When Public Officials Overreact & Other Newsbreaks

So much for summer's reputation as a slow news season. There's been NYC library coverage aplenty over the last week. Let's break it down.

New York Public Library finally dropped the layoff bomb and it wasn't all that painful. Sixty-five positions have been eliminated, but 120 "restructured" positions have been created thanks to a large (but unknown) number of vacancies yielded by employees who accepted "voluntary separation incentives." Those 65 affected library staffers get first dibs on the 120 new positions.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind called on Brooklyn Public Library to ban all VHS tapes after a Borough Park granny discovered porn spliced into the ending credits of the copy of Austin Powers she'd borrowed for her grandkids. The perpetrator had already been arrested for the crime, and 18 similarly modified tapes were found during BPL's internal investigation.

NYPL's 42nd Street building opened the Edna Barnes Salomon Room as a study space, featuring seating for 128 patrons, Wi-Fi, and loaner laptops (available starting July 28). The Salomon Room was formerly used for exhibitions.

And in a final piece of NYPL news, the recently-launched, totally new-fangled Catalog appears to be running smoothly.

Migratory Video

Happy New Year! All's quiet in the library around the holidays, so Shelved @ NYC has been on something of a hiatus. In the interregnum, here's an interesting/sad bit of news about one of the city's best commercial collections:

Kim's Mediapolis (Broadway and 113th) closed in September after an intolerable rent increase by its landlord, Columbia University. Subsequently, Youngman Kim donated his 30,000+ DVD and video rentals to Columbia University Libraries' Butler Media Collection. Now comes word that Mondo Kim's (St. Marks Place) rental collection is headed to a not-so-local non-library, the town of Salemi, Sicily, where all 55,000 films will be screened at the "Neverending Festival". Vanishing New York has some nice coverage of their impending cross-Atlantic journey. The remaining, non-rental portion of Mondo Kim's is moving to a new location on 1st Avenue. Kim's Video on Avenue A closed in 2004 and the Christopher Street store is no longer owned by Mr. Kim.