Odyssey Online

….this is banned books week…locally the Rensselaer Falls Library has organized an event for teens to think about what this means, and our friend Jessamyn West who writes the blog Librarian.net has a list of things on the web about banned books. Very useful.

The slogan over at Librarian.net is putting the ‘rarin back in librarian and for that reason alone you’ll find a link here under Other Blogs to Note…

…as you may or may not remember we have a SLU Libraries Facebook page, with our Catalog and ConnectNY front and center (under the boxes tab), and now JSTOR.  So, along with all that a Facebook enthusiast might do, you can simply click to our Facebook account and sample the academic journal literature.  Librarians have been thinking about Facebook…quite a slew of libraries have Facebook accounts and friends like the Librarian in Black have argued seriously and with verve that libraries need to be in Web 2.0 places, because, well, that’s where the clientele is.

…on the other hand there is a sense of encroachment felt by students as institutions and well, parents, make their way to Facebook. My in-laws are all avid Facebook habitues, not so much their kids, mind you, but the parents.  Is Facebook a place where colleges students want to think about research? Perhaps not “to be or not to be” as far as important questions go, but the attempts at translating libraries to Web 2.0 spaces ask interesting questions about what people want out of libraries, and what people want out of life online…

…in what amounts to big news, the FCC today affirmed Network Neutrality, and began to organize itself to enforce said.  There are proponents of this decision, and their are critics (this article from PC World nicely sketches both sides).  Network Neutrality is all about keeping the infrastructure providers, literally the folks who own the fiber optic cable, from using their conduit technology to establish different levels of web service.  Of course, being something, in this life, it’s not that simple–Edward Felten wrote a good primer several years back on what Network Neutrality is, who the players are, and what the consequences might be.

…ah Friday and autumnal rain.  It was widely reported last week that Facebook has now a membership close to the population of the United States and for the first time, it turning a profit as a company (here is the CNN version of the story). And moving from social networking to social reading, Nina Siegal has offered an interesting essay call Thoughts on Bestsellers, which is about reading, readers, and the future of literature. It’s an analysis of the New York Times Best Seller list over the later part of the twentieth century, and this essay (which is long) is an usual but engaging mix of optimism and pessimism on the future of literary fiction.  Great reading for a rainy September Friday…

…much has been going on in our Interlibrary Loan Office in the name of moving requests more quickly, and while most of this is things-technical that don’t effect how the SLU Community makes requests to borrow materials, we did come up with Five Really Helpful Things to Know About Interlibrary Loan. All five things do in fact help, this takes just a minute to read, take a look!

…our friends at University Communications have give a web “shout out” to Steve Amick (noted here) and also to Lorrie Moore ’78, whose books have drawn much praise.  We have a number of her works including Life Stories, Anagrams, Self Help, and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital to name four.

Ms. Moore has built a real name for herself within American literary circles, Ploughshares, one of our better literary reviews, has an interesting profile of her here, and the New York Times published this interview on September 2nd…

…we’ve encouraged here the notion that one should, along with all that one  might be reading in the name of one’s research, have a book on the side.  That argument leads to our Browsing Collection, and there, in with the titles we thought folks would find of general interest, is Steve Amick’s book Nothing But a Smile. Among other things, Mr. Amick is a Larry, class of 1986.  We have his other book too, The Lake, The River, and the Other Lake which is about a summer spent in Northern Michigan, and both books have drawn positive notice in publications such as Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and the New York Times…

…with September upon us it is time, it is time, it is time to put off whatever you are doing and spend another twenty minutes in Facebook. We now have a SLU Libraries Facebook Page, so, all of you Facebook enthusiasts, simply look for us “Fanned” on the main SLU Facebook Page, or search St. Lawrence University Libraries and you’ll see all that we’re up to Facebook-wise.

…also, under the banner of all things Facebook, an interesting little piece from Atlantic Online about Facebook’s business strategy.  Seems they are thinking big and trying, according to Derek Thompson, to be  social networking’s “one portal to rule them all”…and under under the banner of something simultaneously sublime and ridiculous a Washington Post feature about people

turning to Facebook for religious companionship…