(Via Daily Infographic)

Librarian Libations is a great place to meet current & future NY Metro area librarians, including students from LIU’s Palmer School, Pratt SILS, and Queens College. Come to our  informal hangout for drinks, conversation and “networking”. This event draws a diverse crowd of students and professionals from all disciplines to talk shop and job opportunities  You might even make a new friend!

Can’t make it this Friday? No problem, Librarian Libations is held on the second Friday of each month.

What: Librarian Libations
Where: Beauty Bar, 231 E. 14th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan
When: Friday, June 8, 2012 from 6:00pm-9:00pm

A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators , by David Carr for The New York Times

A Curator’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Megan Garber for The Atlantic

Curator’s Code, a project by Maria Popova

The State of the News Media, by Pew Research Center

5 Great Tips for Great Content Curation, by Steve Rosenbaum for Mashable

As of this moment, I have yet to see Amazon or Google (or any other company for that matter) as being the reason cited that any library has been cut or closed. It’s always been a matter of political will, whether it is local, state, or national. The threat is not from these companies or ones like them; it is from our own communities. In fact, our communities are a bigger actual threat than the imagined threats from these outside entities. Our communities are the investors, the stakeholders, and the immediate purse string holders. It doesn’t get any more “power over life” than that.

We at WAL wholeheartedly agree that assigning blame to superpowers like Amazon and Google accomplishes nothing. The answer is political involvement and a reassessment of library models. The only real “library killer” is misplaced energy into a fight not worth having.

Source: Why Are Librarians Picking So Many Fights? | Agnostic, Maybe

(via TED)

We did a great job knocking down SOPA & PIPA, and now it’s time to speak out against CISPA before it goes for a vote in the House of Representatives. From District Dispatch:

ALA is concerned that essentially all private electronic communications could be obtained by the government and used for many purposes – and not just for cybersecurity activities. H.R. 3523 would permit, even require ISPs and other entities to monitor all electronic communications and share personal information with the government without effective oversight just by claiming the sharing is for “cybersecurity purposes.”

For more information including links to find your Representative’s phone number and Twitter handle, plus talking points, check out ALA’s piece written yesterday.

(District Dispatch via The Digital Shift)

(via TED)

Tech meets textiles with the recent completion of the digital archive project presented in collaboration between the two institutions. They used Blacklight for the faceted search with Ruby on Rails and Solr indexing. Jpeg 2000 allows for unbelievable quality high res images with exceptional zoom capabilities.