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C&RL News, November 2007
Vol. 68, No.10

by Gary Pattillo

Book banning
Since 1999, support for the idea of banning “books with dangerous ideas” from public school libraries has declined from 55 percent to 46 percent and has now fallen to the lowest level of support of the past 20 years.
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007,” March 22, 2007, pewresearch.org/pubs/434/trends-in-political-values-and-core-attitudes-1987-2007, August 14, 2007.

UK book market
The United Kingdom book market grew by 2.6 percent in 2006 to reach a value of $4.3 billion. In 2011, the market is forecast to have a value of $4.8 billion, an increase of 11.9 percent since 2006. Sales of general trade and consumer titles accounts for 67.5 percent of the United Kingdom market’s value.
Datamonitor, “Books in the United Kingdom: Industry Profile,” July 2007 (Reference Code: 0183-0781), October 11, 2007.

Books and translations
Approximately 1.5 million books were published worldwide last year. About 30 percent of them were in English. There are more than 6,900 languages spoken on Earth. In 2005, 3.54 percent of new adult fiction books published in the United States were translations. In 2005, Chinese publishers bought 3,932 American titles. In that same year, American publishers bought 16 Chinese titles.
Jascha Hoffman, “Comparative Literature. (Book Review Desk),” The New York Times Book Review (April 15, 2007): 27(L). Academic OneFile, Gale, October 17, 2007.

Citing Medicine
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) announced the publication of Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, available free of charge on the National Center for Biotechnology Information Bookshelf. Citing Medicine provides guidance for citing 26 types of published and unpublished material, ranging from print books and journal articles to blogs and wikis. Citing Medicine updates and supersedes two previous NLM publications: National Library of Medicine Recommended Formats for Bibliographic Citation published in 1991 and its Internet Supplement published in 2001. These publications will be archived on the NLM Web site.
National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 2nd edition, 2007, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.TOC&depth=2, October 15, 2007.

Digital preservation
In many cases, digital materials are considered more fragile than physical ones. Machines and software used to read digital files can break or become obsolete. The files themselves must be continually managed, and their longevity and costs are unpredictable. For example, the average life of a Web site is between 44 and 100 days. Items at risk include e-mail, computer files, storage media, digital photographs, e-books, and e-journals. Some options and considerations include saving data in a variety of open, widely available formats; saving multiple copies to a variety of media and keeping them in different locations; transferring or migrating data to new formats and media as they become available; and printing documents with high-quality ink and paper.
The Library of Congress, “Did You Know? Some Interesting Facts About Digital Media,” www.digitalpreservation.gov/didyouknow/index.html, October 10, 2007.

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.unc.edu

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association