading (as well as some respite from UV rays while people are online posting comments.)

it's about reading and writing

Lisa Dempster at Locus Press picked up some good reading at the TINA (This Is Not Art) festival in Newcastle, and has a roundup of the National Young Writers' Festival up as well.

Want to talk to an agent? log into this forum at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online from  October 8-11 to talk to Agent Sydney.

From LISNews.org, this link to a Long Island librarians' panel on the graphic novel may be of interest to some.

Read all about the speedy adoption of ketai, novels published on mobile phones in Japan, here in the Telegraph. Talk about convergence:

Out of the top 10 bestselling fiction works in the first half of 2007, five started as keitai novels and boast average sales of 400,000.

Crude in style and basic in characterisation, they tend to be written by first-time writers - usually in their teens or twenties - for a young audience equally wedded to their phones.

Several have been turned into real books. Love Sky, a story about a boy with cancer who breaks up with his girlfriend to spare her feelings, has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is to be made into a film.

Many of the novels are influenced by comic books which are very popular in Japanese. Consequently, they are heavy in dialogue and really short paragraphs which fit neatly on a small screen. Large empty spaces between sentences are used to imply that the characters are thinking.

Link via the Speakeasy blog at AWM Online.

in case of vanishing journals

Here's another report at Critical Mass, the National Book critics Circle weblog, this time by Jane Ciabattari, about literary magazines going electronic in large libraries.(An earlier post giving some essential background on what's been going down in academic libraries with regard to this appeared about a month ago, from K.G. Schneider of Free Range Librarian fame.)

A  September 13 NBCC panel, "Literary Magazines Go Electronic: Now Where's the Print Edition in the Library," cosponsored by Library Journal is the subject of Ciabattari's report. Susan Thomas, a librarian on the panel, suggested that the dissolution of print journals into electronic databases can be halted by lobbying librarians and academic staff to ensure a supply of literary journals on the shelves for browsing. One panel member, Kevin Prufer, the editor of Pleiades, was inspired to set the evening up after he went to the University of Central Missouri library to catch up on poetry reviews and found that several important journals had vanished from the shelves.

Literary journals are not always easy to absorb as screen based artifacts: it can be done if needed, but it's more pleasurable to handle the magazine in paper if that's how it was designed to be handled. (Some of course are online productions, and their design is a different concern altogether.) 

Susan Thomas notes in this post, "Reading a literary magazine is such a relief after hours at the computer screen," she said. "My job is to encourage young people to become lifelong learners. They lose interest in reading on the computer. If I can put an exciting literary magazine in their hands, it can be important."

small publishing grows in spite of...well, everything, really

From Mark Sarvas again, this link to a newish site in the States which is picking up on several threads I've noted here from time to time about publishing (Mark keeps a much better eye on these things though.) Mark was interviewed for their blog recently, here.

Why are we doing this?

In the last few years there has been enormous publicity about two separate but related trends - the demise of the independent bookstores and the apparent decline of reading in the U.S. Some critics accuse the temptations of the Internet, television, and video games. At the same time, the number of independent local booksellers in the U.S. has declined from over 5,000 in 1991 to only about 1,800 today. Unable to compete with the convenience of Amazon.com and the sales and distribution efficiencies of Borders and Barnes and Noble, the local independent bookstores have been going out of business.

We see a different world. Where others see an industry facing gloom and doom, we see an industry ripe for re-invention. Where others see a downward spiral for reading, we see reading leaping forward in innovative directions with a new generation of internet savvy readers and writers; new reading formats like e-books and audio books; and new opportunities for self-publishing.

Among the things that give them optimism, they include '60 million people writing their blogs on the Internet and developing their reader base with a do-it-yourself approach'.

Andrew Burke, poet and producer of the Hi Spirits blog, has pointed us in similar spirit to the Small Press distribution homepage working out of Berkeley, California.

From little things, big things grow. (Now if I called this post by that name, there'd be a lot of disgruntled searchers out there.)

The poets have a nice meme up, and I'm counting myself tagged by Andrew, just because it's there. Here's the drift, from his blog again:

'Tom Beckett tagged Jill Jones with this meme:

"I now propose a new tag: Things which one has read and has been influenced by which are not confined to those paper-bound vessels of the printed word we refer to as books. Let's call these Non-Books. Or maybe Impossible Books. Or Limen Books? It's up to you."'

And here's my take on it.

1. my youngest children running around our small house with great energy some years back whenever the James Brown number from The Blues Brothers came up on the cassette player, while I cooked dinner.

