Beth Cackowski former educational services librarian at SOLINET, Atlanta, has recently taken the position of Georgia Highlands College librarian at Southern Polytechnic State University, Marietta, GA.
Anne-Imelda Radice will be nominated by President Bush to be director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a term of four years. Radice currently serves as acting assistant chair for programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities. She previously served as chief of staff at the Department of Education, acting chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and curator in the Office of the Architect of the United States Capitol. She received her bachelor's degree from Wheaton College and her first master's degree from Villa Schifanoia School of Fine Arts. In addition, Radice received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her second master's degree from American University.
Anke Voss is the new director of the Champaign County Historical Archives, the genealogy and local history department at Urbana Public Library, IL. Voss comes to the library from Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, where she was archivist and special collections librarian.
CURES Act Set to Once Again Put NIH, Access to Research on Agenda for 2006
The battle for free public access to government-funded research is will rear its head again in 2006. And this time, it's Congressional. On December 14, 2005, Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) introduced legislation to establish the American Center for Cures within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Included in that bill, known as the CURES act, is an aggressive provision that to help make taxpayer-funded biomedical research available to all potential users. Although Congress directed the NIH to draft a policy to achieve that goal in 2005, it proved to be a controversial issue. What resulted was a weak policy that simply requested NIH-funded research be deposited into PubMed Central within a year after publication. A provision of the CURES Act, however, if passed, would require research funded by a number of government agencies be made available within six months. SPARC director Heather Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire that library groups were "gratified" to see that Congress took universal access to research into account when crafting this bill. "The aim of the bill is to speed cures by removing barriers," Joseph noted. "One of those barriers is access to research."
Joseph said the bill's provisions are both broader and more stringent than the current NIH policy—the debate over which was the source of much consternation in 2005. Under the CURES Act, deposit of research articles funded in part or whole by government agencies, including Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), including NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, would be required, as opposed to requested, and within up to six months. In addition, the law would set penalties for non-compliance. While the legislation mentions PubMed Central as a repository, Joseph said the bill does apparently leave the door open for deposit in any publicly accessible repository. Joseph said it was unclear when Congress would begin to consider the bill in earnest. While publishers will likely find much to oppose in the bill, a coalition of library groups issued a statement praising the bill and promising support. The coalition is made up of the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association.
As UMass Dartmouth Student's Story Crumbles, Scrutiny Begins
When news broke just before the Christmas holidays that a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, was supposedly visited by federal agents for requesting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, most librarians had a fairly common reaction: skepticism. Meanwhile, recriminations began as a UMass Dartmouth professor penned a scathing indictment of the two professors who first brought the student's fabricated story in to the media, calling on the university to discipline both the student and the professors who peddled the story. In a Boston Globe story, Clyde Barrow a professor in UMass Dartmouth's policy studies program, said it was "unbelievable" the student was "not being suspended for a semester," and "even more unbelievable that the faculty who jumped the gun on this story and actively promoted it on campus, the Internet, and blogs," will also escape punishment. Barrow went on to slam the two professors as "dogmatic" and "politically correct but chic anti-Americans." The university has said it would not discipline the student because the offense was not related to his studies. The two professors, in their defense, said they had no agenda when they mentioned the story to a local reporter and had been attempting to ascertain the truth themselves.
Librarians, on various blogs and electronic discussion lists, mostly took a more sober—and skeptical—tack in assessing the story. While some thought that the story could possibly prove true, many raised red flags over, procedurally, how it could happen. In addition to the poor reporting in the initial report, "there was the idea a library would cooperate," notes Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, MN) librarian Barbara Fister, "that they'd ask patrons for Social Security numbers on their ILL requests." Fister was one of a number of librarians who commented on the story, writing hers on the Association of College and Research Libraries' blog. A combination of the Patriot Act battle and the Bush administration's revelation of domestic spying without court orders certainly helped set a tone for the story to spread, she noted. But the state of today's media also merits scrutiny. "With blogging, RSS feeds, and automatic alerts the first draft of history is passed around before the ink is dry," she told the LJ Academic Newswire. "The state of the media, which I think should be as much a matter of concern for librarians as the state of scholarly or other forms of publishing, is changing in ways that we need to pay attention to." She cited the irony, for example, that the UMass story, with minimal confirmation, made into print immediately and quickly circled the Web, while the New York Times revealed recently that it had delayed its report on the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying program for a year. "[The Mao story] fascinates me mainly because it's such a wakeup call for anyone who cares about information literacy," she added. "Nobody should have read that story without thinking, 'hey, wait a minute.'"
AAUP Also To Hold Annual Conference in New Orleans, Prior to ALA
Are you ready for a week or two in the Big Easy? In addition to hosting the American Library Association, New Orleans will also be the site of the Association of University Presses' (AAUP) annual conference. Since a number of presses are allied with their libraries, that means that more than a few librarians will no doubt be spending a lot of time in New Orleans this June. AAUP will host its conference from June 15-18, while the ALA annual conference runs from June 22-28. "We've been monitoring the situation," wrote the AAUP's Susan Patton in the AAUP newsletter, The Exchange, "and believe that we'll be able to hold a successful meeting in the city." The AAUP has directed AAUP members to the ALA's FAQ on the conference to address any concerns. Meanwhile, an online poll by LJ, queried, Are you planning to go to New Orleans for the June 2006 ALA Annual Conference? Of those who had been planning to attend, 70 percent (285 votes) reaffirmed their plans. Nevertheless, a sizable 30 percent of total respondents (122 votes) said they cancelled ALA plans following Katrina's devastation.
