Library Stuff

“The Elsevier Foundation announced today the 2013 grant recipients for the Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries and New Scholars award programs. In total, $700,000 has been committed to ten institutions around the world in addition to five ongoing multiyear grants and the Nurse Faculty program. The Elsevier Foundation is funded by Elsevier, a global provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services.” (via PRNewswire)

“The UMass Amherst Libraries has become one of the newest partners of HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org), a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. As HathiTrust members, UMass Amherst students, faculty, and staff will have access to more than 3.5 million public domain books. The campus community will be able to search HathiTrust’s catalog and download titles in the public domain. Users can then create their own private libraries of these electronic titles.” (via Hathi Trust)

“Gregorio Travoli spends his nights lying in a tent in downtown Dallas and most of his days at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library on Young Street. Travoli said he has visited the library for the past 15 to 20 years. He isn’t the only homeless person to call this branch his own; many of its patrons are homeless. And the library’s staff has started to welcome them in a new way. Coffee and Conversations, a one-hour session that caters to homeless people, is the brainchild of Jo Giudice, who became the director of the Dallas Public Library system last year. Giudice’s office is at the central branch.” (via Dallas Morning News)

“Toronto Public Library recently commissioned the Martin Prosperity Institute, part of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, to conduct the first Canadian study to measure the library’s economic impact on Toronto. Results clearly demonstrate that Toronto Public Library delivers a strong return on investment through the delivery of library services that enhance Toronto’s competitiveness and prosperity and contribute to a better quality of life for all.” (via CNW)

“After being asked to leave a Sugar House library because of his lack of hygiene, a Utah man is suing the Salt Lake City Library for $25,000 — and he wants his library card re-activated. According to a lawsuit filed in 3rd District Court Wednesday, the man wrote that over the summer, he was banned from the public library at 2131 S. 1100 East by a librarian “who said that I smelled and I was unclean.” After being asked to leave a Sugar House library because of his lack of hygiene, a Utah man is suing the Salt Lake City Library for $25,000 — and he wants his library card re-activated. According to a lawsuit filed in 3rd District Court Wednesday, the man wrote that over the summer, he was banned from the public library at 2131 S. 1100 East by a librarian “who said that I smelled and I was unclean.” (via The Salt Lake Tribune)

“A public database of 350,000 pages of archival documents and 2,000 historical photographs relating to the 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, can be accessed from any computer in a virtual research room dubbed “FRANKLIN,” which went live at 10 a.m. Wednesday, a spokesman for the library said. The database is a collaborative effort by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, the National Archives and Records Administration, Marist College, IBM and the Roosevelt Institute, library spokesman Cliff Laube said.” (via The Poughkeepsie Journal)

“McGraw-Hill Professional, a leading global provider of print and electronic content and services for the business, education, technical and medical communities, and OverDrive, the world’s largest eBook, audiobook, music and video lending service for schools and libraries, announced today that McGraw-Hill Professional’s eBook catalog is now available for K-12 school libraries and public libraries worldwide. This catalog is one of the premier eBook collections for business, consumer, education, technical, and medical titles available on the market today. To celebrate this new offering, 2012 and 2013 McGraw-Hill eBook releases (more than 700 titles) will be offered at special bundled rates and packages for K-12 school and public library partners through the end of this year in OverDrive Marketplace.” (via PRNewswire)

“It was while looking at Google’s scan of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that I saw my first one—the hand of the scanner operator completely obscuring the book’s table of contents,” writes the artist Benjamin Shaykin. What he saw disturbed him: it was a brown hand resting on a page of a beautiful old book, its index finger wrapped in a hot-pink condom. In the page’s lower corner, a watermark bore the words “Digitized by Google.” There are several collections of Google hands around the Web, each one as creepy as the one Shaykin saw.” (via The New Yorker)

“Scout, the Sunlight Foundation’s government search and alert system, is now delivering daily alerts on federal court opinions. Court opinions will be included by default — along with regulations, legislation, speeches, and reports — for any alert based on search terms. If you’ve already set up alerts on Scout for search terms, and your alert ranges across all of our data types, you don’t need to do anything: we’ve updated existing general search alerts to include opinions too.” (via Sunlight Foundation Blog)

“The nation’s libraries are backing legislation that would curb the powers of the National Security Agency. Revelations about NSA surveillance have created a “climate of concern” for libraries, which are seeking to defend the freedom to read and research away from the government’s prying eyes. “You need to have some freedom to learn about what you think is important without worrying about whether it ends up in some FBI file,” said Alan Inouye, director of the Office for Information Technology Policy at the American Library Association (ALA).” (via TheHill)