2. walking into a pediatrician's rooms in Warrandyte Road, Ringwood, eighteen years ago, with a tiny, adored, apparently perfectly formed blonde three year old boy who would be a different person when he came out again, labelled like a virus, a jamjar, a conundrum, but still a little boy in his best red and blue French wool jumper that he never got dirty.

3. saying to myself, I am 46, that's not very old is it. And alternatively, "I could go at any time" (Arnie Grape).

4. wanting to fight and to run away all in the same moment

5. learning to care and not to care, learning to sit still

6. at about ten years of age, driving around the Dandenongs with a carfull of bouncy, wrestling siblings, longing for quiet.

7. singing, many songs, most of them well-worded, quite a few less so.

Tagging - anyone else who cares to take it on.

ready for reviewing at SLV this weekend

Mike Shuttleworth, of the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria, informs me that he has put together a workshop on review writing, to be held at the library this weekend.

It has been designed with reviewers of young adult fiction in mind, but has equal application to anyone either interested in, or already engaged in writing reviews for publication.
WHERE and WHEN?

Saturday, March 17th
Conference Centre Lounge
State Library of Victoria
Entrance 3, La Trobe Street
1.00–4.00pm
Cost: $30.00, Subscribers to BookTalk: $25.00

For booking enquiries phone 8664 7262 or email youthlit@slv.vic.gov.au

In other Victorian book news, it's great to hear that the Australian Book Club at Readings bookshop is going so well that they will be running two full meetings a month. For March, members will be meeting to discuss Rodney Hall's Love Without Hope, with new books by Deborah Robertson and Gail Jones to follow.
Email Aviva  for further enquires at avivatuffield@yahoo.com.au.

Finally, I heard some humungous figures at the Library Unconference last week for SLV's incredibly popular program, Text Appeal- as Paula Kelly now knows, my previous remarks were firmly tongue in cheek. They had over 800 participants in the last sessions, have been invited to provide considerable media commentary on the program, and people keep ringing up to put themselves on a waiting list for the next one. Books are much bigger than we all think, even in tooled up Australia, where Internet use is the highest it is anywhere in the world.
Now, if Apple had an iPod Speed Dating event, knowing what I know about music and lists, I think it would be - well, mayhem, actually. Much wiser to stick to one book per session per person, isn't it. (Which is a nice spot from which to nod to Sophie Cunningham's piece on blending book collections, over at Sarsaparilla.)

I had the very great pleasure of co-presenting at the Library Uncon with Paula and her web project manager Lili Wilkinson (she of the excellent YA blog and website, InsideADog), on books and blogging. I've had a bit of a rave about it all over at Library Sputnik (and got a bit carried away, I think - but judge for yourself. That's the kind of day it was). Thanks again to Christine Mackenzie of Yarra Plenty Libraries and her wonderful team, for running a very inspiring event, may there be many more opportunities for Victorian libraries to pick each others' brains using this highly creative format.

victorians vote for three dollars

Victorians have spoken, and on Saturday Mrs. Terry Bracks announced the results of the voting for the 'all-time favourites' on the State Library's summer reading program, Reading Victoria.

In descending order from a list of 20 novels set in Victoria, readers placed  the following five:

Perlman, Elliot, Three Dollars

Birch, Tony, Shadow Boxing

Lindsay, Joan, Picnic at Hanging Rock

Johnston, George, My Brother Jack

Ham, Rosalie, The Dressmaker

Tony Birch, Rosalie Ham and Elliott Perlman were present to accept their awards, with publisher Lisa Berryman accepting the award for My Brother Jack. 

Reader recommendations for the reading list next summer include the work of Carole Wilkinson, Peter Mews, Raimond Gaita (nonfiction), Luke Davies, Tom Griffin, Peter Temple, Lily Brett, Gerald Murnane, Hal Porter, Dorothy Porter, Maureen McCarthy, Wendy James, Maurilia Meehan, Martin Boyd and Brian Castro. So it looks like this excellent interactive reading program will be with us for some time yet.

how can you tell me that you're lonely

Lynne Hatwell of dovegreyreader goes from strength to strength - don't miss her interview here with Ralph McTell, talking about the inspiration he has drawn from the novels of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie.
Make me a bed right down on his floor, anytime. I am too late this year, but I've registered myself for the Port Fairy Folk Festival, where he is visiting as part of his last world tour later in March.

This blog, from the Kenyon Review, comes highly recommended by Kim of Reading Matters. From there, it's an easy jump to here -Armavirique is the blog of the New Criterion, I did but see it passing by, and managed to find my way back.  Not an easy task when the blogosphere continues to expand.

