DrWeb's Domain

Traditional Flavors of the Lunar New Year - New York Times

Traditional Flavors of the Lunar New Year - New York Times.

Traditional Flavors of the Lunar New Year
By DANA BOWEN, Published: January 25, 2006

TWO sisters sat at an ingredient-strewn table at Vietcafe, gossiping as they prepared the sticky rice cakes that are adored across Vietnam at this time of year. Lan Tran Cao, the younger of the two and the owner of Vietcafe, a TriBeCa restaurant, spoke of a relative's recipe.

"The way she seasons it is different," she said to her sister, Nga Thi Tran. Clearly, "different" meant not as good.

A cook, Mai Nguyen, walked in and spotted the women mashing dried mung bean balls into banana leaves with great force. "Ah, banh chung!" she sang, and smiled. For her, the bundles contained distant memories of New Year's celebrations in Hanoi.

Lunar New Year begins on Sunday, and in many traditional Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese households in New York, the cooking is under way. Chefs like Ms. Cao find themselves in a peculiar spot at the beginning of the Year of the Dog, poised between a public hungry to learn about the world's cuisine and a community where many culinary traditions are slipping.

My Week as a Waiter - New York Times

My Week as a Waiter - New York Times.

Critic's Notebook
My Week as a Waiter
By FRANK BRUNI, Published: January 25, 2006

IT'S 7:45 p.m., the East Coast Grill is going full tilt and I'm ready to throttle one of the six diners at Table M-8.
...
And I learned that for servers in a restaurant as busy as the East Coast Grill, waiting tables isn't a job. It's a back-straining, brain-addling, sanity-rattling siege.

Good article, and don't forget to tip that 20% for your server (or waiter or waitress).. my Mother was a waitress all her life, and it's a hard, tough job, with moments of pleasure and satisfaction, but it's hard work mostly.. I really appreciate the work to help me relax, dine out, enjoy a good meal, and have fun eating out.. and a tip: don't *snap* your fingers to get a waiter's attention.. waving or simple hand signal would do just fine, thank you very much :) ...

Read it and weep: New Orleans libraries are in ruins

Read it and weep: New Orleans libraries are in ruins.

Volume 75, Number 36 | January 25 - 31, 2006
Talking Point
Read it and weep: New Orleans libraries are in ruins
By Andrei Codrescu

Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans Public Library. All of its 13 buildings were damaged; eight of them are completely unusable: books, furniture, computers, all destroyed. Eighty percent of the employees were laid off. Recovery will be a long process. Libraries around the country are helping, but many of them are not in such great shape themselves, having had their budgets slashed over and over during decades of laissez-faire capitalism.
...
The New Orleans libraries need help. To find out how, write to Ronald L. Biava, Fund Development counsel for NOPL, ronbiava@earthlink.net

Read more about author Codrescu at the American Library Association's Midwinter conference (Library Journal article), just concluded in San Antonio, Texas.. he spoke on the ALA President's Program, along with Bill Johnson, Director of the New Orleans Public Library.. and he also was clear in bashing ALA for its stance on Cuban libraries and librarians...

The Shuttle Explodes

The Shuttle Explodes.

The Shuttle Explodes [Historic article reference to 1986 event]
6 IN CREW AND HIGH-SCHOOL TEACHER ARE KILLED 74 SECONDS AFTER LIFTOFF, Thousands Watch Rain of Debris
By William J. Broad, Special to The New York Times

Cape Canaveral, Fla. Jan. 28 -- The space shuttle Challenger exploded in a ball of fire shortly after it left the launching pad today, and all seven astronauts on board were lost. The worst accident in the history of the American space program, it was witnessed by thousands of spectators who watched in wonder, then horror, as the ship blew apart high in the air.

This New York Times Learning Network site is great ("Connections for Students, Teachers, and Parents"), and today, offers a look back at the Challenger Shuttle explosion, Jan. 28, 1986, 20 years ago today.. the large front-page photo is online, courtesy of UMI, and can be purchased.. we should never forget these space pioneers, and hopefully, lessons learned continue to be applied to current and future space flights and vehicles...

