Now that Bloomberg owns Business Week, having bought it from McGraw-Hill, it is laying off about 100 staff people. One casualty was the library. And, according to Stephen Baker, who wrote one of the seminal articles on the importance of blogging in the corporate world, published in Business Week, reporters are being advised to take their research needs to Google. That is, for those reporters who are left. Baker, for one, will no longer be with BW come December 1st. Other columnists and reporters let go by Bloomberg include such well-known names as Jon Fine (media), Damian Joseph (innovation & design), Rob Hof (Silicon Valley), Lauren Fine (finance), Steven Wildstrom (technology), and Amy Choi (small business).

This is so sad.

I went to the New Members Meet & Greet last evening. (Hey, why not? It’s the only thing during the whole conference scheduled at my hotel!) Lots of great LIS students were there, some just graduated, some about to graduate. I learned from David Gross that San Jose State University is offering a one-credit course to its students attending ALA. The students have to trade business cards with people they meet at the conference (and I, of course, had left mine in my room, so I owe David a card), attend sessions, visit the exhibit hall, keep a journal log of their activities, and when they return to San Jose, write a paper researching something new that interested them from the conference. I think this is a super idea! Do other graduate library schools do this?

Great segment on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer about public libraries. Julia Keller talks about the impact of public libraries on peoples’ lives. My favorite takeway line was that it doesn’t matter as much what you come in looking for as what you actually take away with you. OK, that’s a paraphrase. Here’s an even more egregious one: It’s not the horse you rode in on, it’s the one you go out with. Bad grammar, I know. Still a terrific sentiment. Reminds me of a sentence from a book by Annie Dillard where she talks about the explosive nature of the books she encountered as a child at the Pittsburgh Public Library. You just never knew, she said, what was between the covers.

There’s only 3 weeks left to submit your request to speak at Internet Librarian International, to be held in London (the one in the UK, that is) on the 16th and 17th of October. We’re looking critically at all things 2.0, including transparency, technology, and the tangible benefits. Plus, any neat new stuff you’ve done with search, web design, portals, and funding would be interesting.

It’s our tenth year and we’re looking for a mix of papers for conference sessions, workshops, and short tutorials. If you’ve got something to share, please take a look at the website, and submit a request to speak.