NPR is not the only news library which has a blog. A recent email discussion among other news librarians pointed out the following news library blogs. They highlight the rich and vast archival collections which many newsrooms have, as well as the unique local history of the different towns and cities they cover.
Let us know if you know of other news library blogs not listed below.
The Plain Dealer Library, Cleveland OH
Latest post includes the first photos from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and an eyewitness account of that massacre.
The News & Record, Greensboro NC
Latest post provides tips on useful searches on Twitter and how to use the results in your research and news gathering.
The Columbus Dispatch, Columbis OH
Latest post include a picture of the switchboards from the day that JFK died as well as their front page from November 22, 1963.
The Palm Beach Post, Palm Beach FL
Latest post features a picture of kids at the groundbreaking at the South Florida Science Museum in 1960.
By Kee Malesky
Today, Saturday 9/26, is the start of Banned Books Week -- sponsored by the American Library Association, American Booksellers Association, and others. Since 1982 this annual event has celebrated the freedom to read, even unorthodox or unpopular material. Among the giants of American literature that have been banned in the past are Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and (can you believe it?) Charlotte's Web. More recently, the Harry Potter books and Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, have been challenged.
Stick up for your freedom! Read a banned book this week.
As part of our audio reference services, librarians here at NPR are frequently asked to find old newsreels covering a specific topic or historical sound of a specific person. We do have a small but important collection of speeches, movies and television shows for the staff to use. Often times, though, we search known websites with archival sound for that perfect clip to be used in a reporter's story.
Recently two organizations have released free archival material on their websites that could come in handy for future audio reference questions.
September is Library Card Sign-up Month. The American Library Association (ALA) and local libraries across the country are sponsoring a marketing campaign to encourage children, teenagers, and adults to sign-up for a library card at their local public library. Basketball star Candace Parker is featured in multiple radio public service announcements as well as print media. This year's theme focuses on library cards as being the "new" must-have school supply and being one of the "smartest cards in your wallet."
Here in NPR's Spoken Word collection, I found a short skit The Library Card performed by Mr. Television Milton Berle, in which he tries to take out a book from the library but he doesn't have a library card.
from The Golden Age of Comedy: 50 Years of Great Humor, from Vaudeville to Video. Larchmont, NY : Longines Symphonette Society. 1971.
Here's something for those of you who can't take another story about people yelling and hollering during health care forums, or talking endlessly about Brett Favre.
It's an interview with a woman in Illinois who should be upset at being inconvenienced by hundreds of people calling her business phone, which happens to be very similar to the Cash for Clunkers phone number, but instead, she takes a positive attitude.
The printed version isn't due out until October 2009, so I decided to satiate my curiosity by perusing its somewhat basic but ultimately effective web site. The home page for the Historical Thesaurus of English offers a lexicographical smorgasbord for word lovers of every variety. The book is divided into three major sections: The External World, The Mind, and Society with each section further broken down into a panoply of smaller categories. The interesting and varied taxonomy is sure to produce many librarian "ooh" and "ahh" moments.
The synonym search function is incredibly robust and a heck of a lot of fun. I spent more time than I care to admit looking up synonyms for terms as illustrious as "bogus" (suppository, pasteboard, mock-made ), "smelly" (reechy, stinkardly, puant) and "petulant" (nervy, snouty, effrontuous). What can I say? Not only is the Historical Thesaurus Of The Oxford English Dictionary destined to become a classic in the annals of reference materials, it's also destined by provide hours of good clean semantic fun.
The Fourth Annual World eBook Fair is giving free access to over 2,250,000 books until August 4, 2009. Project Gutenberg, the World Public Library, Internet Archive and others have joined together to bring a variety of publications on one searchable page. Heading on vacation and don't have time to buy a book? Take a few minutes and download The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle by Beatrix Potter for the kids, some Jane Austen, or the treatise On Corporate Social Responsibility by the World Bank.
