Upholding Integrity in Education and Law

Librarians Leaving for Better-Paying Jobs

With a third of its new librarians leaving for jobs elsewhere, library management at New York City’s three library systems has made an historic appeal to city officials to increase librarian salaries. All three systems say that the decade-long trend of librarians leaving after five years or fewer has reached a crisis point. The New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and Queens Borough Public Library systems say that current librarian salaries are so low that librarians, particularly children’s services staff, are defecting to school, corporate, and suburban public libraries. To that effect, New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc made a salary presentation on behalf of the three library boards, asking city officials for a 15 percent increase, approximately $9 million, in librarian salaries. The current starting salary for a city librarian with a master’s degree in library science is $29,007 for a 35-hour workweek. Librarians in the city’s

Libraries Taking the Media Role

In common parlance the word “media” refers collectively to the organizations that gather and present news to the public. Thus, the American Heritage Dictionary (1969 edition) defines it as “a means of mass communications, such as newspapers, magazines or television.” Webster’s 3rd New International Dictionary (unabridged, 1976) casts a somewhat wider net. It defines “media” as “a channel, method or system of communication, information or entertainment,” and cites an illustration from the Saturday Review: “A book needs the widest possible discussion in the reviewing media of the country–whether magazine, newspaper, radio, television, or public platform.” Here “information” and “entertainment” have been added to the content of media, and “public platform” to the means of delivery. Those definitions of “media,” however, were written before the consolidation of the mass communications industry during the 1980s and 1990s. Where there used to be hundreds of independent publishers, here and abroad, that produced English-language

Librarians in the Advent of Innovations

Technologies have unwittingly affected most library jobs. Libraries require staff for management, building maintenance, and systems, which staff all use various software packages and also the internet to enable them to. Within our system they will use email for internal and exterior communication the voice over internet protocol telephone system software or softwares to produce documents and Excel spreadsheets to special human assets software for record keeping remotely located accounting and payroll that ties into our online timesheet help desk software for problem confirming Dreamweaver to handle our intranet site to produce input forms and surveys desktop posting software for marketing. There are just too many innovations that librarians today need to keep up with. The curtain call of libraries and librarians continues to be viewed as only a matter of time. They predict that libraries and librarians must change or else they enter oblivion by virtue irrelevance. Oddly, some

Phony College Students Put Campuses to the Test

A story from The Seattle Times June 19, 2007 discusses the issue of young adults posing as students on campuses where they are not enrolled. So they may go to class, eat in the dining hall, and live in the dorm, but they are not legitimate students. The article details the cases of fake students not at small, unknown institutions, but individuals “sitting in” at Rice, Stanford, and Yale. A former psychology professor provides his analysis on why someone would undertake this elaborate ruse. He said the lies start to cover a shady past or to impress significant others. But the “students” must have the facility to remember all the lies they’ve already told and continue to build upon them. The open atmosphere of residence colleges allow liars to get by until someone gets suspicious and does some checking. The story details that some fake students use an assumed name