"You have probably heard about Ready for Reference, the Alliance Library System's virtual reference service, and/or Answers Unlimited, the North Suburban Library Systems project and how these two projects received an LSTA planning grant from the Illinois State Library.

My Web Librarian is the name of the combined service that came about because of the Illinois Libraries: Just a Click Away planning grant. The official roll out of the combined and expanded service is scheduled for April 7, 2003.

The project continues to welcome any Illinois library to join us and share in our success.

One of our goals for the grant is to compare virtual reference vendors, and we invite all Illinois libraries to participate in these free vendor trials. My Web Librarian will be a statewide service and it is important that we get input from you, your staff, colleagues and as many Illinois librarians as possible. The trials are free, fun, and easy to do. All we ask is that you complete the user survey and give us your opinion. Come on Illinois librarians and tell us what you think!

Complete instructions may be found by clicking the 'Free Trials' link at the project's web site: http://www.MyWebLibrarian.com.

Once you are there, please explore each of the services offered by the five vendors: divine, Docutek, LSSI, QuestionPoint, and 24/7 Reference. Don't worry -- you won't be answering questions from the public! This is a chance to stick your toe in the virtual reference waters and splash around. Feel free to take as many 'dips' as you like!

The trials will last through April 15, 2003

For questions or to get more information, please contact the Project Coordinator: Skip Burhans, 309-353-4110 x2128"

For the login and password, contact SLS Reference Service or Skip!

"The netConnect/WEB FEET Best of the Web Awards will recognize excellent school and public library web sites. School library awards will be in two categories: K-8 and high school libraries. The public library awards are also in two categories: web sites that provide health information and web sites designed to meet the needs of small businesses. Awards will recognize both small and large libraries.

There will be eight awards in all; each award is accompanied by a grant of $1000 from WEB FEET. Deadline is May 1. For more information, visit http://www.libraryjournal.com/netconnectawards or contact Brian Kenney." [WEB4LIB]

Mexico to Abolish the Public Domain (but at Least Honestly)

"The Mexican Congress is about to consider a revision to its copyright law. Among it many changes, the law will extend the term of copyright from life-plus-70 to life-plus-100. (And no doubt thus beginning yet another cycle of 'harmonization' around the world.) Worse, at the end of the copyright term, the government has the right to charge royalties for works in the 'public domain....'

The insanity in this system is astonishing. But here's the message Mexico has got to understand: it will be easier for Mexicans to consume Hollywood content over the next 150 years than it will be for Mexicans to cultivate and preserve their own culture. Is promoting Hollywood really what the Mexican Congress is for? [Lessig Blog]

The March 28 issue of Entertainment Weekly has the following "Open Letter to America" from the EW staff on page 11:

"As you may be aware, the Untied States has been experiencing some diplomatic tension with the leadership and citizenry of France. In a bold and courageous move, Congress recently rechristened some of the items in its cafeterias to reflect its growing dissatisfaction with the French people: French fries and French toast are now 'freedom fries' and 'freedom toast.' (Mmmm.) We at EW, in our constant quest to support our elected leaders - well, all leaders, really, elected or otherwise - have eagerly embraced this new approach of diplomacy by semantics.

Consequently, we would like to note that the movie The French Connection will henceforth be referred to in our pages as The Freedom Connection, and the Meryl Streep-Jeremy Irons drama The French Lieutenant's Woman will be referred to as The Free Lieutenant's Woman. The Meg Ryan-Kevin Kline romantic comedy French Kiss will be Free Kiss, a tongueless title we frankly like a little better. An American in Paris will be referred to as That Gene Kelly Movie With the Stupid Dream Sequence at the End....

Frenchie from American Idol will henceforth be known as 'The Unjustly Wronged....'

...The refrain from 'Lady Marmalade' will be rendered as 'Will you sleep with me tonight?' which will - we admit - make it a little more difficult to distinguish from other Christina Aguilera songs. We apologize for any confusion.

We will be suspending our relentless coverage of Edith Piaf until further notice...."

You can get a copy of the whole thing from your local library.

EFF and Breaking News

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a Breaking News page to notify readers about specific digital rights related issues that the organization is tracking." [beSpacific]

No RSS feed, though. Darn. Hopefully we'll see some posts about digital rights and libraries show up here.

"The Blog Bar is a neat little tool to add to your IE Taskbar. Click on the Blogger icon and a side bar comes up where you can blog, post, and publish your entries.

Only works with Blogger. Rats!! Does anyone use anything similar for Movable Type?

Jenny, this looks somewhat similar to FM Radiostation, right? (or am I totally off base)." [Library Stuff]

It's different in that Blog Bar embeds into an existing web browser, whereas FM Radiostation is a completely separate application that is designed to replace blogging from within the browser. It's interesting to see the different approaches, though, and I can see where something like Blog Bar would be helpful. We're definitely approaching a new phase of blogging software, although we're still a long way from where I'd ultimately like to see us.

Blogger users can also monitor Status.Blogger.com messages via RSS. [via News Is Free: Recent Additions]