Frequent photo flubs: 15 picture pitfalls and how to avoid them - CNET.com

Frequent photo flubs: 15 picture pitfalls and how to avoid them - CNET.com.

Frequent photo flubs: 15 picture pitfalls and how to avoid them
by Lori Grunin, senior editor, Updated January 24, 2006

You know the feeling: you've just snapped that once-in-a-lifetime moment, and you're already thinking about how big you want to print it. It looks great on the camera's LCD, and everyone in the room wants a copy of it. When you get home, you eagerly load it up on your PC, only to discover it's too blurry to even make out the faces. We've all been there.

Thanks to our friends at Webshots, we had a boatload of photos to browse through in order to pick examples of the most typical mistakes that snapshooters make. For instance, a camera phone is fine for the occasional spur-of-the-moment shot, but if you know you're going to be at a party, an event, or some other venue where you'll want to take photos, please--use a real camera. The only truly bad photos we saw were clearly taken with camera phones. So, by remembering a few simple rules and taking a few minutes to page through your camera's manual--if necessary, by trashing your old clunker and buying a new camera--you'll increase your odds of shooting photos that impress, not distress.

Chicago Tribune | Libraries to try online orders

Chicago Tribune | Libraries to try online orders.

Libraries to try online orders
By Robert Channick, Special to the Tribune
Published January 23, 2006, 9:45 PM CST

Taking a page from online retailers, three suburban libraries are venturing into cyberspace with plans to offer books, movies and other material for home delivery.

Beginning Feb. 1, patrons of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, Skokie Public Library and Indian Trails Public Library in Wheeling may browse the libraries' holdings and borrow material online.

"By no means are we trying to discourage people from coming to the library," said Lynn Stainbrook, executive librarian at the Arlington Heights library. "But if you have a time crunch or you're more comfortable trying to work at something in your pajamas at home, we want to be able to offer you services too."

The six-month pilot program, called Library Express, is funded by a $50,000 state grant. Orders placed through the libraries' Web sites will be shipped based on availability. Each library will use a different delivery method--the U.S. Postal Service, UPS and a private courier--but all three will charge $4 per item.

This sounds like a good move into customer service, direct service, for libraries...

Digital library curriculum project

Digital library curriculum project.

Digital library curriculum project
January 26th, 2006, Becky Glazer, Staff Writer
Potential curriculum needs new research

The rise of digital libraries is fairly new. Its most primitive ancestry can be traced back 15 years - not nearly long enough for it to have found a niche as a subject at many institutions of higher learning. As a result, it is relatively difficult to find adequately-trained individuals who can design and add to these digital libraries. All of that, however, is about to change.

As of Jan. 1, Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina have been working together towards providing a quality educational curriculum on the development and preservation of digital libraries.

The two schools were awarded a grant of more than half of a million dollars by the National Science Foundation, ensuring funding for three years. Edward Fox, professor of computer science, is directing the project at Virginia Tech while Barbara Wildemuth heads the program at UNC.

GDFR - Global Digital Format Registry

GDFR - Global Digital Format Registry.

Global Digital Format Registry
The Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) will provide sustainable distributed services to store, discover, and deliver representation information about digital formats.

The format of a digital object must be known in order to interpret the information content of that object properly. Without knowledge of its format, a digital object is merely a collection of undifferentiated bits. Thus, format typing is fundamental to the effective use, interchange, and preservation of all digitally-encoded content. In terms of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, the format typing of a digital object is representation information about that object; that is, it provides "information that maps the Data Object into more meaningful concepts." [ 1 ] However, in order to implement that mapping it is necessary to have complete representation information about the format itself: its syntactic and semantic rules for encoding information into digital form. As noted in the recent NSF-DELOS report, Invest to Save, "Registries of digital formats provide keys to understanding the nature of digital objects, guide the managing of their transition from one state to another, and inform the choice of preservation method for material in specific formats." [ 2 ] In so doing, format registries fall directly into the scope of the digital preservation research agenda identified in the NSF/Library of Congress workshop report, It's About Time, playing a key role in enabling and supporting technical architectures and tools "to acquire archival data, prepare data for long-term storage, and manage data over several generations of technology." [ 3 ]

The wide diversity and rapid pace of adoption and abandonment of digital formats present an ongoing problem for long-term preservation efforts. As noted in the Library of Congress planning report, Preserving Our Digital Heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP), "Longevity of digital data and the ability to read those data in the future depend upon standards for encoding and describing, but standards change over time." [ 4 ]  The purpose of the GDFR project is to address this concern by providing a sustainable resource for managing format-critical representation information necessary to the preservation function.

