Recommended Reading, Links Galore, Plentiful Screenshots, Occasional Commentary, and Photo Galleries on the Topics of Libraries, Publishing, Technology, Politics, Social Issues, and More
I’ve proudly worked for newspapers for my entire adult life, starting in high school. Now an industry that, for all its faults, does a wonderful job keeping our politicians honest and simply trying to tell the truth is in financial jeopardy in a new, digital age.
Excerpt:There’s even a near-perfect model of how Connecticut Light and Power could have done the job better. Norwich, Conn., a city of 40,000, has owned its own electric utility, as well as those for sewage, gas and water, for 107 years. Norwich Public Utilities’ customers pay, on average, a bit less than Connecticut Light and Power’s. Yet after this past weekend’s snow dump, power was out for only about 450 of its 22,000 customers — and for no more than an hour. As of Thursday morning, nearly half a million Connecticut Light and Power customers were still waiting for the lights to go on.
Excerpt:In an effort to save money but still maintain high standards of service, the Beloit Public Library's Board of Directors approved the elimination of long-held health care benefits for about one dozen part-time employees there.
Library Director Kristi Howe admitted "there's potential for this to have a significant impact on the lives of employees," but said there were few other options capable of filling the institution's financial shortfalls. Workers were informed of the plan in September and will maintain benefits until March 2012.
Ideally, the grace period will give the part-timers opportunity to brace for change, Howe said.
Full-time workers will be required to chip in an increased percentage of premium payments, she added.
Dawn Deuvall, an employee in the city's accounting department and union president of AFSCME # 2537 - the group to which these part-time employees belong, said the library board didn't demonstrate due diligence in its proposal. Alternative cost-cutting measure should have been further explored before resorting to this, she said.
Part-time library staff negotiated for these benefits in the 1970s and have "kind of paid for" them by taking wage cuts in recent years, Deuvall said.
Excerpt: In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood says that our nation discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and pecuniary pursuits of happiness.” This democracy, he said, changed the lives of “hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”
Those words moved me when I read them. They moved me because Henry and Ruby Moyers were “common laboring people.” My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. Mother managed to finish the eighth grade before she followed him into the fields. They were tenant farmers when the Great Depression knocked them down and almost out. The year I was born my father was making $2 a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a week in his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the last job he held. I was one of the poorest white kids in town, but in many respects I was the equal of my friend who was the daughter of the richest man in town. I went to good public schools, had the use of a good public library, played sandlot baseball in a good public park and traveled far on good public roads with good public facilities to a good public university. Because these public goods were there for us, I never thought of myself as poor. When I began to piece the story together years later, I came to realize that people like the Moyerses had been included in the American deal. “We, the People” included us. [Bold highlights added.]
Excerpt: Debate over the Pearls’ teachings, first seen on Christian Web sites, gained new intensity after the death of a third child [1st child, 2nd child], all allegedly at the hands of parents who kept the Pearls’ book, “To Train Up a Child,” in their homes. On Sept. 29, the parents were charged with homicide by abuse.
More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially popular among Christian home-schoolers, who praise it in their magazines and on their Web sites. The Pearls provide instructions on using a switch from as early as six months to discourage misbehavior and describe how to make use of implements for hitting on the arms, legs or back, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line that, Mr. Pearl notes, “can be rolled up and carried in your pocket.”
The book's modern edition.
More than 670,000 copies sold
Very little middle ground.
In light of this article, the following comment takes on a different meaning from when I first read it a few days ago.
As I know from my experience at Middleton, home-school families make extensive sure of public library materials and services, though I'd characterize the last paragraph in the above statement as hyperbole.
A list of DeMint country public libraries found here.
If any South Carolina home-schooling families have requested a copy of the Pearl book, no library in the state has purchased one -- at least according to WorldCat.
Excerpt: But they do have issues with how the city is run, including a feeling that the Common Council was trying to micro-manage individual departments.
The employees in the focus group wanted foremost to see that department supervisors were given the ability to oversee day-to-day functions without interference from the Common Council.
They were also concerned that the turnover in supervisory positions along with several unfilled positions — human resources, most notably — contributed to city government inefficiencies.
We couldn't agree more.
The Common Council, mostly out of an attempt to save money, has allowed several key supervisory positions to remain vacant. Human resources, city planning and city assessor are three of the top-level positions that haven't been filled with permanent hiring.
