Carnival of the Infosciences #45

Welcome to the Carnival of the Infosciences #45. As it says on the Carnival of the Infosciences home page:

The Carnival of the Infosciences is a weekly weblog post that endeavors to showcase the best posts in the blogosphere about topics related to the wide world of Library and Information Science.

This week has been a busy one in the biblioblogosphere and its neighborhood. The entries listed here were selected by me from my blog roll I read every day via BlogLines or were submitted by fellow bloggers. I have attempted to cover some topics not reported on by many others this past week. Carnival of the Infosciences #46 will be hosted at Eric Schnell's blog: The Medium is the Message on Monday, July 24, 2006. Watch for the announcement.

One important announcement last week came from the Pew Internet and American Life Project:

Home Broadband Adoption 2006

In Technology and Media Use Adoption of high-speed internet at home grew twice as fast in the year prior to March 2006 than in the same time frame from 2004 to 2005. Middle-income Americans accounted for much of the increase.

Congress is acting irrationally about social software such as FaceBook and MySpace, again:

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus Blog: Librarians Fight for Facebook

Federal lawmakers are, for the moment, preternaturally worried about the specter of “online predators”—and their preoccupation is keeping Chris Kelly pretty busy. Twice in the last two weeks, Mr. Kelly, chief privacy officer for Facebook, the popular social-networking Web site, has headed to Capitol Hill to describe what Facebook is doing to keep its users safe.... Beth Yoke, executive director of the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association, didn’t mince words. The bill, she argued, “creates barriers to information literacy” by discouraging librarians and schoolteachers from teaching young students about responsible use of the Web. “This flies in the face of logic and hundreds of years of educational theory,” Ms. Yoke said of the act.

Reason to celebrate: Happy 3rd Birhtday to WebJunction. Visit WebJunction at http://www.webjuction.org.

Rory Litwin and LibraryJuice continue to be the conscience of our profession by reporting on many issues and happenings overlooked or underreported by the mainstream library media: Vamos a Cuba update

The Dade County, FL, school board’s attempt to ban Vamos a Cuba, the children’s book that local Cuban expatriats complain paints too rosy a picture of life in the socialist country (blogged here on June 14th), is presently being held up as a result of the ACLU’s legal challenge. At the time of the ALA Conference the ACLU had just announced their lawsuit, and there was too little time for the Freedom to Read Foundation to consider joining the case, but in his report to Council on the FTRF’s activities, Board member John W. Berry stated that they definitely have it on their radar.

This is an interesting report cited by Steven Bell of the Kept-Up Academic Librarian blog:
Faculty That Don't Use It Or Use It Well Is The Main Failure of Courseware.

Michael Sauer's The Travelin' Librarian reports on the release of Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 1. He lists the new features.

Peter Bromberg of Library Garden presents a great critique of a article about virtual reference in his post titled, Is virtual reference successful? Part I (Hint: yes it is).

One relatively new blog I am reading is LIS :: Michael Habib On Librarianship and the Information Sciences. Michael has a refreshing view on our porfession and should be rquired reading by all librarians. He is very knowledagable about social networking and social software such as MySpace and FaceBook.

Another interesting post from Michael Sauers. Be sure to go to his blog to see the video:

Jon Stewart on The Internet According to Senator Ted Stevens

By Michael

I read about Senator Ted Stevens' description of the Internet as "a series of tubes" last week but had been avoiding blogging about it due to the sheer lunacy of the speech he gave. However, yesterday someone told me that Jon Stewart had covered it on The Daily Show and I've found the video on YouTube.

That is all for this issue of the Carnival of the Infosciences. Thanks for stopping by.


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