LISNews: Librarian News

Meiji University in Tokyo has announced plans to open a library devoted to the art of manga, the Japanese graphic novel genre.

Full blurb at the NYT

In an increasingly digitized world, the cyber cemetery has become the main publicly accessible depository for government records that don't exist on paper. The site is maintained by the University of North Texas and the U.S. Government Printing Office.

Other entities, such as the Internet Archive, take periodic snapshots of Web sites to preserve information. But the Cyber Cemetery, which also has partnered with the National Archives and Records Administration, focuses exclusively on government Web sites and captures them in their final and complete form, UNT Librarian for Digital Collections, Starr Hoffman said.

"Someone needs to take the responsibility of capturing the material for future researchers," said Cathy Hartman, Assistant Dean of Libraries at UNT. "This is government by the people, and we need access to see what our taxes are paying for."

The AP reports: The archived sites include the understandable — the Child Online Protection Act Commission of 2000 — and the unintelligible. (Check out the 2005 Commission on Systemic Interoperability or the 2000 International Competition Policy Advisory Committee Research Collection.) The work is varied, from commissions to help people have more access to health care information to panels that study 20th century antitrust problems.

The British Library made public yesterday a 30,000-word memoir in which Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th-century art historians, and curator of the Queen's art collection, described spying for the Soviet Union, beginning in the mid-1930s, as “the biggest mistake of my life.”

The NY Times reports on the unsealing of the memoir after twenty five years. Blunt intended it as a testament to family and friends, and it was given to the British Library in 1984 by the executor of Blunt’s will, John Golding, on the condition that it be kept secret for 25 years. Frances Harris, the library’s head of modern historic manuscripts, told the BBC on Thursday that its existence was so closely guarded that even she had not read it until recently.

The memoir’s tone of regret for the price Blunt paid personally for betraying his country, coupled with the absence of any apology to those who suffered as a result of his actions, including secret agents working for Britain whose identities he passed to the Russians during World War II, contributed to harsh criticism of the document on Thursday from British historians and commentators.

On July 13th the Los Angeles Times published the article "Budget cuts raise concerns for future of Southeast Asian archive". The Archives used to be managed and curated by Anne Frank, the librarian who spearheaded the archives, but once she retired, the UC Irvine Libraries' administration made the decision to not recruit for a replacement.

Read full LA Times article.