And wow - I rejigged my bookmarks in Firefox to include the Britblogs' excellent  headlines page, and look what I found on Peter Stothard's blog at the TLS - an early modern philosophy blog! just the thing to keep Alzheimer's at bay for a few more years, and it has a great moniker too.

The British Library's amazing London:A Life In Maps exhibition is also available in a Google Earth format. What a blast.

Found quite by chance on Technorati - TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, a website and blog 'advocating well-stocked national digital libraries.' Tele-Read is coordinated by David Rothman of Virginia, Monica de Leon of Mexico and Vivek Bhagwatkar of India. Wow. There's one very good article here, admittedly eight years old, by a reference librarian from Tampa, John Iliff, on the implications for libraries of affordable e-books, prompting me to ask, are they simply a good idea that will never happen?

From the Patrick White Readers' Group comes notification that a conference will be held in conjunction with the Sydney Writers' Festival on the man with the beanie. "Patrick White Remembered" will be held on the weekend before the festival, 26-27 May 2006.

Finally, in speaking of those passed more recently, two lovely reminiscences of Elizabeth Jolley have been posted over at Sarsaparillla, by Meredith Jones and Kerryn Goldsworthy.

we're not quite done reading victoria

I'm a bit late to the table with this one, having been asked a couple of weeks ago to get something out - but the books I'm asking you to consider have been around for longer than that, so no great harm's been done, I hope.

Note ye all that voting for your favourite of 20 Victorian (that's set in the Garden State) novels on the State Library of Victoria's Summer Reading program is closing tomorrow.

There's a terrific website here complete with shortlist and blog, and I noted the 20 selected books displayed in tantalising poses at the State Library on Monday, both in the lobby and in the back corner of Mr.Tulk's cafe, enticingly close to a soft bench and a smart table - don't think those copies were for reading with the muffins, though. (Maybe next year??)

I do have a quibble with the list - I hope to see Brian Castro's The Garden Book on this next year, pleeaasse. And while we're at it, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, and Criena Rohan's Down By The Dockside.  Nothing wrong with a really BIG book set in Victoria, is there? Nothing wrong with that at all. Or a book set in country Victoria and beautiful downtown Preston, like Wendy James' Out Of The Silence, which won a Ned Kelly crime writers' award earlier this year.

But it's a lovely initiative,  and was well supported by The Age early in January with five good articles on selected books, complete with interviews with their authors. (Let's face it, it is going to be hard to interview some of my favourite authors of things set in Victoria. Deirdre Cash, who wrote as Criena Rohan, died of cancer in her late thirties, leaving behind two novels and a lost manuscript, and Martin Boyd is no longer with us either.)

The list is impressive, all the more so because there is room for expansion. Victoria's not exactly a huge place, it doesn't teem with writers like the ACT or Tasmania do - or perhaps it always has and always will. For this reminder alone, we should be grateful. And also for the fact that the program was sponsored by several publishers, and that the website has received sparse but useful feedback which should guarantee another fresh, similarly strong reading list next year.

lingering over links

If you've already hit the absinthe, you might care to dip into the drinking issue of Boldtype
while you're at it. Authors reviewed on the topic of imbibing include Jonathan Ames, Graham Greene, Charles Bukowski, Tom Standage and Caroline Knapp.

British author Jacqui Lofthouse has a terrific coaching blog, here. She has put a 30 day writing program online and it's as good as a published book on the subject. Jacqui combines the teaching of writing with creativity coaching, is  a graduate of the creative writing school at the University of East Anglia,  and is the author of several novels.

Kate Kellaway has interviewed Jeanette Winterson about her new book for children, Tanglewreck. Link via Bookslut.

On the designer side of things, the rather beautiful Haruki Murakami website at Random House was nominated for a Webby recently. (See celebrity/fan section ).
The BBC's digital storytelling project in Cumbria, Digital Lives, won the Community section.  And Beck's homepage got a nomination too!!

Thanks are due to a library mailing list for the Webby  links, and a warm welcome to librariesinteractinfo in the sidebar there, under Library Stuff. This is a terrific new group blog for Australian librarians, well set up and run by some smooth and friendly operators who know the ropes.

finding, winning and losing

Colm Toibin has won the IMPAC prize for The Master. Huzzah. First Irish writer to do so.  Several useful links at Mark's blog, here.

How to write for the Internet - we can all learn something. From Jacket magazine.

