LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

It wouldn't be the first time the Bible was censored.

But it is probably the first time that the Bible has been published serially, in a sort of magazine format, with somewhat sexually explicit pictures. Then there was the homoerotica...

Yeah, it should surprise no one that this didn't work out too well in the "land of the free."

More from The Local.se.

"The Librarian" by Mikhail Yelizarov.

Winner of the Russian Booker-2008 competition has been awarded in Moscow. The first prize of 20 thousand dollars goes to the young author of the mystic novel “Librarian”. The jury members noted that the book is written with sense of humor and really comes near one’s heart.

Anyone ever heard of the 'Russian Booker' before? Apparently, Wikipedia has, so if you want to be the first to report on the 2008 prize...you'd better get right on it.

"I couldn’t believe it. Oswestry Library (UK) no longer stocks encyclopedias. Before the refurbishment, it had both the Encyclopedia Britannia and the World Encyclopedia, the latter beautifully printed and in some respects the better of the two.

The librarian told me that encyclopedias were “old fashioned” (tantamount to saying that books were passe, old hat) and I’d have to go online. Well call me a Luddite if you like (I had an IT bypass yonks ago) but at 68 I’ve no desire to tangle with new technology." More from the Shropshire Star.

Fatima Ndoye has just finished “L’enfant noir,” a novel based on the childhood of Guinean author Camara Laye. She could hardly put it down – except that she hardly had the chance to pick it up, either. She has been reading it in borrowed snatches of time when she races across the street from her school to the Pikine Library during her lunch break.

This crude library – a 15-by-65 foot room in a concrete cultural center – is a treasure trove for the 14-year-old, who says she tries to read a novel a week here during hour-long visits. The daughter of a construction worker who earns $10 a day, she can’t afford the $2 library card nor the two passport-sized photos required to get one, so she reads the books in installments, a little every day.

Fatima, her blue school vest covering jeans and T-shirt, knows every corner of the library: She walks to a shelf that’s three-quarters full and tells a visitor, “these are the novels.” The shelf below, she says, are books about business. She wanders a few more steps, and indicates the children’s section, picking up a picture book and rifling through the pages.

“When I was little,” she muses, “I liked these books. But now I’m bigger and I’ve changed. Because you progress. You progress all the time. I’m 14 now, and I read much bigger books.” More from The Christian Science Monitor.

A photographer for The Independent who captured the massacre in the train station in Mumbai earlier in the week describes the police officer's failure to act while innocent people were being murdured by terrorists.

The photographer noted that he wished he had a gun and not a camera.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has designated Iowa City, Iowa, the world's third City of Literature, making the community part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Iowa City joins Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia, as UNESCO Cities of Literature. .
The panel of experts that evaluated the application of Iowa City recognized this University town’s unique profile as a creative writing and reading centre with impressive history of literary accomplishments. The community’s strategic commitment to literary culture through the diversity of grassroots initiatives, such as the Iowa’s Writers Workshop and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, was highly regarded as an instructional model and inspiration for other small cities to promote local economic and socio-cultural development through creative industries.
--I hope the U.S. library community becomes more connected to UNESCO. See tags for UNESCO at Librarian.

Based on my experience, it is one of Blakes' favorite words: meh.

But there is nothing meh about the journey of the latest entry in the Collins English Dictionary. Rather, it illustrates how e-mail and the internet are creating language.

“Meh” started out in the US and Canada as an interjection signifying mediocrity or indifference and has evolved, via the internet and an episode of The Simpsons, into a common adjective meaning boring, apathetic or unimpressive in British English.

Times Online says "Collins has been aware for some time of the growing use of meh in written and spoken language. The word is widely used on the internet and is appearing in British spoken English as well as in print media.

Cormac McKeown, head of content at Collins Dictionaries, said: “This is a new interjection from the US that seems to have inveigled its way into common speech over here." Love it, us colonists teaching the inhabitants of the motherland new words.

Late news via e-mail notes that E-LIS, the E-prints in Library and Information Science, will soon resume functioning. The note indicated that E-LIS was moved to a new server as part of an upgrade by the site to Eprints 3.0. E-LIS Chief Executive Imma Subirats noted that e-mail alerts from the old version site were not migrated to the new version. Subirats suggested that e-mail alerts be re-created by users once the site is fully restored.

Europeana, a Web site of two million documents, images, video and audio clips, opened yesterday with international publicity and acclaim from researchers. LISNews report is here.

And today, it crashed.

A message on the Europeana website reads: "The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch.

"We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible. We will be back by mid-December," it added.

"We launched the European.eu site on 20 November and huge use, 10 million hits an hour, meant it crashed."

Story in the New York Times:

France has never been shy about promoting its culture, so few were surprised when it took a close interest in a new digital library intended to showcase Europe’s history, literature, arts and science.

But when the new site, called Europeana, begins life on Thursday, more than half of its two million items will come from just one of the 27 countries in the European Union: France.

So comprehensive is France’s cultural dominance over this cyberspace outpost that other countries are having their own history written for them — in French, of course.

“I find the figures extraordinary,” said Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for the project. “France has half the content — the collapse of the Berlin Wall is illustrated with a French TV documentary.”

Full story here.