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U.S News and World Report just released its annual list of 31 careers with bright futures (i.e. that offer strong outlooks and high job satisfaction.) Librarians are listed as being part of that group. According to the description:

It’s an underrated career. Most librarians love helping patrons dig up information and, in the process, learning new things. Librarians may also go on shopping sprees, deciding which books and online resources to buy. They even get to put on performances, like children’s puppet shows, and run other programs, like book discussion groups for elders..

Librarians are actually on the list twice, as one of the other good jobs included on the list is Usability/User experience specialists (one of the training backgrounds they suggest for this job is library science).

- DD

Google will soon be releasing their own take on a Wikipedia-style of information resource - Google Knols (screenshot).

Some of the significant differences will be: named authors (who can choose to receive a portion of ad revenue for the “knol” pages they write) instead of Wikipedia’s anonymous author model. The site will allow multiple “knols” on a single topic (each will be written by a single author) with the community voting for the best one and suggesting changes in a separate area instead of the collaborative style of composing articles used on Wikipedia.

(via MetaFilter)

On a completely unrelated note, this will be the last Friday Fun Link I post on LibrarianActivist. After some recent discussions with the other two librarians I took on this project with about the future of the site, it was felt that we need to re-focus on the serious side of activism. We also discussed some other potential changes and improvements to the site. Hopefully more details about these items will be forthcoming in the weeks and months to come.

I am happy to remain involved with LA as a contributor but for anyone who’s enjoyed this recurring feature, I will continue to post the Friday Fun Links on my personal blog.

- JH

This list is focused mostly on the Internet and technology as things that librarians are better at (rather than librarians successfully utilizing these tools beyond what normal users might do - he says, typing on a blog) but it’s still a lot of food for thought.

To be honest, I think it wouldn’t be hard to make a 100 item list of why libraries and librarians are still essential.

Plus they forgot #34 - “Librarians are the ultimate service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.” (Thanks to Michelle L. for the quote.)

- JH

Play a fun word game and donate rice to help end world hunger with every correct answer at FreeRice.com.

Or, if you don’t feel like playing the game, why not just visit HungerSite.ccom?

(Thanks to Gillian W. for the tip)

- JH

Librarian Chick provides an exhaustive list of online resources for students and librarians in the academic environment - from audio books to test taking and everything in between.

She also has a Learning Center that lets you search for free educational information, sites, games and software online.

Finally, to complete the trifecta of excellent resources, she also offers a search for free online audio books, e-books and textbooks. The search provides results from literally dozens of the biggest and most complete libraries that host free resources.

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has put up over 13 000 segments going back to 1999. That’s pretty cool…or at least it would be if I could get any of the videos in the archives to load.

Maybe the site’s just being hammered with traffic because it’s so new. But it almost makes you wish some of these media giant properties would skip the proprietary site designs and media players and just put it all up on YouTube instead.

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

I’ve done a pretty fucking exhaustive swearing-related FFL before but this fucking article is a nice fucking addition to that list. Fuck yeah!

- JH

- JH

I did an earlier post about the guy who designed a program to link IP addresses to Wikipedia edits. This has led to all kinds of discoveries of spin, manipulation and outright lies being planted by individuals and organizations who want to harm others or clean up their own image.

Now a blogger has compiled a list of the seven most scandalous edits that have been discovered…so far.

- JH

The ALA recently released a survey of rural librarians with all kinds of interesting, enlightening and downright depressing comments and statistics.

With fully one half of your friendly neighbourhood LA contributor team working in rural library settings, this survey also hits close to home (although I do believe that the situation in Canada for salaries and working conditions is much better than in the US for the most part.)

(via the always jam-packed ALA weekly e-newsletter which, unfortunately isn’t online)

- JH

Wikipedia allows anonymous edits but it does track the IP of anyone who makes the edit. So a Cal-Tech computer grad student, inspired by news last year that Congress members’ offices had been editing their own entries, and curious whether other organizations were doing anything similar, developed a program to make it much easier to see the affiliation of anyone who made edits to any Wikipedia page.