From Cordite #23 (the Children of Malley issue):  Robert Kennedy writes on the imminent sale of Harold Stewart's personal library on e-Bay,  in The Journey (Death) of a Library . This is a very sad thing to see happen,  but it is not always easy for larger libraries to absorb personal collections, particularly if they are left under conditions that don't suit potential owners. Kennedy rather begs the question here - we are talking about 2,500 books:

So why aren’t our libraries and institutions set up to take a collection of books from one of Australia’s most prominent poets and writers? Why aren’t they displaying the libraries of our writers so we can gain an insight into their studies and learn from what they learned from? The libraries that helped them to become world-famous writers.

Some libraries have acquired the collected books of our writers. The State Library of NSW has Patrick White’s library. What are we studying and learning from that collection?

And I think he can rest assured that meticulous study will be being made by the gatekeepers, of exactly what is happening with Patrick White's shelf space. As it is done throughout every library.

I think I've seen this before, but from the Cordite blog, this link provides information on a free Australian literature site, Australian Literature Resources, compiled by John Tranter and volunteers.

your brother and his lover have embraced

Over at a favourite Australian space, Sills Bend - a tag cloud from Library Thing, where Lucy has tagged  Measure for Measure (the subject of a very old thesis of mine), with the tag 'demi-monde'.
Quite.

Using Library Thing, another lovely Internet free toy which has squillions of people cataloguing their own collections online, one can also generate covershots of books from one's library. Neat stuff. And there's a blog. Go and generate metadata, all of you.

academic blogging time is now, says McConville

Found on Templedata, Georg Hibberd's excellent tech blog for the University of Sydney, and crossposted to The Weblog Repository ( that's another blog of Genevieve's with a crappy name).

This article from Online Opinion, an Australian site, is by James McConville, a Senior Lecturer in law at La Trobe University.

It is probably still the case that, at least in Australia, blogging is considered a distraction from true scholarship rather than an exciting addition to scholarship. This was the case also in the United States, but the attitude is rapidly changing...

In Australia, most academics are happy to pump out their one or two journal articles a year and the occasional book. Academics cannot be criticised for this, as it is what is expected of them - just as workers in the Cadbury factory are expected to pump out the Freddos and family-size blocks.But surely it is time to open up this traditional approach to examination. Surely things can be done better.

athol fugard off the record

Chris Boyd, a Melbourne critic, had a profile of South African writer Athol Fugard published in the Financial Review of February 4-5. He has published excerpts from the transcript of his interview with Fugard at his blog, The Morning After, where you will find Fugard shedding a remarkably clear light on Pascal, Camus and the value of writing in dangerous times:

One of the problems I had... I was a writer. And it has taken me the longest time to arrive... Because it was a dilemma. My friends... There were friends of mine who were in jail because they had made bombs and had planted them. There were friends of mine who had to run for their lives into foreign countries. There were friends of mine who committed suicide outside of South Africa because they just couldn’t live with themselves anymore and by virtue of all that had happened... There were friends of mine who were driven into exile. And there was I writing. And it has taken me a very long time. I’ve arrived at it, now. I arrived at it with a very important play of mine -- in terms of my own personal progress -- with a play of mine called My Children, My Africa. With that play, I examined this issue in a sense. And I realise that the written word, the spoken word, are effective forms of action... every bit as significant -- every bit as potent in terms of consequences -- as any bomb that could be placed anywhere.

four books I'll never receive

I'm looking forward to donating to Michael Palin's Reverse Book Club after reading this short story published in the Guardian as part of a celebrity auction being held shortly in Britain to raise money for Book Aid.

As far as I know there is nothing like it down here. What I like about this effort is that direct donations are converted into appropriate, often purposely published materials for recipients, and donations of surplus books are only taken if they meet stringent requirements...

weeding the collection

A constructive use for all those extra endocrinology texts...here. While you're there check out the link to the Harvard Sucks prank as well. (Thank a younger Australian librarian for the link).

slight pickings

On this site I've just managed to collapse four categories into one - Media and Technology is where you will find all the blogging meditations from now on. If my work at a new site bears fruit, future posts on that topic will be over there ( TBA), but we will see how that goes...In the meantime, I'm sick of offering links instead of something I've taken time to think over, (and that's one of the reasons the tidy - up is taking place), but this is all I have this week.

Over at Corporate Engagement, Trevor Cook notes that spending on Internet advertising has risen 34% in the last quarter, giving increased returns of 5 % and pulling dollars away from other advertising areas such as TV and newspapers. (From Reuters.)

In other news from Reuters, the Library of Congress has sought assistance from Google for its World Digital Library  documentary project:

The Library of Congress will contribute its own body of works to a blended collection with other countries. More than half of the printed volumes in the Library of Congress are in languages other than English.

"It will deal with the culture of those people rather than with our contacts as Americans with those cultures," [librarian James] Billington said.