Soft Skull's Richard Nash Wins AAP's Miriam Bass AwardSoft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash has won the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. The award will be presented on March 14 in New York at the AAP Annual Meeting for Small and Independent Publishers. The award, given annually, was created in memory of Miriam Bass, the widely-respected book marketing expert known for the "News Breaking Now" newsletter she wrote for the National Book Network (NBN). The award is co-sponsored by AAP, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and NBN. It carries a $5,000 cash prize, which is funded by Rowman & Littlefield and NBN. In selecting Nash, the judging committee cited how he "single-handedly took a struggling company and turned it into one that has become synonymous with excellence in literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry." Nash, however, said his award went beyond his own work. "It's a celebration of the remarkable ecology that is independent publishing," he said, "and it is an honor to be, for a moment, representative of that beautiful ecology."
Nash is no stranger to controversy in his publishing endeavors. For example, in 2003, he opted to re-publish former Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles' hot-button book, Arming America, about gun ownership in colonial America, which had been a nonfiction bestseller for Knopf before allegations that the author fudged sources caused the book to be pulled and forced the author to leave Emory. Nash republished the book with Bellesiles' response to critics in 2003 and, although he says it has not done as well commercially as he would have hoped, the decision shows Nash's commitment to publishing. "Had I it to do over again, I still would have done it, definitely," he told the LJ Academic Newswire. "You'll note that the book has been consistently up in the top five of the ALA's Most Challenged books." Nash said the author and press made a number of adjustments, based on the mistakes Bellesiles himself had felt he made. "I will say that the very fact that it exists and is in print means that he hasn't been utterly discredited. And every year the Most Challenged Books list is announced, I do my best to try to get the subject back into the public conversation."
Patriot Act Compromise to Expire February 3
Just before we left for the holidays we reported that a deal had been struck to extend the USA PATRIOT ACT by six months. Of course, just after we turned out the lights, that extension was reduced to just five weeks, until February 3, by Congressional leaders. The surprise move came after the U.S. Senate had agreed to the six-month extension rather than let the law expire or renew the law according to a previously crafted House-Senate compromise. While the compromise version of the bill would have reevaluated Section 215, which permits secret searches of business records at libraries, bookstores, and other institutions, in seven years, the Senate favored a four-year "sunset clause."
The ALA Washington Office said the five-week extension was "good news" and in large part a result of librarians' efforts. "A strong grassroots push from the library community and other concerned constituents helped Senators stand firm in their conviction that the conference report did not do enough to secure reader privacy," ALAWASH said in a newsletter. The extension leaves time for further discussion about controversial provisions criticized by the library community, civil liberties advocates, and a near-majority of Senators who were willing to sustain a filibuster to block the law's renewal. "The White House…couldn't break the filibuster, couldn't break the bipartisan group," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI). Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), who had previously said he would not agree to a temporary extension, did not say why he decided to agree to an extension after all, However, one factor may have been media reports that, after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush had authorized the wiretapping of numerous Americans without seeking warrants from the secret court charged with handling terrorism cases.
Best Sellers in Language and Literature, January–November, 2005, as compiled by YBP Library Services
IGSCE English as a Second Language
Lucantoni, Peter
Cambridge U. Press
2004. ISBN 052154694x. $20.00
Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare, William
Ed. by Rex Gibson
Cambridge U. Press
2005. ISBN 0521618703. $8.95
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, & Shorter Fiction
Agee, James
Ed. by Michael Sragow
Library of America
2005. ISBN 1931082812. $35.00
Shakespeare and Women
Rackin, Phyllis
Oxford U. Press
2005. ISBN 0198711980. $49.95
Novels & Stories, 1959-1962: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Letting Go
Roth, Philip
Library of America
2005. ISBN 1931082790. $35.00
Film Writing and Selected Journalism
Agee, James
Ed. by Michael Sragow
Library of America
2005. ISBN 1931082820. $40.00
Novels, 1967-1972: When She Was Good/Portnoy's Complaint/Our Gang/The Breast
Roth, Philip
Library of America
2005. ISBN 1931082804. $35.00
The Year of Magical Thinking
Didion, Joan
Alfred A. Knopf
2005. ISBN 140004314x. $23.95
Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery
Vendler, Helen Hennessy
Princeton U. Press
2005. ISBN 0691116180. $19.95
March: A Novel
Doctorow, E.L.
Random House
2005. ISBN 0375506713. $25.95
Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath
Kirsch, Adam
W.W. Norton
2005. ISBN 0393051978. $24.95
T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet
Miller, James Edwin
Penn State U. Press
2005. ISBN 0271026812. $39.95
Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden
Ed. by Stephen Burt
Jarrell, Randall
Columbia U. Press
2005. ISBN 0231130783. $34.50
Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel
Alter, Robert
Yale U. Press
2005. ISBN 0300108028. $27.50
Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Novel
Smiley, Jane
Alfred A. Knopf
2005. ISBN 1400040590. $26.95
Melville: His World and Work
Delbanco, Andrew
Alfred A. Knopf
2005. ISBN 0375403140. $30.00
Eudora Welty: A Biography
Marrs, Suzanne
Harcourt Trade
2005. ISBN 0151009147. $28.00
Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times
Ben-Zvi, Linda
Oxford U. Press
2005. ISBN 0195115066. $45.00
Historical Guide to Herman Melville
Ed. by Giles Gunn
Oxford U. Press
2005. ISBN 0195142810. $55.00
Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment
Crystal, David
Cambridge U. Press
2005. ISBN 0521852137. $19.99
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