Unshelved - Sept. 26, 2009

Unshelved is a webcomic about life in a Public library. My favorites are usually the Sunday Book Clubs, but I thought this one was worth sharing too. [Note: it's drawn a little differently than normal, because it was done by a guest artist.]

A library without the books - The Boston Globe

This private high school in Massachusetts has decided to embrace the digital age, and upgrade their library to a multi-media Learning Center, with huge flatscreen monitors, computer stations, laptop ready study carrels, e-readers, downloadable texts, and a $12,000 espresso machine.

Sounds awesome, right?

Then you get to the part where, to make room for all this - administrators decided to THROW AWAY ALL THE BOOKS. ARGH!


A library without the books - The Boston Globe

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Flick Chart

I don't remember where I first read about Flick Chart - (possibly Cinematical) but I've been playing with it for about a week. The site presents you with 2 movies, and you click on whichever one you liked better. Each click generates and modifies a list of movies ranked by your taste. On the left side, it keeps an updated list of your top Twenty movies, and on the right, it provides stats about the movie you just chose.

So far my top 3 are The Prestige, Casablanca and Moulin Rouge. But as soon as The Princess Bride comes up for comparison against them, its all over.

(Update: the site is still in testing, so its invite only, but you can bypass the invite and sign up directly using this link.)

OCLC Policy Changes

Last semester I wrote an Independent Study Paper about the potential copyrightability of metadata - particularly in the form of Library Catalog Records. One of the topics I discussed was OCLC's WorldCat, and the unrestricted availability of records to OCLC members. For a variety of reasons, I questioned whether they could assert ownership over the records, if they ever wanted to do so. Just 2 weeks before I had to turn in my paper, OCLC suddenly changed its policy, not to claim ownership of the records per se, but to restrict the way users could use the records. This policy change has caused not a small amount of outrage in the cataloging community, and since the first changes, 2 further revisions have come out. For more information, check out the wiki maintained by Coders for Libraries.