Secret Librarians of Fandom

It's been over four years since the last post I'm seeing on this community, but there are still people listed as following it, and I've got some news for the intersection of library tech and fandom.

A group of filkers has started up a project to create a website for crowdsourcing identification of recordings from conventions, making short clips available just to registered contributors to the database. I'm the lead developer. They'd provide information on title, performer, instruments, etc. This might well be a useful tool for librarians, researchers, and archivists, in which case it can become a bigger project, backed by crowdfunding and made available as open source. There's a lot of excitement already from the people working on it.

If this sounds interesting to you, please read my post asking for input and comment, either here or on Wordpress.

As many of you know I am studying for my MSc in Information and Library Studies. I am doing my dissertation on "Science Fiction in Libraries" and my survey can be taken online now.

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/18977…

I would be very grateful if any science fiction fans on would grace me with their answers.
I will be cross-posting this to other LJ communities and to facebook, so sorry if you see this notice in several places in the coming weeks.

It should only take between 2 minutes and 10 minutes to complete, depending on how many questions you answer. It's completely anonymous and all surveys will be destroyed when the project is over.

I work for a large university library, and I've been thinking about how we might adapt our web applications for mobile devices. The most obvious thing, to me, would be a scaled down user interface for our on-line catalogue (OPAC). It would be nice to be able to enter a title and get back a location and call number without going through a web site that doesn't fit on a tiny screen.

Being able to access one's account and see what materials are checked out and which are overdue would also be a good feature.

Any thoughts on this, either on what you'd like to see or what you have seen?

I have a challenge for people. I have no idea what book this is, but a patron came to me today looking for a book. Naturally, he cannot remember either the title or the authour, except for the title being something like Green world or perhaps Green ship.

The patron says the book is from the late 60s or early 70s.

From what he remembers, the story is as follows:

There is a spaceship that is apparently overgrown with plantlife. People are aboard this ship, but they have been aboard for so long they have forgotten they are on a space ship. They have devolved while aboard. The ship has returned to earth, and the earth scientists are going up to the ship and conducting secret cultural observations on the shipmembers. They are spotted and the shipmembers think they are gods.

Does anyone have any ideas as to the title or author?

Thanks in advance!

A notice in the new Borderlands newsletter, presumably distributed in other places as well, caused me to put on my librarian hat.

Buy a copy of one or all of The Tiptree Memorial Award Anthologies for your hometown library! The Motherboard of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award urges you to purchase and a send a copy of one or all of the Tiptree Memorial Award Anthologies to your hometown library, in the interests of spreading the word about outstanding fiction that expands or explores our understanding of gender, and making that outstanding fiction easily available to the next generation.

It sounds like a good and generous idea, but please check with your library first before you donate books to the collection. If you visit in person, go to the reference desk (not the circulation desk) of the main library (not a branch) and ask to speak to the collection development officer for science fiction, who might well be sitting there answering reference questions at that very moment.

The problem is that when a library buys a book, it costs a lot more than just the purchase price. And these extra costs can't be easily solved by waving more money at them, because the costs are in staff time. Time to decide whether to accept each donated book - libraries get offered a lot of crap. Time to enter the book into the cataloging database. Time to process it physically: to stamp it, to add the barcode and security strip, to put protective mylar covers on, etc. It's not much for any one book, but it adds up fast.

If you just donate a book cold, some overworked harried person is going to look through a pile of them, and they know they can't take an indefinite number of books even if they're all good, and anything they don't take goes straight to the public booksale, where its departure will get the library no more than $2 in hard cash.

A new proposal for preservation of fannish bibliographies and discographies. This project could be of special interest to SLOFs.

The creators of the comic strip Unshelved are auctioning the original cover art from their first book. The proceeds from the sale will benefit the New Orleans Public Library.

This will take you to the auction.

Hey, anybody want to be a research monkey?

I need people to do a short questionnaire for my final research project. There are different levels of the experiment, of course, so I can't just post it here for you to do (because my mad html skilz are not up to randomizing which one displays if you click through, and I don't have anywhere to put it anyways), but if you drop me an email address (I'll screen replies so it won't ever become public), I will email you the materials and you can email me the questionnaire back, which I will print anonymously (without your name attached) and add to my other subjects.

===
Here's the official spiel:
(gotta be legal)

Hi! Thanks for agreeing to help!
I’m doing a class activity looking at how employers evaluate job applicants.

Basically, I will give you a job description to read, and then you’ll evaluate a resume from a potential candidate for an Administrative Assistant position.

Your participation is completely voluntary. If you start reading the materials, and you want to quit, just tell me – it’s no problem at all. You can also choose to skip any question that you don’t want to answer.

Your responses will be completely anonymous – I’m not collecting any identifying information, and I’m going to put your response sheets into this envelop, mixed up with all other response sheets, so I won’t even know which one was yours.

Do you have any questions?
===

The story by a UMass Dartmouth student, claiming that his interlibrary loan request resulted in a Homeland Security investigation, has been exposed as a hoax. Nice followup work by SouthCoastToday.

An FBI memo referred to opponents of the "Patriot" Act's library provisions as "radical militant librarians."

Now there's a t-shirt.