January 2002

Elizaabeth Christian writes \”Is the death of Photopoint an Archives, Library issue ?


Started as a dot com venture capital business by one intrepid visionary, providing unlimited storage in albums for photographs from everywhere, by the time it closed this month it was the repository of an amazing photographic archive, well organized, with editing options, and most important online data for the photographs.


Some people are just finding out their precious photos are gone..they trusted, later paid.


Some links on Photopoints recent demise.In my opinion, this is an in credible international archive of photos, especially US photos, and some nonprofit should step in to preserve the archive, and then sell discs of albums back to the users….assumng the archive still exists.


Warning about \”free\” on the net. People just will not pay if it was once \”free\” it seems.

Ripoffreport.com


CyberJunkie.com


Cido Blog


Comparative stats on uses when it closed.
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The free online version of a forthcoming book from the Research Centre in the History of the Book:

The papers in this volume represent the core of a conference that took place in the University of London on 12-13 March 2001 under the auspices of the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of United States Studies and the Institute of Historical Research. The question, and title of the conference, \’Do we want to keep our newspapers?\’, had suddenly become one of urgent and open public concern when it was widely realised for the first time that collections of original newspapers in major research libraries were being managed by policies of deaccessioning and destruction.

Apologies if this is a re-post.

Shift has a story by Neil Morton, who says daily papers don\’t have nearly the impact and influence they used to. He says a new generation of news seekers are growing up on the net and for them, the print papers aren\’t even an option, they tend to end up on the online version.

\”Many 12- to 35-year-olds now view Salon and Slashdot as seminal news sources, news sources their parents likely haven\’t even heard of. With the net, now we go and find the news; the news doesn\’t get selected for us by editors and writers. We go out and discuss various viewpoints on political events in threads and discussion boards rather than having them dictated to us by op-ed pages with their own agenda.

First it was Stephen Ambrose, and now, Olaf Olafsson has been caught paying \”a little bit of tribute\” in his book \”The Journey Home\”.


Seems like I\’ve been seeing more and more Plagiarism Stories.

\”If you knowingly use somebody else\’s words, and those words are covered by a valid copyright, you are infringing the copyright,\” says Jeffrey Craig Miller, a New York attorney who specializes in publishing and intellectual property.\”

My Girlfriend pointed out this NY Times Story on
The Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, a branch of the New York Public Library, and it\’s Thirty-eight million dollar restoration project that made it no longer a pleasurable place in which to read a book or listen to a recording.

From The Scotsman:

Restrictive opening times of Edinburgh’s public libraries have been slated in a comprehensive survey.
Current rules which see most libraries closed in the evenings and only open for Saturday mornings at the weekends mean thousands of workers don’t have enough opportunity to use them, residents believe.

More.

More on Giuliani\’s plan to place the records of his administration in the hands of private organization rather than with NYC:

\’\’He\’s removed his papers so that nobody can go down there and look at them. I think that\’s dead wrong,\’\’ said former mayor Ed Koch, who said he viewed everything he did during his tenure as part of his public record.

From the Boston Globe. Still more from the Village Voice.

From Islamic Republic News Agency:

The director of Afghanistan\’s National Library, Fazlollah Qodsi, said that no new Persian books have been added to the library for the past 20 years. Qodsi told IRNA that despite being in position to add new specialized books to the library, it is unfortunately short of any training facilities and that the entire number of its medical books is just limited to 19 volumes.

More.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The University of California, Los Angeles Library has purchased the literary archive of Susan Sontag, one of the best-known and most influential American intellectuals of the late 20th Century. Sources close to the sale say the library paid $1.1 million for the materials, $440,000 of which is for her personal library. Funds were donated by an anonymous UCLA alumna.

A bit more. Even more from the Las Vegas Sun.

Someone passed along a USNewsWire release, Statement From Blacks in Government Library of Congress Chapter, from William W. Ellis of Blacks in Government, says:

\”The Library of Congress (LC) has descended from its on-going
blatant racism into the abyss of the segregation outlawed by the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under the leadership of Librarian James
H. Billington, LC managers have segregated procurement officers in
the Contracts and Logistics Division (C&L) into two teams. An
all-white all-female team now handles major contracts, and an
all-black team of men and women is left to handle the dregs.\”