This has led to numerous revelations about corporations like Fox News, organizations like the CIA and individuals such as staffers for a current US Presidential candidate abusing the intent of Wikipedia

(via MetaFilter which has lots of other links I didn’t include in this post)

- JH

• How Swearing Works
• BBC’s List of Most Offensive Words (in ranked order)
• Urban Dictionary - a user-created dictionary of slang including many offensive terms. Great for understanding the latest teen slang.
• The Great Internet Swearword Project - picking between two choices helps define the “best swear words in the world“.
• Learn To Swear in any Language
• Letter Cursing - How to Swear Without Swearing
• The Greatest Swearing Moments in Cinematic History

- JH

Instead of relying on your friendly local library (who, let’s be honest, often has a policy of not letting patrons know about overdue books until, well, until they’re overdue), Library Elf is a neat little service that helps you track your due dates, holds and more. You can configure the service to notify you via e-mail and/or RSS about the status of your library account, track multiple library accounts (ie. for your whole family) and more.

A number of libraries across Canada, the US and internationally are currently supported and more are being added all the time. (See the FAQ for how to submit your own library if it’s not already listed.)

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

The title says it all.

(Also I’m in a bit of a pinch for time this week as I’m heading to a lake soon and will be sans Internet for a day or two.)

- JH

“In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors.”

Just in time for the biggest book release in the history of the universe, a contrarian view from the Washington Post.

It’s out tonight at midnight but rumours of leaks have been happening for the past few days.

Harry Potter’s publisher has been going after any web site that even links to a site that distributes files purporting to be the leaked work.

They’ve even been going after sites that link to sites that are distributing the leaked work if you can believe it!

- JH

The author of the popular Freakonomics book looks at the question, “If public libraries didn’t exist, could you start one today?”

“But here’s the point I’m (finally) getting to: if there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the U.S. (much like Andrew Carnegie once did), what would happen?

I am guessing there would be a huge pushback from book publishers. Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it? I don’t think so.”

He doesn’t bring it up but I wonder if an analogy could be made to bit torrent sites today? One person buys a legitimate copy and then others are able to obtain a free copy. The only difference is that instead of dozens of uses as for popular library items, bit torrent allows thousands of copies to be downloaded. The other big difference is that bit torrent tends to focus on movies, music and TV shows that don’t have the history of “free” borrowing like books in a library do. And of course, you don’t have to “return” a digital copy.

It’s not a perfect analogy but the similarities are there.

(via Reddit)

Oh, and in a semi-related story, a PhD candidate in economics contends that the optimal length of copyright in today’s digital age is…fourteen years. (via Boing Boing)

- JH

The worldwide series of concerts known as Live Earth have started today in Australia and Japan and will be moving around the world for the next 24 hours.

Although not directly related to Live Earth, there are a couple relevant sites you might want to check out:

• Earth Charter is “a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society for the 21st century. Created by the largest global consultation process ever associated with an international declaration, endorsed by thousands of organizations representing millions of individuals, the Earth Charter seeks to inspire in all peoples a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family and the larger living world. The Earth Charter is an expression of hope and a call to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history. ”
• The Earth Portal which is “The Earth Portal is a comprehensive resource for timely, objective, science-based information about the environment. It is a means for the global scientific community to come together to produce the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable information resource on the environment, and to engage civil society in a public dialogue on the role of environmental issues in human affairs. It contains no commercial advertising and reaches a large global audience.”
• And as always, there are pledges to be found - the good folks at Avaaz have one which they’re trying to get 50 000 signatures on (27 055 at this point).

- JH

On late night TV talk shows, every show begins with the host inevitably saying something like “We’ve got a really good show for you tonight!” whether the guest is Tom Hanks or that guy who made the funny noises in the Police Academy movies.

