July 2002

Lee Hadden passed along This One from Chronicle.com that says when Congress brought copyright law into the digital era, in 1998, some in academe were initially heartened by what they saw as compromises that, they hoped, would protect fair use for digital materials. Unfortunately, they were wrong.

Recent actions by Congress and the federal courts — and many more all-too-common acts of cowardice by publishers, colleges, developers of search engines, and other concerned parties — have demonstrated that fair use, while not quite dead, is dying.

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Another unique feature about BCRN are the commercials. 90% of our commercials are about books.


Via:
Wired
\”

TechReview.com takes a look at U.S. Postal Service Owning Email.

They say The Postal Service had considered electronic mail ever since the invention of the telegraph.

The Postmaster General of the United States in 1982, William F. Bolger, said “the Postal Service be prohibited by law from entering the ‘Generation III’ (terminal-to-terminal) business. That aspect is the proper domain of the telecommunications industry. Our mandate for 206 years has been the delivery of hard-copy messages. That will remain our function.”

Nothing too exciting in This Story except for the opening, which really cracked me up:

\”Libraries are a lot like baseball fields (at least those that figure largely in certain movies): Build them and they will come.\”

It is a nice look at how busy public libraries are now.

A Fulton County library employee killed his boss and then himself on Monday, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The 31 year old killer was \”going for a degree in Library Science\” says the story.

Read the article.

Charles Davis sent over The mystery of Hannah Crafts.
By John Bloom

Who was Hannah Crafts. Was Hannah Crafts really a black woman? Was she really a slave? How do we know she wasn\’t a tea-sipping housewife in Morristown who wanted to help abolish slavery?

In case you missed the ballyhoo, 16 months ago an obscure 301-page handwritten manuscript was offered for auction at the Swann Galleries in New York. The title page read \”The Bondwoman\’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, Recently Escaped from North Carolina.\”


The catalog said that the manuscript appeared to be from the 1850s and that it was \”uncertain that this work is written by a \’negro,\’\” but that there was textual evidence to suggest that it was written by a slave — for example, \”her escape route is one sometimes used by run-aways.\”

Alan Gray writes \”Here\’s an article from the Princeton University web site about how a college prep program uses a scavenger hunt of the library as a learning tool.

\”

A Salt Lake City librarian witnessed a man downloading kiddie porn off the Internet, and called authorities. The man was arrested. After searching the man\’s apartment, the police found more sexual images of children and other items, including a child\’s backpack and 100 pairs of children\’s underwear. Read More.

To follow up on Ryan\’s story, The Guardian Says the British Library was closed by strike action for first time.

The 24-hour closure was over the library\’s refusal to raise a 4% pay award to staff. These include the library assistants – some of them earning only £10,000 to £15,000 a year.The strike closed the new St Pancras building\’s total of six reading rooms and a similar room at the library\’s outstation in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Scholars at a third centre, the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, north London, were only able to work if they had ordered material in advance.

A Few More Details on the murder/suicide down in GA.


As he stacked books and helped children navigate the Internet, anger grew within the 31-year-old man who worked for Gladys Dennard at the library in Union City.


The man, who was working toward a degree in library science, had been disciplined by Dennard, said Clint Johnson, library board chairman. He did not know the nature of the discipline.