LISNews: Librarian News

Terry Ballard, Systems librarian at New York Law School's Mendik Library has spent years on a project of creating a Google map that reflects the places in America where Mark Twain lived and worked. The map follows him from his childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri to his years as a teenager visiting the great cities of the east coast. As a young man he was in New Orleans booking passage to South America in search of wealth and adventure. He decides at the last minute to become a riverboat pilot instead. When the Civil War brought down that occupation, he headed west to live in Nevada - pursuing mining unsuccessfully and writing very successfully.

In San Francisco, his writings about police injustice got him in trouble with the law, and he had to hide out for a time in Calaveras County, where he discovered the story that would cement his career as a writer - "The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County." As a successful author, he lived most notably in his mansion in Hartford, but had repeated stays in Manhattan, the Bronx and Upstate. The map makes extensive use of photographs from members of the Mark Twain Forum.

Ballard is extremely grateful for the adoption of his work by the Mark Twain House & Museum. Steve Courtney from the Twain House wrote: "Terry Ballard, librarian, Twain collector, and Google Earthling extraordinaire, has built a guide to the many, many locations that Samuel L. Clemens visited during the course of his long life and varied travels." Eventually, Ballard hopes to integrate images from the museum's enormous collection into the map. -- Read More

ISTANBUL — The first thing you see are the cigarette butts. There are thousands of them — 4,213 to be exact — mounted behind plexiglass on the ground floor of the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s new museum, named for and based on his 2008 novel, “The Museum of Innocence.” Story and multi-media from The New York Times.

It’s a fittingly strange beginning to a tour of this quirky museum, tucked away in a 19th-century house on a quiet street in the Cukurcuma neighborhood, among junk shops that sell old brass, worn rugs and other bric-a-brac.

But it is also, like everything else on the museum’s four floors, a specific reference to the novel — each cigarette has supposedly been touched by Fusun, the object of the narrator’s obsessive love — and, by extension, an evocation of the bygone world in which the book is set.

“The Museum of Innocence” is about Istanbul’s upper class beginning in the 1970s, a time when Mr. Pamuk was growing up in the elite Nisantasi district. He describes the novel as a love story set in the melancholic back streets of that neighborhood and other parts of the European side of the city. But more broadly it is a chronicle of the efforts of haute-bourgeois Istanbulis to define themselves by Western values, a pursuit that continues today as Turkey as a whole takes a more Islamic turn.

David Hockney thinks his current exhibition may be the first one that's ever been 100 percent e-mailed to a gallery. The 73-year-old artist is standing in the space in question — the Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation in Paris — trying to talk about the works, when his iPhone rings.

More from NPR's Morning Edition.

From Discovery News: Egyptians are bravely defending their cultural heritage, according to a statement from Ismail Serageldin, librarian of Alexandria and director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

“The young people organized themselves into groups that directed traffic, protected neighborhoods and guarded public buildings of value such as the Egyptian Museum and the Library of Alexandria,” he said.

“The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters,” Serageldin said.

However, the risk for cultural and archaeological sites remains high.

The West Bank, where the mortuary temples and the Valley of the Kings are located, is without any security, with only villagers trying to protect the sites.

“All the antiquities in the area have been protected by the locals all night, and nothing has been touched,” Mostafa Wazery, director of the Valley of Kings at Luxor, said.

UPDATE: Sun Jan 30, 14:40pm EST: In a faxed statement, Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, confirmed that a total of 13 cases were smashed at the Egyptian museum, adding that other sites are at risk at the moment.