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As may be obvious, I’m a little behind on my feeds. The good news is that there’s a lot of good stuff there. The bad news is that you may have seen some of it. Here are a few quickie notes that I think merit some attention. My apologies if you’ve all seen them before. My personal goal is to be all caught up on feeds by the time I leave for ALA — Thursday morning — and don’t get behind again. I think it’s doable.

• ALA’s Poor People’s Policy - Laura Crossett talks about a few things her library has done to remove financial barriers to library services for poor patrons.
• Librarian 2.0 and hockey and you. Ryan Deschamps does a little outreach, without books!
• Andrea Mercado talks about what the what is as far as Twitter goes and notes some useful Twitter tools.
• Ken Varnum looks at the ways the Iowa flood is being covered online. When I mentioned the Cedar Rapids public library yesterday, I was heartened to see that the library’s website had information about the library closures and the flood. It was just three years ago that Katrina hit and many New Orleans area library websites weren’t able to respond on their websites in anything approaching real time. While the floods remain a tragedy, this is progress in a library technology and service arena.
• The American Library Association’s International Relations Committee has prepared a detailed history of the “independent library” movement in Cuba and how IFLA and ALA see their relationship to it. Kathleen de la Peña McCook has put the report sumary online with links to relevant online material.
• Mary Minow gives Vermont libraries a high five over our strengthened patron privacy rules.

I'm a fan of mysteries--especially British and Scandinavian ones. (Of the Americans, I do like Sara Paretsky and Laura Lippman.) I especially like listening to mysteries, because I can't race through them as I do when reading.

I have been waiting and waiting for Reginald Hill's Death Comes for the Fat Man to come out on audio and it finally popped up this week. Hooray! (If you haven't read Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series, I highly recommend it.) Only it was under its British title: The Death of Dalziel.

I hate to say it, but this time the Americans got it right. Death Comes for the Fat Man is an infinitely better title than The Death of Dalziel. (Dalziel is the Fat Man of the series--Chief Superintendent to Pascoe, who is the more intellectual of the two detectives.)