OMG! Alright everyone, are you ready for this? According to MIT's Technology Review, Wikipedia will soon be launching a module that will enable users to access, edit and attach open source videos to Wikipedia entries. Article author David Talbot writes, "Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, says that he hopes the effort will help promote wider access to vast stores of historical material, political speeches, interviews, documentaries, and anything else that could figure into Wikipedia, the world's seventh most popular website."
For an open-source proponent like me, this is a dream come true. I can't wait to watch what happens - pun intended of course!
Despite a current (FY08) budget cut of $5 million and the threat of reductions of nearly $20 million more in the next budget, the Queens Library has maintained massive and excellent programs of service and incredibly high levels of use by a public that lines up at every one of its 62 sites, every day, and occupies every space until it closes. The service includes some 23,000 free educational, cultural, and entertainment programs each year and a circulation approaching 20 million items. The Queens Library serves a population of 2.27 million, 55 percent of whom speak a language at home other than English--it is just one of the 160 different languages spoken in that diverse borough. No one in Queens lives more than a mile from a library branch.
By Kee Malesky
This week, some of the NPR librarians are attending the annual Special Libraries Association conference, here in DC. It's the centennial of the organization and the 85th anniversary for the News Division -- whose members work in the print, broadcast, and online news media, and who don't have much to celebrate these days.
The conference kicked off with a tour of the NPR libraries on Saturday, and last night the keynote address was by former Secretary of State Colin Powell. He was funny and charming, and really spoke to the audience. He talked about bringing the State Department into the digital age and the importance of the human connection between leader and follower. He also told us that the work we do is essential -- and sounded as if he really believes it.
Today I attended a session on voting technology, and this afternoon there's one about the 2010 census. Tomorrow, there are meetings on social networking as research tools, time management practices, and a talk by an editor of The Onion. We also have lots of opportunities to chat with our vendors and give them feedback and suggestions. Plus plenty of time to socialize with friends and colleagues from around the world. It's actually a great way to spend a few days!
By Jo Ella Straley Notions about intellectual property may be changing, but copyright is still a big deal to folks who want to be sure they are recognized/paid for their work. Unfortunately for most applicants, the process of obtaining a copyright is long and getting longer. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that glitches in a new system intended to improve the application process are responsible for the growing delay. Fun fact: According to the 2007 Copyright Office Annual Report, 526,378 claims to copyright were registered -- no matter how you look at it, that's a lot of paperwork! To the folks at the Copyright Office I say: "Courage."
Textbooks: Relics of a time gone by? iStockphoto.com
My memory of high school would not be complete without the textbook. Lugging those 20 pound beasts of burden to and fro, shoulders aching, my homemade paper bag book jackets tattered and littered with graffiti - those were the days of character building, but those days may soon be over if you live in California. In an effort to save money and speed innovation, Governor Schwarzenegger recently announced a new educational initiative to offer free, open-source digital textbooks to California high school students by fall of 2009.
Even though California's initiative is currently limited to secondary math and science textbooks, some colleges and universities have already dipped their toes in the digital textbook experiment with positive results. Serious challenges await California, but if they can successfully implement the model, it could radically alter accessibility to educational materials and potentially the change textbook distribution model forever. The future is now my friends.
There's a new NPR twitter feed in town called NPRBackstory. Created by Public Interactive's Keith Hopper, NPRBackstory is "experimental mashup that digs through the NPR archives to unearth the backstory on trending top." I'm following...are you?
We'd heard of pirate radio, but radio pirates? Our colleague at WNYC, Andy Lanset, brought this film to our attention. It's already been released in the UK where this review originated.
If you're interested in rare book and manuscript digitization, then you must read the fantastic article from last Friday's Wall Street Journal, called The Next Age of Discovery. It's all about the intersection of technology, history, scholarship and religion. The article highlights the work of Benedictine monk, Father Columba Stewart, who's leading the charge to preserve religious historical manuscripts through digitization. He "cites his monastic order's long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration."
There's a really interesting article by John Timmer from Ars Technica about a Wikipedia hoax that fooled the likes of The Guardian. Apparently, an Irish college student inserted some finely crafted, yet totally false wording into the Wikipedia entry for composer Maurice Jarre, who had just passed. That finely crafted, yet totally false wording was directly lifted by several news organizations who wrote about Jarre's life. OOPS! Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, umm...Wikipedia, umm...won't get fooled again.
