Washington Update, 5.1.2008

From time to time, I will try to give you some news of goings-on up on Capitol Hill as they relate to the library profession. To say the laws passed by Congress and the President are byzantine is just scratching the surface, but I will try my best to figure out how new, pending or existing legislation might benefit you.

I’ll start with a bill that seems to be going somewhere. Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) Higher Education Amendments of 2007 passed the Senate last July, though it doesn’t seem to have done much since then. The bill has some sections on debt forgiveness for librarians working in certain areas, and grants for training and technology upgrades.

The House counterpart, H.R. 4137, was referred to the Senate in February. That’s about all I can say about it right now. I’ll try to see if there’s anyone out there who knows whether these two bills would do us librarians any good as federal law.

 

As teen haunts, libraries have pros and cons

A crowd of teenagers congregating at a library is not a bad thing, said Hillsborough library services director Joe Stines.

 

How libraries can help you make money, #2

Check out Money Smart Week at the Chicago PL.

 

How libraries can help you make money, #1

You can borrow books that tell you how to play the stock market.

 

Saying “no, thanks” to Sergey and Bill

Some libraries would rather pay to have their collections digitized than let Google or Microsoft do it for free.

 

This item won’t fit in the book drop

Britain’s new Living Library lets patrons borrow a person.

 

More letters like this, please!

The public library is the place where children’s vocabulary blossoms and verbal interaction between children and their parents grows strong.

 

Nixon library to get real, again

Ed Gray is the son of L. Patrick Gray, who ran the FBI at the time of the Watergate break-in. The younger Gray said he never visited the old Watergate exhibit, but “I know the people who used to run this place had an agenda, and that agenda was, ‘Watergate never happened.’ “

 

William Styron on libraries

As a student at Duke, Styron regarded “the books in the Duke library as ‘the rocks and boulders’ he could cling to against his ‘onrushing sense of doom and mortality.’”

 

‘Repositories of . . . dreams’

Sure, you can find anything online … but how do you think much of it gets there? From libraries that have been so carefully keeping it all.