New Continuing Education Requirements for Public Librarian Certification

Approved by the Board of Regents on September 15, 1950, and most recently amended effective January 8, 2009, the Commissioner of Education defines the requirements for certification of librarians for public, free association, and Indian libraries under Commissioner’s Regulation § 90.7.

Frequently Asked Questions: Changes to Commissioner’s Regulation § 90.7 regarding public librarian’s professional certificates issued as of January 1, 2010

New York State Public Librarian Certification Website

100 Best First Lines of Novels (according to American Book Review)

 

38.

All this happened, more or less.

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five

1969

16.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

1951

6.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy (trans. Constance Garnett)

Anna Karenina

1877

For the rest, visit the list at infoplease

Gapminder, a tool that helps you understand the world better

“Gapminder World” is an online graphing tool that takes collected data from countries around the world on many topics and lets you compare that data in almost any way you want.  Why do this, you might ask?  To allow you to see things like how income affects lifespan or how lifespan is affected by family size.  Not only that, but it will automatically show the trends in those variables over time and by country.  You pick the variables (for both axes) and find out which countries have the worst teeth, who produces or consumes the most oil and how the data is changing with time.

This powerful tool is fairly easy and fun to use, but requires a little time to get the hang of it.  The conclusions you can make are often surprising and not what common wisdom would suggest.  Because there’s a lot to it,  I highly recommend viewing the 2-3 minute video tutorial.

On the site homepage, you can watch some videos of Myths getting demolished or click on some pre-made examples and see how to control the data at the main tool, which is called Gapminder World

Entire Run of Life Magazine Available on Google Books

For a nostalgic walk through our country’s past circa 1936-1972, check out the entire run of Life Magazine.  Nearly 1900 issues spanning over 20,000 pages!   Easily search for articles by issue or the whole run, use thumbnails,  zoom in, or read in full-screen mode.  Take a look at Life

Gmap-pedometer.com for mapping out distances, counting calories and more

If you ever need a useful website to mark out paths for running, walking, biking or if just want to to determine distances between streets, cities or even continents, try  gmap-pedometer. You can enter any zipcode or address and the google map will appear.  Click the “start recording” button and then double click to create points on a path. The path distance is measured as you click.  You can choose to do manual entry or automatic (which follows the streets for you).  There’s also a built in calorie counter, and other features like save, print and more.    Try it now

“Courier” folds like a book. Is this Microsoft’s net tablet?

“At long last, details about a super-secret computer tablet have emerged, complete with pictures and even a video showing how it works.

But it’s not the long-awaited tablet that Apple has been rumored to be developing. This prototype reportedly comes from deep inside Apple’s arch-nemesis, Microsoft, where its development has supposedly been so blanketed in secrecy that many high-ranking company executives didn’t’know it existed. If it’s real, that is.

The device, code named Courier, showed up on the Gizmodo.com (link has video) site under the headline, “First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet.”    Full Story (L.A. Times)

BIBME.ORG free automatic bibliography generator (for when Citation Machine is still too much work)

We’ve all been there.  You’ve finished writing your child’s report and now you have to do their bibliography, too.  Sure there are other sites that perfectly format your information, but what if you don’t want to bother looking up the publisher, date or bother inputting that information?

Bibme.org lets you search by title, author or ISBN and then fills in the bibliographical data for any book, magazine, journal, newspaper, film or website.  You need to register in order to save or download created bibliographies, but not if you merely need to copy and paste them into reports.   It supports MLA, APA, Chicago and Turabian formatting.  Visit Bibme.org

(thanks to Sue C. for this suggestion)

An Internet message board that’s not totally useless! Someone asks forum for book suggestions…

“Don’t Panic! You should read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Excellent choice, upvote for the guide

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The apocalypse…hilarity ensues.

A+, the wit is sharp, and it’s one of those books where all the random, seemingly inconsequential things come together in ways you’d never expect. Great stuff.

Just read everything by Kurt Vonnegut.

Especially Slaughterhouse 5″                Browse the Full Forum Post

ALA’s Banned Books Week : Celebrating the Freedom to Read

September 26, 2009 - October 3, 2009

“Banned Books Week (BBW): Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, this annual ALA event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted. BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where the freedom to express oneself and the freedom to choose what opinions and viewpoints to consume are both met.”   Full Story

Department of Justice, in Court Filing, Urges Major Changes to Google Settlement

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), in a “Statement of Interest” filed with the federal court considering the proposed Google Book Search settlement, acknowledged the potential benefits from the settlement—including increased availability of books “effectively off limits to the public,” full-text search, and access for those with print disabilities—but said the “significant legal concerns” it raises require major changes.

The rest of the story…