Ever heard of Wolfram Alpha? The name conjures visions of solar systems and Battlestar Galactica episodes, but Wolfram Alpha isn't a constellation or a galaxy. It's the name of a new computational research engine spearheaded by legendary physicist Stephen Wolfram. According to CNET, Wolfram Alpha is "a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine." In a nutshell, you can ask it a question, such as "What's the GDP of France?" and it gives you the answer. In more technical terms, it's a giant repository that employs complicated computer algorithms to perform computational calculations of vetted data sets requested by natural language queries. Got that?
Unfortunately, Wolfram Alpha isn't publicly available yet and, based on early demonstrations, there are still kinks to be worked out. However, the idea and concept are there. Using my crystal ball to gaze deep into the future, I see major implications for librarians and investigative news researchers. A tool like this could revolutionize investigative reporting for cash-strapped news organizations and start-up blogs. Reporters and researchers will no longer have to spend countless hours compiling data to determine whether correlations exist between events. Maybe Wolfram Alpha will turn into a star after all.
The other day my colleague Kee Malesky turned me on to an incredibly interesting article from the New Scientist website about the granting of patent 7508978. What's so important about Patent 7508978 you ask? It's the patent that explains how Google's proprietary book scanning technology works.
Image of Google's infrared camera technology United States Patent and Trademark Office
By Maureen Clements
Strange things are afoot in the world of digital books, and I don't mean inappropriate book content. According to the New York Times, the Justice Department is opening an antitrust inquiry to examine the recent settlement between Google Books and the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild. There are so many facets to this story it literally boggles the mind. Is Google creating a monopoly with this agreement? What happens to access if Google no longer exists? Is the book industry being greedy by asking too much? Are copyright laws in the Internet age too Draconian? Stay tuned because this is definitely a story worth following.
Filmmaker and screenwriter Bill Haney was driving home in rush-hour traffic in Boston, listening to NPR, when a story came on about a working single mom in Texas who'd been unjustly accused of dealing drugs. He was so moved by it he pulled over to the side of the road and began to cry. He tells an interviewer at the Philadelphia Film Festival that the radio piece inspired him to make the movie "American Violet," premiering April 17, which tells the real-life tale of the wronged mom, Regina Kelly, and stars Alfre Woodard and Nicole Beharie.
It's National Library Week for real this time and what better way to celebrate than by reading about your fellow brethren. Take for example the Shovers and Makers website. If you count yourself among the hundreds of thousands who didn't make the Library Journal'sMovers and Shakers list, then the Shovers and Makers site is for you. Write a bio about yourself and post it to their site. Or why not check out the Original Librarian Trading Cards website? It's chock full of interesting people who've heeded the call.
Next week kicks off National Library Week, the week when librarians toot their own horn. Last year, the American Library Association paid homage to NLW by making hilarious videos demonstrating the type of questions librarians are apt to be asked on any given day. Hope you enjoy them and Happy National Library Week everybody!
Did anyone happen to catch the recent article from the New York Times about the stress libraries are facing as a result of the economic downturn? Here's a major shout out to all those public librarians at the forefront of the crisis.
In the ongoing discussion of why the media industry is under duress and how it happened, a few things have appeared recently that may shed some light, or maybe just muddy the waters.
The State of the News Media 2009 is the sixth annual report on American Journalism by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) that examines the health of the profession. The Associated Press news item on the report sums up the prognosis of the profession as "disoriented, not dying." The day the report came out, NPR's Talk of the Nation had PEJ director Tom Rosenstiel on to talk about it.
No Saint Patrick's Day would be complete without paying tribute to one of Ireland's most notable bards, William Butler Yeats. Check out the National Library of Ireland's amazing interactive online exhibit about WBY's life and work, or take a listen to this Morning Edition piece from March 17, 2000. It contains clips of William Butler Yeats reading his poetry on the radio. Erin Go Bragh!
