I’m a crafter by heart and Word Nerd posted a craft that I thought many of you might appreciate.
Word Nerd and Word Nerd Teen put together a card case in preparation for Banned Books Week. They found card cases and covered them with decoupaged book covers.
I think they turned out really neat! Maybe it will inspire you to bring out your inner craft star. So get crafting and have fun!
EVERYBODY’S LIBRARIES
John Mark Ockerbloom | September 27, 2011
Imagine you’re working in a library, and someone with a suit and a buzz cut comes up to you, gestures towards a patron who’s leaving the building, and says “That guy you were just helping out; can you tell me what books he was looking at?”
Many librarians would react to this request with alarm. The code of ethics adopted by the American Library Association states “We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.” Librarians will typically refuse to give such information without a carefully-verified search warrant, and many are also campaigning against the particularly intrusive search demands authorized by the PATRIOT Act.
Yet it’s possible that the library in this scenario is routinely giving out that kind of information, without the knowledge or consent of librarians or patrons, via its web site. These days, many sites, including those of libraries, invoke a variety of third-party services to construct their web pages. For instance, some library sites use Google services to analyze site usage trends or to display book covers. Those third party services often know what web page has been visited when they’re invoked, either through an identifier in the HTML or Javascript code used to invoke the service, or simply through the Referer information passed from the user’s web browser.
NPR
The Associated Press | September 23, 2011
Missouri lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Friday to repeal part of a contentious new law that had prohibited teachers from chatting privately with students over Internet sites such as Facebook.
If the repeal is signed by Gov. Jay Nixon, Missouri’s law restricting online communications would instead be replaced with a new requirement for public school districts to develop their own policies on the use of electronic media between employees and students.
Original post: http://ndlaonline.org/ifblog/?p=1517
NEW YORK TIMES
Campbell Robertson | September 26, 2011
The past is never dead, though at the Kilby Correctional Facility outside of Montgomery, Ala., it seems it is not particularly welcome.
Last Friday, Mark Melvin, who is serving a life sentence at Kilby, filed suit in federal court against the prison’s officials and the state commissioner of corrections, claiming they have unjustly kept a book out of his hands.
The book, which was sent to him by his lawyer, is a work of history. More specifically, it is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Southern history, an investigation of the systematically heinous treatment of black prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mr. Melvin, 33, alleges in his suit that prison officials deemed it “a security threat.”
The dispute began a year ago. Mr. Melvin was entering his 18th year in the state’s custody, having been charged at 14 with helping his older brother commit two murders. He was well-behaved enough to be granted parole in 2008, but after committing what his lawyer called “a technical violation” at a transition house, he was sent back.
So he has been reading novels and biographies, studies of World War II and Irish history, his lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, said. After his return to prison, Mr. Melvin was assigned by the warden to work in the prison’s law library.
Last September, Mr. Stevenson sent Mr. Melvin a couple of books, including “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” by Douglas A. Blackmon, the senior national correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2009.
