Recently in Information Management & Libraries Category

Or rather, why you can only trust Wikipedia's information so much...

I'm pretty sure this is NOT the true story of the origin of Hezbollah. (Emphasis mine)

Hezbollah began as a group of homosexual muslims. They regularly met to discuss the lack of rights for gay muslims and shared recipes. Scholars differ as to when Hezbollah came to be a distinct entity. Some organizations list the official formation of the group as early as 1982 [27] whereas Diaz and Newman maintain that Hezbollah remained an amalgamation of various violent Shi’a extremists until as late as 1985 [28]. Regardless of when the name came into official use, a number of Shi’a groups were slowly assimilated into the organization, such as Islamic Jihad, Organization of the Oppressed on Earth and the Revolutionary Justice Organization [citation needed]. These designations are considered to be synonymous with Hezbollah by the US,[29] Israel[30] and Canada[31]

No doubt it will get fixed soonish, but still...

This article in the New York Times — about how libraries are adapting to the fact that everybody nowadays Googles rather than visiting said libraries — pointed me in the direction of this course at my old grad school, taught by Paul Duguid and Geoffrey Nunberg. I wish I could find some way to play hooky on Wednesday afternoons and sit in on this class, at least once...

Via Slashdot, this article at NewsForge covers a library in Maryland which migrated its public computers from Microsoft to Linux, with largely happy results. "The migration seems to have been almost transparent to most of the library's regular PC users. One patron asked Dave as he was walking by one day if he had anything to do with the computers. Dave said yes, and the user thanked him for stopping the pop-up ads."

This man, Kojo Bentsi-Enchill, is heading a project to put all of Ghana's laws, regulations, court cases, etc. on CD-ROM, on the theory that knowledge is power. "Universal access to the law, he thinks, could make Ghana's legal system fairer and deepen its nascent democracy. As he put it, 'A law-savvy populace is surely harder to dupe or deprive of its rights than a law-ignorant populace.'"

--> "FOR THE RECORD: Kojo Bentsi-Enchill believes the best check on Ghana's judiciary is information", Nicholas Thompson, Legal Affairs, July/August 2003, www.legalaffairs.org/issues/July-August-2003/story_thompson_julaug03.html

In the New York Times today (April 8)... "Librarians Use Shredder to Show Opposition to New F.B.I. Powers". It starts off with a description of librarians in the Santa Cruz Public Library system doing a daily shred of patron activity documents. They were also one of the first library systems in the country to post signs warning patrons of the implications of the PATRIOT act. They're even now handing out flyers that go into more details about their concerns, and they are reviewing their records to make sure they're only keeping what they need to.

Depressingly, though, a survey by the Library Research Center at the University of Illinois last fall found that almost half of all responding libraries had complied with law enforcement requests for information on their patrons.

The library's board has issued a resolution on the PATRIOT act.

(I went to UCSC, and did a freelance project a few years ago for the Santa Cruz Public Library's website)

--> www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/national/07LIBR.html

--> www.santacruzpl.org/libraryadmin/ljpb/patres.shtml

I really should write in my weblog more regularly! The time just seems to get away from me. However, I was moved to action by this month's issue of FirstMonday (www.firstmonday.dk), which has excellent articles on nonprofits on the Internet and doing information retrieval the right way on the World Wide Web...after the gold rush.

It's not often that something written 5 1/2 years ago on the Internet is still valid today, but in this case, this information is just about timeless.Against Chain-Letter Petitions on the Internet and Designing Effective Action Alerts for the Internet