Web search company Google has agreed to work with the Library of Congress on developing standards for indexing the digital collections and by providing computer equipment.

It's anticipated the existing American digital library at LOC, the American Memory Project, will act as a model for the collection of unique objects from the world's collections such as manuscripts, pictures, photographs, recordings, maps and books.

Divertissement du jour: Over at Rhetorica, a list from Andrew Cline (updated in September this year) of Professors Who Blog.

And coming close behind that, the Guardian's list of Top Twenty Geek Novels (link from Barista).

special librarians of the world unite

There's a new kid in town. (Link via The Little Professor, and the comments are interesting.)

Genesis and flowers of evil to go

If the bookshops are shut and you must have that copy of Les Fleurs du Mal immediatement - here's your answer. (Thanks to the gang at ALIA again.)

Also following a link from The Little Prof,  a site of free databases mainly focussed on library science, but with some material covering other topics as well. (The Library Stuff typelist is coming.)

gunna meet hot chicks at the library

The title of this post is drawn from our family's punk anthem, Gunna meet hot chicks (hot chicks) at the library library library... which one member was moved to compose when I did a subject on management, taking a public library branch as its focus, a while back.There was more of it - let's all go to the library, library, read some books, you get the drift. It was minimalist and raucous and defused many a tense moment as I wrestled with group politics - whenever I got too serious about it all the 'tune' insinuated itself into my brain and kept me sane (almost).

So what about some news from people who do? Pick up at libraries, I mean. (Books, of course). From the ALIA lists, some titbits and stories, including one about the original pitch for the film, The Outsiders - that's right, it was made because some children asked their librarian.

But firstly, what are the librarians reading? (Note the acronym's resemblance to that of some friends in the sidebar here...)

Sharon Uthmann, a Queensland librarian gave me the following link (from the website of Zoetrope Films):

In the spring of 1980, a librarian at Lone Star Jr. High School in Fresno, California, took courage in hand and wrote to Francis Coppola. She told him that the students and faculty of her school wanted him to make a movie from a book they all loved very much, The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton.

The librarian, Jo Ellen Misakian, wasn't sure of the director's current address, so she sent the letter, along with a copy of the book and a petition signed by the youngsters, to the New York offices of Paramount Pictures. This was the studio that had produced two of Coppola's best-known films, The Godfather and its sequel.

Missives such as this often get lost, but this one didn't. It was duly forwarded to Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in Los Angeles and, lo and behold, actually read. Not only read, but investigated by the director's long-time associate Fred Roos.

Mr. Roos learned that the book was a bestseller in the field of adolescent literature and was taught in school systems throughout the country. It was dear to the hearts of thousands of school children, as well as their parents and teachers, but only the kids at Lone Star did something to see it transformed into another medium.

And finally - libraries of 2040, according to the Dutch. Including partisans, survival and (I kid you not) hormones.

studying the traffic

From The Age and Sydney Morning Herald (this link from the former) - the international average time for an Internet search is half an hour. Unemployed librarians take heart - for a lot of people it's still an information wilderness out there (though I bet most of those are over forty). More than a million Australians reach the international average while conducting a search, while 35% give up on searches regularly without the information they require. What do they make of blogs scattered through their results, I wonder?

We have two large families as a sample base, what a shame I don't have to do a research survey for library school. Which is in its final legs this semester, thank God. There will be fewer posts while this is happening, though I can't see myself abstaining completely from blogging while wrangling knowledge management and database building to the ground.

and you thought the robot librarian was bad news

From: Agence France-Presse

WITH the summer season in full swing, officials in northern Portugal are
setting up a library at a popular beach to encourage sunseekers to read as
they tan by the seaside.The library will operate from two locations along the beach in Povoa de Varzim, a popular fishing port resort town located 380km north of Lisbon, offering books, magazines and newspapers on short-term loan. It will open its doors on Friday and remain in operation everyday until September 15, the mayor's office of the town said.
In addition to lending reading material to beachgoers, the library will stage classical music concerts and several plays as well as loan board games and other toys to children.

Imagine trying to do checks on the board game pieces - every mother's and librarian's nightmare.

Two librarians from New South Wales attest to a service run on and near railway stations in that state - both these stories via the ALIA New Graduates List ( thanks guys). The one at Bankstown is called Station Express.

By the way, if there have been problems with any of the side links recently, Typepad has let me know and it should all be cool now.

I'm returning to study soon, and trying to get one or two reasonable posts up before I go fairly quiet for a while. So I will get off trivia briefly at some point...dunno when exactly. (And sort out the quote at the top of this post some other time.)