Call me….

Hot line!/ I got some conversation
I can be your operator
Baby you should call me later
–Ciara, Hotline

Pictured above is Austrian actress Anne Bennent. From now until the end of May, you can pay €.039 (53 cents) per minute to hear her read passages from 18th century erotic fiction. Of course, you would only be doing this for the greater good. All proceeds will go to the Vienna Library, to raise money for an expansion and remodeling of the main branch.

the medium is the massage

In the category of sooner or later:

Dan Savage tackles the ethics of transgender Second Life sex.

In a thread that starts off with “Myspace is the private press of the 21st century”, record nerds talk about digital preservation, and myspace as arbiter/destroyer of the future of outsider music.

dissed! at news corp.

Members of our ranks should have plenty of reasons to bristle at the mention of Murdoch and News Corp. already. ( y’all know I do.) But in case you need an occasion to recoil at something that relates to librarians super-directly, check out Gawker’s roundup of inside dirt from News Corp. employees, which alleges serious mismanagement of information and technology throughout, with one item that outright disses the ‘corp’s librarians:

No individual Nexis accounts, but the computer program that reporters used to use to search for stories, Folio, went out of business. Reporters can ask the library to do a Nexis search for them, but insiders say that taking that route is essentially a black hole: “At the last minute, stories are often killed because some librarian didn’t catch that Newsday did the same story a few weeks before.”

ARLIS Dispatch—Day Two

Day two was distinct from day one in its high concentration of back-to-back scheduled professional development. I sat in on a 9am session Ten Years After: a Decade of Copyright Developments moderated by Roger Lawson of the National Gallery of Art. The session was unique in that neither presenter used .ppt or wore glasses. Speaker Madelyn F. Wessel, Special Advisor at UVa, eloquently noted that she has “never seen a more brilliant group of lawyers than librarians.” Despite this ability to apply copyright principles to daily library practice, Wessel cautioned against librarians contracting away rights that are otherwise afforded by copyright’s fair use provisions through overly restricted licensing agreements.

Power to the People: Social Tagging and Controlled Vocabularies differed from the copyright session in that every presenter had both glasses AND a .ppt. My notes on the session are copious and I can’t even begin to summarize. I did, however, attach to moderator Sherman Clarke’s observation re: the ways in which tagging “comes and goes in its ways of helpfulness.” I, too, find the quirky results that oft-emerge from browsing tags entertaining, but then had a silent mini freak out when I heard speaker Jenn Riley’s statement/concern/news that user participation in library catalogs (ala Ann Arbor) might be understood as a way to one-day alleviate the workload of tired catalogers and librarians. This brings up Classic Big Questions regarding labor, the future of cataloging, and the purpose of libraries.