LISNews: Librarian News

Charles Davis passed along this one from
The Guardian on a Cambridge graduate who stole antique books and pamphlets worth an estimated £1.1m from libraries and then sold them at auctions and is now facing a lengthy jail term. The Police named him the \"Tome Raider\" after they busted him with books like Principia Mathematica by Sir Isaac Newton, works by Galileo,
and The Wealth of Nations by the Scots economist Adam
Smith.
In total he stole 412 extremely rare antiquarian books making
the haul one of the biggest of its kind in British legal history.
Some have been returned to the libraries but hundreds of the
books have never been traced.

\"We don\'t assert he actually got them out of the libraries in the
first place but what he did afterwards was to pretend to be the
owner to sell them or store them away for later, we say, to make
quite a pile of money. We are not dealing with last year\'s law
book. We are going back hundreds of years with some of them.
They are valuable and he knew that.\"

See also, BBC Story on stopping book thieves in stores.

You\'ve most likely heard of Brewster Kahle\'s Internet Archive. In the case that you have not, this note on the homepage should tantalize you

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

Well, an interesting article from Business Week tells of the development of Kahle\'s project, his plans for the future (which include better searching capablilites and digital copies of TV and radio programs) and the *huge* obstacle that is COPYRIGHT! In the article, Lawrence Lessig calls Kahle his \"hero.\" Wow! The strange thing about the article is that it seems to be sympathetic to Kahle and Lessig, rather than business.

The average lifespan for a website is 60 days. \"To a librarian, whose whole role in life is to preserve information, that is the stuff of sleepless nights.\"

As well as regularly archiving 10,000 sites, the British Library will take half-yearly \"snapshots\" of the entire .uk domain, which is presently 25 million webpages, with 60,000 being registered monthly. The library plans to create a cross section of British websites, consciously choosing a variety of sites, \"for example, we chose the Soil Association site and also the Monsanto site, to see how the debates on GM foods matched up.\" The archive will be cataloged, somehow, and they are investigated getting copyright clearance so that the public can browse the archives.Read the Full Story here

Charles Davis Sent in this Story from
Ananova on an appeal launched to buy a unique collection of classical music treasures.

The Royal Philharmonic Society archive could be split up or
leave the UK unless the cash appeal succeeds, the British
Library said today.

Deborah Bloom also sent in A Second Story on the same thing.