I am always on the lookout for reviews of books that we have published, and am usually gratified to read them. If there is a complaint in the review, it is most often that the book has typos or needed better copy editing. One recent review of one of our books, and I will not … Read more On reviews that say a book was “put together quickly”
Women in Libraries, which for many years was the print publication of the Feminist Task Force of ALA/SRRT, ceased publication a few years ago, but is now back as an online publication. It is part of the larger wiki of the group.
Introduction [Book information] June 10, 2009: James von Brunn logged off his Packard Bell computer, grabbed his keys and strode out the door of his son’s Annapolis apartment. He had moved in with his son and future daughter-in-law two years ago where he paid $400 a month in rent and spent most of his … Read more A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace
From time to time here at Library Juice Press we build up a stock of imperfect copies that we can’t sell on the regular retail market. They might be returns with creased covers or pre-publication copies with typos and copy editing issues. We have decided to start selling these at half price through our website. … Read more Bargain books (error copies at half price)
I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to point out an inaccuracy in an article on the Adbuster’s website (and maybe in the magazine as well, I can’t tell) titled, “Google’s Flaw,” written by Micah White. I’m not unsympathetic with White’s point about Google, but I have … Read more Inaccuracy in Adbusters article
Bill Brahms of Reference Desk Press (a librarian publisher like myself) has just released his company’s second book: Last Words of Notable People. It is much more than a complement to his previous book, Notable Last Facts, and more likely to find extensive use as a part of a reference collection. There are more than … Read more Last Words of Notable People
At Litwin Books and Library Juice Press we have a number of projects sitting on back burners awaiting the right authors to get them going. I will list some here, with the invitation for potential authors to contact me. First, a few books about statistics. Not the science of statistics, but statistical data that has … Read more Seeking Authors
In teaching students and other library users how to evaluate web pages and other published information for the presence of bias, we direct them to look for a number of cues that reveal whether the producers of the documents are more interested in accomplishing a goal in the world or working toward impartial truth-seeking and … Read more “Nonpartisan” …. nonplussed
An item in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section in the last issue is about the difficulty of keeping track of a valuable information object over time: a concert ticket. How do people remember where they put it? This one has to do with a long awaited reunion show by Pavement, in Central … Read more Organizing personal info in an age of change: Tickets to a Pavement concert
I have commented on problems stemming from automated reasoning as capitalism shifts to an AI foundation. Here is a juicy example of what I am talking about.
I thought the FBI had been shamed out of spying on pacifists long ago, but check this out. Incredible. Greenpeace, Thomas Merton Center, Catholic Worker, and other anti-war activists got put on terrorist watch lists and were the subject of 200 page reports. It’s almost funny how much the reality matches liberals’ paranoid fears post … Read more The Mad Men of the FBI
Increasing use of AI means smarter-than-average searchers constantly need to learn tricks in order to counteract the AI that assumes a user base of average consumers. Here is one for Google: Presently, if you search german modernist collage, the search results will be full of hits that assume you meant to type “college” rather than … Read more A Google trick for staying ahead of AI
From an early pamphlet advertising a bibliographic database, found among the ephemera saved at the University of Virginia Libraries: “Why use a computer search? Consider the time it takes to search manually through the many issues of printed indexes. The computer searches these indexes in seconds; the search is faster, more comprehensive, and often … Read more Ephemera from UVa Library’s computing past
Leonard Kniffel, editor of American Libraries, the American Library Association’s house publication, write in his blog: Book burning is the most insidious form of book banning, and just as the American Library Association is preparing to celebrate the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, along comes one Rev. Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove … Read more Props to ALA on 9/11
There is a new issue of Information for Social Change, on the theme of information ethics. This issue is edited by Mikael Böök. It’s a very international collection of articles, some of them a little odd and all of them interesting.