It looks like the days of being shushed at the library could be numbered.  A couple of Japanese scientists have invented a device that can force someone to stop talking.

SpeechJammer is the name of the device and it can be used to silence someone from as far as 100 feet away.  The device looks like a radar gun used by police to track how fast cars are going.  To silence someone, you simply use the laser targeter to target the talker’s mouth and pull the trigger. [Read more…]

Ever wish you had access to a super genius through your mobile phone?  Someone that could reference gigantic databases of information and find what you’re looking for quickly?  Well, now you can.  It’s a service called “Siri” “Text a Librarian” and it’s available on every mobile phone in Illinois. [Read more…]

Seattlepi.com reported today that a woman with her kids at the Lake City Branch of the Seattle Public Library complained when she saw a man watching porn on a computer with a screen that could be seen from the information desk of the library.  She asked a librarian to ask the man to move to a more private area and the librarian refused stating that “the library doesn’t censor content”.  The woman, Julie Howe, said that one of her daughters (ages 7 and 10) saw what the man was watching. [Read more…]

Libraries are defined by Merriam-Webster as “a place in which literary, musical, artistic, or reference materials (as books, manuscripts, recordings, or films) are kept for use but not for sale” or “a collection of such materials”.

I don’t know if the people that write dictionaries have been to a library in the last several years, but they really need to update their definition.  Public libraries today are definitely not what they used to be. [Read more…]

Contra Costa County Library launched the first automated book dispensing machines in the country in 2008.  Their Library-a-Go-Go dispensers are located at Bay Area Rapid Transit stops in the San Francisco area.  The machines hold up to 400 books which can be browsed from a touch screen.  They operate like an ATM with a swipe of a library card to dispense books.  Users can have up to three books checked out at a time and return the books to the Library-a-Go-Go machines. [Read more…]