Excerpt:But while many academic libraries are digitizing and moving holdings off site, Manseuto is the largest and latest (of about two dozen libraries) to add automated storage and retrieval systems. Volumes are housed in solid steel cases about 50 feet below ground. Should someone want to actually touch the real thing, books are delivered through a labyrinthine system of cranes and elevators. Picture the door-sorting machine from Pixar’s “Monsters Inc.”
Excerpt: I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.
Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08 days.
However much community leaders are pushing reading, it's not enough. We need more mobilization from educators, politicians, pastors and civic leaders around reading.
As for parents, far too many are poor allies of their children's reading skills. More needs to be done to reach them and teach them. Parents, turn off the television a lot more often and read more yourself - it's great modeling for your kids, especially matched with reading aloud to younger kids.
20,476 to be exact, slightly less than the population of the Town of Grand Chute, just west of Appleton.
At the time of the article's publication, 879 applications had been approved and 177 rejected. Likely reasons for the latter: insufficient information provided on application, insufficient training documentation, no payment.
The article also notes that 30 to 35 employees have been assigned to process applications "at any given time". Not sure if these are limited-term workers -- Hey, I thought we were broke! -- or current, temporarily reassigned Department of Justice staff. If it's the latter case, what's not getting done, and is this suspension of duties delaying the implementation of some other crazy scheme?
Excerpt: Changes in state shared revenue and employee contribution laws have helped the budgets of some municipalities, but many smaller communities are struggling to make up for a reduction in state aid.
To help municipal governments deal with a reduction in shared revenue -- a state program that distributes Wisconsin taxes to local governments -- state officials created a requirement that employees make contributions to their state retirement fund and group health plans. However, only a small percentage of the 1,257 towns in the state are part of the two programs, said Rick Stadelman, Wisconsin Towns Association executive director.
"We have about 233 towns in the Wisconsin retirement system and only 83 towns in the state group health plan," Stadelman said.
Noticed an old rusty van in the parking lot of a grocery story this afternoon with its back end covered by every conceivable libertarian bumper sticker you could name – from various Ron Paul incarnations to “Ted Kennedy’s car has killed more people than my gun.”
And pasted in a side window (faded but proud): “I love libraries and I vote!” Didn’t know the vehicle but am sure I would have known the driver…
Excerpt: On a recent morning, Terry Jones visited the three one-room schoolhouses in rural Marin County where she makes weekly stops. Exuberant and optimistic, Jones arrives in a 29-foot bookmobile equipped with 3,500 books, DVDs and CDs.
Excerpt: Inside the main branch of the Oakland Public Library on the day of the general strike, it was quieter than usual, even for a library. But outside the library was a different story. While thousands gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza, hundreds gathered here, on the front lawn, for a smaller, more humble, and more family-oriented sort of protest. This march was led by toddlers in strollers and their parents. It was called called “The Toddler Brigade.”
Acting Supervising Librarian Kathleen DiGiovanni said the event wasn’t organized by the library, but it made sense that the lawn was being used in such a way; it’s a neutral, public meeting place for protesters to gather. After the police raided Frank Ogawa Plaza early on Tuesday, October 25th, 1500 people headed to that same library lawn to regroup. That’s when they decided on the general strike.
West Hollywood's Standup Librarian isn't laughing. (Los Angeles Times, 11/2/2011)
Excerpt: Myers, 37, got a master's in library science, but library jobs are scarce these days. So she volunteered to promote literary events and book festivals in Los Angeles while also developing her comedy routine. At StandUpLibrarian.com, she uses her story and sharp sense of humor to advocate for books, writers, literacy and libraries. Earlier this year, Myers devoted much of her volunteer time to fundraising for the West Hollywood branch of the L.A. County Public Library.
Excerpt:The Common Council is expected to discuss how to bridge an $800,000 budget gap when it meets Monday.
Other options being considered include reducing funding for the Mead Public Library, laying off city workers, closing a fire station, reinstating a storm water fee or wheel tax or, Amodeo said this week, going to a four-day work week for some city employees.
Excerpt: The same old miserable numbers came out today, nowhere near what we need.
I feel like I’m in the movie Groundhog Day when it comes to the job numbers. I wake up on the first Friday each month to the same story — subpar job growth, no budging in key indicators, the insanity of the “anti-stimulus” of bleeding government jobs – and then wake up to it again next month. This month looks like the past dozen: 80,000 jobs were created, while the government sector shed 24,000 jobs.