The Harvard University Library (HUL) has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two year project leading to the deployment of the GDFR. [ learn more... ]

'Stanford On ITunes' Is For Everybody - Forbes.com

'Stanford On ITunes' Is For Everybody - Forbes.com.

America's Most Connected Campuses
'Stanford On ITunes' Is For Everybody
Kate DuBose Tomassi, 01.24.06, 10:00 AM ET

NEW YORK - In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute “Stanford on iTunes” are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.

While a number of other universities are now using iTunes to distribute class-specific content to their students, including Duke University, Drexel University’s School of Education and the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, Stanford is the first to make a substantial amount of recorded university events available to the public at large.

Talk about "distance education," and lifelong learning, and growing your brain and ideas.. well, it just got bigger "out there," where the Truth is.. congrats to Stanford University for stepping up about the mission higher education sometimes does not take on well and straight-up --educating the society at large with ideas, values, debates, reason, inquiry, and thoughtful discussions.. that's what the classes, labs, seminars, and presentations will offer, to a wider audience than ever before.. we may be seeing the Everyman's Library and Educational Institution come alive online.. we shall see.. what does that mean for "bricks and mortar" campuses? not too much, really.. one format and venue does *not* supersede the other.. we'll need campuses, like Plato's Academy or the beautiful grounds of Stanford, for a long time hence.. the virtual campus online is more and more becoming a reflection, adjunct environment, and collaboration space.. the Stanford initiative bodes well for letting the world engage the academy in dialogs and interaction.. it's the Ivory Tower throwing down an Internet ladder.. time to climb on up, and Inside...

CRL - Newsletters: Digital Archives and Repositories

CRL - Newsletters: Digital Archives and Repositories.

CRL - Newsletters: Digital Archives and Repositories

FOCUS - The Center's Newsletter FOCUS, the Center's quarterly online newsletter, includes news of Center programs, scholarly resources, collections and new acquisitions for members and staff. FOCUS is distributed in electronic format; for information about receiving a printout of the newsletter, contact Yvonne Jefferson.

Upcoming Issues: Newspapers; Ethnic Studies; Gender Studies

Subscribe to the CRL-Online email list
Receive the latest issue of FOCUS and occasional CRL updates.

Most Recent FOCUS Editions
Volume XXV, Number 2, Winter 2005-06
Digital Archives and Repositories Entire Issue (PDF Format)

ALA Midwinter Blog Coverage

ALA Midwinter Blog Coverage

Thanks to a post on CALIX (California State Library mailing list), here's some blogs you can use to keep up and virtually visit the ALA Midwinter Conference in San Antonio, TX.. the last one is from a note by Karen Schneider on another blog to watch and read..

• Public Library Association Blog
  http://www.plablog.org/
• TechSourceALA
  http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2006/01/misquote-midwinter-and-more.html
• YALSA (Young Adult Librarians)
  http://blogs.ala.org/index.php?blog=5
• LITA Blog
  http://litablog.org/

NextSpace, Issue No. 1 [OCLC]

NextSpace: Issue No. 1 [OCLC].

NextSpace: Issue No. 1
Contents

Editor’s Letter
Rebranding a newsletter
The OCLC Newsletter has covered libraries, membership programs and OCLC research initiatives and product news since 1967. With this issue, OCLC introduces NextSpace, a new magazine for our member and information managers.

