Direct to announcement:

What our president said to the nation, what the nation said to the universe, and a cornucopia of musical milestones highlight the major themes of the 2007 National Recording Registry. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today named 25 additions to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress as part of its efforts to preserve the nation’s aural history.

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Direct to Abstract and Full Text Link
by: Quinn, A., Hu, C., Arisaka, T., Rose, A., Bederson, B. (May 2008)
Readability of scanned books in digital libraries. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI ‘08. ACM, New York, NY, 705-714.

Source: Human Computer Interation Lab, University of Maryland

From the website and Podcast:

Jean Darbyshire
Director
Organization Development Programs, Kansas State Libraries, Manhattan, Kansas

Jean Darbyshire is Director of Organization Development Programs at Kansas State Libraries in Manhattan, KS. The Kansas State Libraries believe it is very important to have a quality faculty and staff and provide quality development opportunities for them. One of their most important Organization Development Programs is the LIS Recruitment Program.

Source: LiS Radio

LC Works to Make Collections Accessible and Compelling
by Paula Hane

The venerable Library of Congress (LC), said to be our nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, has certainly not been acting staid and traditional. Lately it’s been leading the way with some exciting digital preservation projects, working with leading multimedia partners on innovative projects, and reaching out to other international organizations to establish a World Digital Library (WDL).

Source: ITI News Link

Adapting Web Archive Catalogues for Dynamic Change.
Wu, Paul H-J and Ichsan, Tamsir P. and Nguyen, Ngoc Giang (2007)
In Julien, Masanes and Andreas, Rauber, Eds. Proceedings The Seventh International Workshop of Archiving Web, Vancouver, Canada.

Web archives are an important source of information. However, before a Web archive can be properly utilized, it needs to be catalogued. This is to ensure that the accessed materials yield the historical understanding intended by the researcher. At the same time, the dynamic nature of the Web will easily render these catalogues outdated, and there is a constant need to monitor when the Web catalogues become irrelevant upon change of the Web content. This means a substantial amount of human effort is required to maintain the catalogue records for the Web archives, adding additional burden to any institutions that maintain it. In this paper, we propose an automatic mechanism to monitor changes in Web content, so that human workload can be reduced. The system combines two component technologies to make this possible: (1) a contextualized annotation module and (2) an evidence change detection module. Contextualized annotation enables the cataloguing process to link content on the Web page (the evidence), to the value assigned for an element of a metadata schema. Thus, the metadata is “supported” by certain Web content that functions as evidence for a cataloguing decision. Regardless of changes in the webpages outside of the evidence, the metadata remains valid as long as all the evidence remains the same. In order to achieve evidence-specific change detection, we need to extend the traditional Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) based Diff engine using a Page Coordinate translation algorithm, which we argue, through a survey, is the first among many other Web content monitoring approaches.

Source: (via d-LIST)

From the article:

Laura N. Gassaway, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who thinks a lawsuit against Georgia State University’s electronic reserve system has implications for other colleges.

Source: Wired Campus

The 2007 ALA list is now available.

For a second consecutive year, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s award-winning “And Tango Makes Three,” a children’s book about two male penguins caring for an orphaned egg, tops the list of American Library Association’s (ALA) 10 Most Challenged Books of 2007.

Three books are new to the list “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes; “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman; and “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle.

“Free access to information is a core American value that should be protected,” said Judith F. Krug, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Not every book is right for each reader, but an individual’s interpretation of a book should not take away my right to select reading materials for my family or myself.”

Source: ALA

Articles include

+ Custom-built Search Engines

+ Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008

+ South African Repositories: Bridging Knowledge Divides

+ Towards an Application Profile for Images

+ Intute Integration

+ Research Libraries and the Power of the Co-operative

+ Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections

+ Twitter Beats (Wow, By 3 Minutes) The USGS With China Earthquake News (via SEL)

+ Powerset Launches Using Wikipedia Data (via SEL)

+ Google Introduces “FriendConnect” Social Widgets For Site Owners (via SEL)

Articles include:

+ In Search of Certitude

+ Big Broadband Connectivity in the United States

+ Top-Ten IT Issues, 2008

+ The Need to Formalize Trust Relationships in Digital Repositories

+ A Steady Vision for Libraries (Podcast)

Source: EDUCAUSE (via Kept-Up Librarian & Pete W.)

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter

In this issue:

* Digital Preservation Pioneer: Caroline Arms
* Information about open sustainable formats
* Updates from digital preservation partners

Source: LC

From the article:

How a Civil War buff’s chance discovery led to a sting, a raid and a victory against traffickers in stolen historical documents.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

v.9, no. 1 (Spring 2008)
Table of Contents includes the following:

Trend Setters: Computers in the Commons Environment
Kim Granath and Sue Samson

Back to Basics: Reviving Ethical Practice in Library
Management
Suzanne Milton

Increasing Impact of Scholarly Journal Articles:
Practical Strategies Librarians Can Share
Laura Bowering Mullen

Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects: Mass Media
Representations and Public Perceptions of Librarians
Maura Seale

Perceptions of LIS Professionals about Digital
Libraries in Pakistan: The Pakistani Perspective
Ashfaq Hussain, Khalid Mahmood and Farzana Shafique

+ Google moves to make Google Reader more social (via Computerworld)

+ Report from Google’s Annual Stockholder Meeting (via Forbes)

72 New Members Chosen by Academy

The National Academy of Sciences today announced the election of 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 9 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

The election was held this morning during the business session of the 145th annual meeting of the Academy. Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,041. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States. Today’s election brings the total number of foreign associates to 397.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the Academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.

Press release contains list of new members and their institutional affiliations.

Source: NAS