Lawrence Kapture is one of my favorite librarians.

I think the name of the object is copy book. This is the sort of book that Victorian and Edwardian women used to write down thoughts and poems. I tried to look up copy book in my small home reference collection but struck out. I asked a librarian and promise to post the answer when they send it.

Blogs are a bit like copy books.

If I had been a Victorian or Edwardian lady, I might have copied this poem into my book.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

W. B. Yeats, The Rose, 1893

Speaking of poetry and blogs, here is haiku the blog.

Oh my God. This is fabulous!

The term copybook (sometimes copy-book) looks to have a more general meaning than I implied in my last entry. First, they were used women and men. Second, they were used for educational and religious purposes. Third, they were used in times earlier than the Victorian end Edwardian periods.

I found this description of Anne Bronte’s Music Manuscript Copy-Book.

Maybe it is commonplace books I am thinking of? Thanks to Naomi.

Weblog Wannabe. Only a cataloger could make a site this good. Oh, Firda!

The only thing less reliable than my host is my hot water heater. I just took a look at my site and found a server error where this web log was supposed to be.

To hell with Interland! I called my sales rep Friday to ask one last time for some resolution to the persistent server problems. I told her that this was the last straw and that if I did not receive a satisfactory response this weekend, I would move services. She said she would have someone call me immediately. No one did.

Meanwhile, I spoke to a rep at ReadyHosting. Unless I see a warning message in my inbox in the next two days, I am going to move to this small Midwestern company.

The running is going much better than expected. Turns out I am in OK shape and can run intervals of at least 10 minutes quite comfortably. Here is the three-part plan: 1. Spend the rest of 2001 getting up to 25-30 miles per week. 2. Spend 2002 running qualifying races. 3. Spend 2003 being kick-ass and running the NYC marathon.

You see, the 30ís are this fancy ladyís decade.

NetLibrary, an eBook provider that caters to the library market, announced last week that it would adopt the Open eBook Forum’s (OeBF) Open eBook Specification for eBook conversion.

NetLibrary had been converting hard-copy books to a proprietary electronic format, storing them on their netLibrary servers, and converting texts to HTML on the fly.

Now publishers will submit OeBF compliant files directly to netLibrary, or request that netLibrary manage conversion for them. Under the later scenario, NetLibrary will outsource the work to vendors.

The Result

1. More than a few people from the netLibrary in-house conversion operation are out of a job.
2. The cost of producing the texts may go down.
3. The texts will be formatted according to a hypertext markup standard established by a working group of publishers, academics, librarians and computer scientists.

What is netLibrary?

NetLibrary has been selling eBooks to libraries since 1999. In brief, this company works with publishers like Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, Grove’s Dictionaries Inc. and O’Reilly & Associates to provide libraries with a collection of e-books that may be searched and circulated. Their single-use policy appears to have made publishers relax their concerns about copyright abuse.

This early press release will fill in the blanks if this company is new to you.

The MARS ALA conference schedule is up. See you in San Francisco.

The new index is finished and at work in this filtering page. Follow me as I follow filtering. If you have been reading my web log for a while, you’ll find this material familiar. I have simply flagged entries having to do with filtering and directed them to this new page. It was fun.

In his article entitled “The First Amendment’s Limitations on the Use of Internet Filtering in Public and School Libraries: What Content Can Librarians Exclude?” Mark S. Nadel argues that the First Amendment does not prevent libraries from filtering if the librarian in charge has as much control over the filter as she or he would over a print collection. Nadel suggests that the Amendment permits a library to filter Internet content as it would filter materials that are donated to the library.

There is a serious shortage of well-written, well-researched pro-filtering literature and this is a welcome change. I am glad to see this article because I was starting to feel like I was arguing against a straw man. Thanks, Mark.

The article first appeared in the Texas Law Review 1117 (2000).

Don Saklad wrote to ask about making this content-rich site more accessible to users with disabilities. I would like to sit down and write a well-considered piece about this, but for now I’ll share my quick tips.

Understand markup standards
GUI HTML editors are fine for certain tasks like creating prototypes, but when it is time to publish a professional site, someone on your team needs to use standards-compliant markup and understand what each little bit of code is doing. Accessible sites are built by people who have mastered markup.

Make sites that validate
If you want to learn how to write standards-compliant markup, run your page through HTML, CSS and Accessibility validators. The results are hard to read at first, but if you take errors apart line by line, you’ll learn HTML more quickly than you would if you had Jeffrey Zeldman sitting over your shoulder.

Talk to other coders
There are some good forums just for HTML woes. A List Apart’s Coders Forum and About.com’s HTML/XML Forum are both full of very nice, helpful people. Accessibility is a hot topic now and good discussions abound.

Read
Read the good stuff. Dummies guides are fine to start, but if you really want to learn how to make accessible sites, read titles published by such companies as O’Reilly and New Riders. These articles will help:

• “Forgiving” Browsers Considered Harmful by J. David Eisenberg.
• This HTML Kills: Thoughts on Web Accessibility by Jim Byrne

More on this later.

My new host (DBWired) has my credit card number. I hope that this leads to a happy client/customer relationship. The site should move some time this week. If I blip out on you, please forgive me.

Gorgeous run last night. I ran past a group of little boys who nearly tripped me with their hockey sticks. A few houses later, a group of girls politely stopped a game of foursquare to clear a path. “You are so much nicer than the boys,” I told them. “Of course we are,” they chimed.

TJ suggests that this LA Times article about the shortage of librarians in LA might be more fuel for the get-your-sorry-ass-into-library-school fire. N.B. He does not think that you ass is sorry.

Catherine dug up ‘ Book Night’ With the Boys, Lynda S. Zengerle’s article about family (not in the Dr. Laura sense) reading.