Cover Story
Extreme Makeover: Library Edition
How legacy brands reinvent themselves, and what libraries can learn from them
It was December 2002 when one of the world’s most beloved restaurant companies was losing its edge to changing consumer tastes. In 1999, a cable TV giant with the industry’s most respected brand suddenly looked outdated. In the early 1990s, the world’s dominant technology company began to lose luster to a new set of computing solutions. Three different companies. ...

Check out the newest re-incarnation of the OCLC Newsletter, now NextSpace.. complete table of contents and links to articles and departments.. see also the Editor's Letter for more about NextSpace...

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > North County -- Bookstore helps pay for library programs

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > North County -- Bookstore helps pay for library programs.

Bookstore helps pay for library programs
By Triveni Sheshadri, UNION-TRIBUNE COMMUNITY NEWS WRITER
January 22, 2006

VISTA – Tucked away at the entrance of the Vista branch library, the Encore Book Store crams about 5,000 volumes in less than 500 square feet, with more books waiting in the storage room.

There are no couches, CD listening stations or cafes, but the used-book store is a magnet for folks looking for a good read at a great bargain.

Most paperbacks are priced at 25 cents, and hard-cover books go for $1. Topics range from health to history, cooking to classics. There are magazines, coffee-table books, puzzles and collectibles.

The store is the biggest moneymaker for the nonprofit Friends of the Vista Library, a 300-member group that raises funds for the library. A big portion of the $47,000 raised annually comes from the store. The county matches $40,000 of what's raised by the group.

America's Most Connected Campuses - Forbes.com

America's Most Connected Campuses - Forbes.com.

Special Report
America's Most Connected Campuses
Edited by Michael Noer and David M. Ewalt, 01.20.06, 8:00 AM ET

It wasn't so long ago when a highly connected campus was one where each dorm room had its own phone line. But in order to remain competitive in the 21st century, a college has to support wireless networking, provide ultra high-speed connections to classrooms and even allow students to take classes online.

Today's students depend on technology to live, work and play. And today's colleges have to provide high-tech tools in order to attract the best applicants. This third annual edition of The Princeton Review's Most Connected Campuses examines the technological capabilities of the country's best schools and tells you which 25 campuses are the closest to the cutting edge.

More...

Interesting study in this series.. the "More" link above takes you to their methodology, which isn't bad overall, but flawed in some ways (wireless or WiFi doesn't include whether it's one "spot" or "location," or the "campus") .. as Rich Wiggins (info tech guru, Michigan State) pointed out when this link and article citation was posted on WEB4LIB.. still, these campuses are pretty hotwired, at least in my view.. for the generation in school now, and coming, there has to be better IT.. modern campuses should be a fundamental "laboratory" for technology in all senses in the 21st Century, though money to implement it remains an issue.. the slideshow of the campuses self-plays in HTML/Javascript, nice touch by Forbes.. their coverage of technology is much improved lately.. take a look at their coverage via the Web, to see what I mean...

Columns by PC Magazine: Much Ado over Google Book Search

Columns by PC Magazine: Much Ado over Google Book Search.

Much Ado over Google Book Search
01.18.06, By John C. Dvorak

Google is grinding through various library collections for every book it can scan, without asking for permission. I, for one, think that's great. I see that my last book, Online! The Book, is in the collection, but this doesn't bother me, because I am apparently one of the few out there who has used Google Book Search. I found it anything but a threat to book sales or anything else to do with publishing.

The fuss over this book-search initiative is idiotic and naïve. It's not as if Google is printing books, or that any of these books are readable as complete editions on Google: They are not. With many of the books, whole sections are removed and unavailable. You can thumb through a few hard-to-read pages, but that's it.

If you are a researcher, you can find some great quotes with this database. And finding it impossible to resist a vanity search, I found numerous references that I was unaware of. This is a research tool and a public resource most of all, and it is no threat to writers or publishers. It's too bad that this supposedly intellectual crowd doesn't understand this—it indicates how far down the societal pecking order they have fallen during the rise of the technological society.

Thanks to LISNews.com for the pointer to this one.. John "gets it," and I think the ideas behind Google Book Search (still just a "Beta") will bear him out, over the years...