MOBIUS Libraries

What's really cool about this thing is the level of analysis that it does of the password. Most "password strength meters" are just looking at length and inclusion of things like lowercase/uppercase special characters. This thing does so much more and rather than just saying "weak", "very strong" it tells you how long it'd take to crack it. Even cooler is that you can choose 'Show Options' and change the hardware of the imaginary attacker and the type of encryption your password is stored as. This is via: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/05/25/how-long-would-it-take-to-crack-your-password/ Worth reading as it also calls into question the idea of regularly changing your passwords. Obviously it's much better to just use separate passwords for everything and only change them if you have a reason to think your password was compromised.

Every time I look over RUSA's standards, I'm struck by how relevant they are to what we do as customer service professionals.

Redbox for books. I'm mixed on it, I like the ease of it but let's not get rid of libraries.

Normally I'd link to the article itself but the comments on the slashdot page are worth a read. "Will they ban 3D printers?" "Knowing our congress they'll try to ban teaching Geometry in schools... you can't print illegal shapes if you don't know shapes!" Sad but true. These are really the kinds of discussions that we will have to have as a society in the very near term. Libraries should be at the forefront of this discussion - they've always had to fight to protects peoples rights to access information. If they have public access 3D printers it's only a matter of time before the government comes knocking wanting to see the shape files that their patrons have been printing just like they do with circulation records and internet history.

Way to go Yahoo! At a time when most people have already forgotten your company still exists... release a security problem. Any press is good press, right?

An article about a Maker Space at the Westport, Connecticut library, which includes a 3D printing project. 3-D printing is one of the waves of the future and I know the MST library looked at one; hosting the Maker Space in the middle of the library is a good way to promote it but I wonder if the noise and activity will end up distracting to the other patrons.

This is epic. Someday soon libraries will be repositories of genetic information and in addition to 3D printers they will have biological printers. Even though libraries lending seeds is fairly new, in the not so distant future that function will be obsolete as patrons are able to come into the library and print the genetic materials needed to grow any plant species on record.

This is why we can't have nice things...

A look at the logistics how an open access journal may be set up-- as you can see, it's both cheap and easy, which which may give pause to some people who would otherwise submit articles.  For that reason, the first thing that Eve stresses is to place high priority on the quality of your board and reviewers, to give your new title some legitimacy.

In France eBooks are only 1.8% of the general market, and total sales of books have actually increased by 6.5% from 2003 to 2011. Some interesting conclusions are drawn from this, namely that prices for French language books are fixed by government decree and set by publishers--not by price discounters such as Amazon, and last year the publishers lobbied to do the same for eBooks. The French government is also friendly to booksellers, offering grants and help with rent. The result is French language bookstores are doing well, while some such English language bookstore such as the 30 year old Village Voice are closing because of the competition from resellers like Amazon and eBooks. The article surmises that the French are really only delaying the inevitable, but I find it curious that nothing is really stopping them from turning entirely to eBooks now, the main factor is cost rather than convenience or access.

That's...pretty neat, actually.  If one were in my neighborhood, I'd use it.

This probably isn't the tipping point for ebooks over print--but is very close to it. Ebooks outsold adult hardcover fiction for the first time in 2011, nearly tripling their marketshare to 15%. However, the overall book market declined by 2.5% and the total revenue of ebooks (2 billion) was still much less than that of all print books (11.1 billion).

Did you know there was a library for the Olympics? I didn't.

Here's an idea for our server coffee tables we keep talking about. We can get cards from each institution/library and put it on top of our table. How many do you think we can fit on a server?

This article points out that many of the values of librarianship (privacy, sharing, preservation) are in conflict with current ebook models. Ebooks are not private ("libraries can't protect data stored with third parties"), ebooks can't be shared ("people can't give their used ebooks to the library"), and ebooks can't be preserved ("we can't preserve files we can't keep"). Even access is not universal ("Does your ebook platform provide content that's compatible with all devices?").

An interesting page from an interactive News Museum that shows the daily front pages from approximately 900 newspapers worldwide. While not as useful as Google as it doesn't include full articles and the archive is only selected "of interest" topics it does give a quick view of what is important in the world today.

An interesting article about drumming up interest and using a response and feedback to refine a book before it is published, a process that libraries could help authors with.

While not a particularly well written or informative article, it is relevant that that debates about eBooks and libraries have now reached journal like The Economist where libraries are rarely mentioned.

Discusses the state of the humanities in education (secondary and higher). Although the article is about three years old, I find a great deal of relevance here. Slouka discusses the commodifcation of education, how America's educational system is being altered to provide "product" for business, rather than critically thinking citizens.

The insights in this article were interesting, given that they coming from a trade publication.   I do think Brantley is absolutely right, but I'm not sure what that means for libraries.  The fact still remains that a lot of bestsellers and popular works-- which are still associated with libraries-- are squarely in the hands of the Big Six (Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillian, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) and it's yet unclear how a large number of independent publishers will have any effect.

A nice collection of information for those new to the concept of digital preservation, as well as some tools to get your institution started.