Wondering who's shaping the future of libraries? Look no further! The Library Journal has just released their list of Movers and Shakers for 2009. It's a veritable who's who in the field of librarianship. Congrats to all the lucky recipients.
Or should I say, fascinating people become librarians. Either way, start asking your local librarian about what he or she does all day and you're sure to have an interesting story on your hands. Take for instance the New York Public Library's very own Librarian to the Stars, David Smith. Not only was he profiled in the New York Times, he also reveals in his latest interview with Gothamist that he helped George Carlin find a 1946 edition of Ripley's Believe it Or Not. Fascinating indeed!
The American Library Association has sifted through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to find a list of programs funded through ARRA that could benefit libraries. It also includes material on grants, how to advocate for funding, and state-by-state impacts on funding.
While you're in the government-policy frame of mind, check out the Special Libraries Association analysis of the Obama Administration's agenda and its relevance for special librarians, especially in the area of technology.
The Special Libraries Association, of which yours truly is a member, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, SLA is hosting a Centennial Celebration Video Contest. Contestants were asked to make a video about the SLA Information Professional of the Future. They received lots of clever video entries such as Stella KOS: Special Librarian 2109. Participation is closed now, but you can view all the awesome video submissions on YouTube.
In between bites of cupcake and sips of Ale-8-One, the NPR reference librarians have been working with our Digital Media colleagues to bring you a fact-laden multimedia tracker as a different way of looking at the events, developments, and actions of the new administration in its first 100 days. Check out the tracker!
Monday night, NPR librarians hosted the annual meeting of the local chapter of Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society of library science. Yes, it's a science, and we have advanced degrees! It's a great organization to belong to.
Usually, our professional activities involve primarily other news librarians who share our specific interests, but in Beta Phi Mu, we meet librarians we would otherwise probably never cross paths with. So we get to chat with public librarians, and children's lit specialists, and researchers at government agencies or law firms. They're all great people and they all have fascinating jobs. I'm not kidding -- I rarely meet a librarian who doesn't love going to work every day.
Joan Weeks and Roberta Stevens strike a pose with Kee /Maureen Clements
I'd like to thank filmmaker Amy Seidl for making librarians look like such badass rock stars in her documentary The Hollywood Librarian. Even though the film has been around since 2007, DVD copies will be available in April 2009. You can also watch the full documentary in preview mode at the Media Education Foundation.
NPR's brand-new CEO, Vivian Schiller, will be speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, March 2nd. Her topic is "Local Is the New Global: The Multiplatform Evolution of Public Radio." She's been an enthusiastic listener and supporter of NPR and now, after only two months on the job, has become a tireless promoter of NPR's radio and web presence.
To see what she has to say, check C-Span -- they carry Press Club Luncheon speeches live, when Congress is not in session. Video of the event will also be available on the Press Club's website.
Today, I came across this Talk of the Nation segment, Blogging for Beginners. Panic set in when blogger Rex Sorgatz mentioned his feed reader has probably 600 or 700 sites in it. My blog reader only has 15. I better get to work.
Glass Ceiling at Covent Garden in London / iStockphoto.com
If not, you certainly missed a milestone in the field of librarianship. England's Cambridge University Library recently appointed its first female University Librarian and it only took 650 years. Congratulations, Anne Jarvis. You rock!
New (to me) word of the day: snarge. Our colleagues at All Things Considered were so intrigued by what happens to birds when they, ahem, encounter aircraft that they went down to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History to get the whole story. Check out what they learned.
Still not sated in the snarge department? Check out a Wall Street Journalarticle and this tidbit from the museum itself.
We never know where the day will take us. This past Thursday afternoon, your correspondent found herself learning all about Michigan state tax liens in the hopes of answering a question related to them. (No offense to the Great Lakes State or any other jurisdiction fond of tax liens, but they are a bit on the dull side.) Suddenly, the story of what turned out to be the crash/splash landing of US Airways Flight 1549 began to spread throughout our network and our building. It was less than 20 minutes before the start of All Things Considered (ATC), which meant parts of that show would change and continue to evolve and update while the show was in progress. Whoosh!