My Friday Fun Links are sort of the same thing - sometimes I have really good ones, sometimes they’re kinda “meh”.

But to be completely honest, this week’s FFL feels like the librarian equivalent of Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts sitting down on the couch (or Tom Cruise jumping on it).

Here’s a link to a great discussion at MetaFilter on the development of the history of alphabetization.

All kinds of topics are covered - the idea that alphabetization developed long after the alphabet instead of soon after as you might expect. Other related issues that librarians face every day - do you use a person’s last name or first? How do foreign cultures with different naming conventions fit in? How about foreign alphabets in general? Does a word with a space (”sea foam”) come before a compound word (seaborne). And so on.

Anyhow, folks, we’ve got a really good link for you this week…enjoy the know!

- JH

In keeping with the topic of the day, here’s a report on internet filtering from the National Coalition Against Censorship which is admittedly, a bit dated, having been produced in 2001. But it gives an excellent overview of many of the issues and problems being discussed in the wake of the LPL debate. And an update of the report in 2006 shows that the same concerns with internet filtering software remain to this day.

Here are some examples of what happens when you filter:

• CYBERsitter blocked a news item on the Amnesty International site after detecting the phrase “least 21.” The offending sentence described “at least 21” people killed or wounded in Indonesia.
• SurfWatch blocked the University of Kansas’s Archie R. Dykes Medical library upon detecting the word “dykes.”
• X-Stop blocked the “Let’s Have an Affair” catering company and searches for Bastard Out of Carolina and “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.”
• WebSense blocked a Texas cleanup project under the category of “sex,” and The Shoah Proj-ect, a Holocaust remembrance page, under the category of “racism/hate.”
• Cyber Patrol blocked a Knights of Columbus site and a site for aspiring dentists as “adult/sexually explicit.”
• BESS and SurfControl blocked curriculum materials on Populism because they also contained information about National Socialism. Symantec blocked the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun sites while allowing sites associated with gun control organizations.
• BESS blocked a site on fly fishing, a guide to allergies, and a site opposing the death penalty as “pornography.” It also blocked all Google and AltaVista image searches under its category of “pornography.”

- JH

“The Prelinger Library is a small privately owned “public library” in San Francisco with the unique philosophy that browsing library stacks can reveal new knowledge, if the books are arranged for browsing. This is counter to most public libraries who rely on computer terminal searching, databases and the Dewey Decimal system to atomize books and subjects, with stack browsing a sort of random after effect. Now a (real) public library in Arizona has joined the revolution and claims to be the first public library in the nation to drop the Dewey Decimal system. Instead, books will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange books. The demise of the century-old Dewey Decimal system is overdue, county librarians say: “People think of books by subject. Very few people say, ‘Oh, I know Dewey by heart.’ “”

(via MetaFilter which has some great discussion about the role of classification systems in libraries and bookstores)

- JH

A bookseller writes in Library Quarterly about how librarians are the enemies of books - marking them up with tape, stamps and glue, getting rid of unwanted and obsolete books and so on.

(Oh, and it’s an article written in 1937. Have things changed or are librarians still responsible for “ruining” books?)

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

The Internet Library of Early Journals is a digitized collection of journals from the 18th and 19th centuries.

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

(Thanks to Kerry M. for the tip!)

- JH

We’ve highlighted a couple sites in the past that offer free e-book downloads but this page has a comprehensive list of all the options online for getting free e-books and tree-books.

(I love that the title of the post where I saw it on MetaFilter is “The Best Place To Get Free Books” and the first comment is “…would be libraries.”)

(via MetaFilter)

- JH

“Ann Seidl’s full-length feature documentary, The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians on Film, will premiere at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., on June 22. The film shows the realities of 21st-century librarianship, including stereotyping, censorship and intellectual freedom, and the impact of librarians on society.”


(via ALA Direct e-newsletter)