There's a scene in the movie "All the Presidents Men" where Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) is in the Washington Post Library, asking for a clip file on Kenneth Dahlberg. The long-haired librarian tells him they don't have a clip file for Dahlberg. OK. But I checked the photo file, she said, and we do have a picture of him. The photo identified Dahlberg as a Republican fundraiser, and was an important early clue in the unraveling of the Watergate plot. Woodward didn't ask her to check the photo file; but librarians don't wait to be asked!
That long-haired librarian was Liz Donovan. She passed away last month. A pioneer among news librarians, blogging before most of us knew what it was, Liz had wonderful careers at the WP, running a health food store, and then at the Miami Herald where she "helped lead the transition to computer-based research. A pioneering Internet user -- yet eternal flower child -- she enabled Herald writers to produce work that won Pulitzer Prizes." From her obituary in the MH on 12/10/08:
Said humorist Dave Barry: 'I went to her with many strange requests, and they never fazed her. I'd ask her something like, `Are there any politicians whose last name is Doody?' And she'd say, `Do you want federal, state or both?'''
Retired Herald investigations editor Jim Savage called Donovan ``one of the folks who built The Herald's reputation for great investigative journalism... We knew when we asked Liz for help she would find the answers to the I-Team's toughest research questions. In her quiet, competent way she created a zone of sanity in the city room while juggling countless deadline requests for information.''
Reliable, thorough and unflappable -- Instantly recognizable under a sun hat in her convertible -- Donovan was most of all dogged.
''She would never give up'' seeking the information a journalist needed,said Joan Fleischman who, as a Herald reporter and columnist, sought Donovan's support daily. ``But the thing about Liz was she made you self-reliant. She'd do the work for you on deadline, then in a kind way teach you to do it yourself. And she was patient.''
From Columnist Carl Hiaasen: ``There was almost no piece of information you could ask her to find that she wouldn't have in a couple of hours at most.''
Writing his novels, Hiaasen said: 'I'd shoot her an e-mail that always began with, `I know this sounds weird, but...' In a day, she'd have gotten the best and only information there was out there.''
Censorship and Wikipedia are two subjects near and dear to my librarian heart, which is why my curiosity was piqued after reading about the latest Wikipedia censorship dilemma.
According to the BBC, the British watchdog group "Internet Watch Foundation" recently moved to block access to a Wikipedia entry about the Scorpions' 1976 album Virgin Killer. The album cover depicts a young naked girl in a provocative pose. Even though the album is 30 years old, the cover still courts controversy, but what about the music? Thanks to the power of YouTube, you can judge for yourself. Here's a link to the tune "Backstage Queen" from Virgin Killer. Has the IWF considered censoring the music as well? I kid! The song's actually not too bad.
This may be a silly observation but I seem to recall several controversial semi-nude album covers that emerged from the '60s and '70s, including Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy and Blind Faith's Blind Faith. If you're interested...here's a list of other controversial album covers.
Looks like we'll have to wait a little longer to check out Europe's new digital library, Europeana. The site completely crashed and won't be available for several more weeks. I can only imagine the drama that went down in those server rooms. Yikes!
A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from Bob Randolph, NPR's facilities coordinator. He asked if I would like to be a "floor aid" and become CPR certified. Not one to shy away from a challenge, I accepted. And boy was I in for a treat.
Yesterday, I came upon this interesting article in the New York Times about the launch of a new digital library called Europeana. According the website's tagline, Europeana is "bringing you digitised books, films, paintings, newspapers, sounds and archives from Europe's greatest collections." WHAT?!? News like this is a dream come true for librarian geeks like me....must investigate now.
As A Matter of Fact is a blog by and for the audio-loving, fact-finding, truth-seeking, pop-culture-fiending, news-addicted librarians of the world. Of course, you don't need to be a librarian to read it. But we're pretty sure you may secretly want to be one after you do. Interested in learning more? Read our Frequently Asked Questions, and don't forget to follow the discussion rules.
