February 2003

From MSN Entertainment News…
\”Fred Rogers, who gently invited millions of children to be his neighbor as host of the public television show \”Mister Rogers\’ Neighborhood\” for more than 30 years, died of cancer early Thursday. He was 74.\”
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Someone sent along This One From Oregon where the Multnomah County Library’s DVD collection is so good that the library is having a hard time keeping thieves away from the latest releases as they wait on the reserve shelves.

“Oprah Winfrey’s book club is accepting new members.”

“The talk-show megastar, whose endorsements have launched dozens of best sellers, said Wednesday that she is reviving the club after almost a year’s hiatus. But this time, club members will read the classics.”

“Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway. Those are the authors she’s reading now — “It’s a gift to myself,” she says — and they’ll likely make the list. The new round of reading tentatively is titled “Traveling with the Classics”; Winfrey will visit the settings of the authors’ works.” (from USA Today via Waterboro Lib Blog)

“Already operating with fewer books, employees and dollars, the Washington State Library is facing more budget cuts — and this time, some valuable federal papers are at stake.”

“Gov. Gary Locke’s 2003-05 budget proposes to severely cut the library, which took a big hit last year but avoided closure. The Senate’s adjustments to the current budget, the supplemental budget, call for cuts to the library before June 30.” (from Seattle Times)

The Tennessean has a look at the world of altered books.

People are buying up old books and transforming them into journals and new works of art.

Artists have long been altering books with paint and collage and the Victorians used old books as scrapbooks, so this isn’t necessarily a new idea. But, avid rubber stampers, scrap-bookers and book makers have refueled the art form in the last two or three years, said Katherine Sullivan of Nashville, who this month began teaching a monthly course in altered books.

Check out ISABA, ABAlteredBooks, or This Site for more.

Here’s A Neat Project devoted to the phenomenon of Los Angeles Literature. Students at Mount St. Mary’s College make a pretty compelling argument that a great deal of good writing has emerged and is continuing to emerge from Los Angeles.

The information gathered on the website has been amassed by first- and second-year undergraduate students, who devoted a great deal of time and effort to providing accurate, helpful, and interesting information.

“Daniel Taradash, 90, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “From Here to Eternity” who imagined the film’s erotic beach scene and was a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, died Feb. 22 at a Los Angeles hospital. He had pancreatic cancer.”

“He directed his own co-written screenplay of “Storm Center” (1956), starring Bette Davis as a town librarian ostracized when she refuses to remove a book about Communism. The film, considered a statement about the anti-Communist blacklist of artists, flopped and ended his directing career.” (from The Washington Post)

A Chronicle Of Higher Ed. Article on planning for the worst.

They say for every story of how an institution was able to save its data, a professor somewhere has a horror story about losing years of research after a fire, natural disaster, or a server crash. And while most large universities religiously back up their main computer servers every night, some only save data on smaller servers once a week.

“”The scary part is if you’re planning for this disaster, and it fails in the calm moment, what’s going to happen in a real disaster?” Mr. Ellis says. “Everybody talks about backup, but the really important part is how long it takes to do a restore.”

NPR’s The Connection has a Report On the Sarajevo National Library, which was engulfed in flames following shelling by Serb Nationalist forces, Wednesday, August 26, 1992.

They say since those days in late August of 1992, librarians and philanthropists have worked to restore not just the documents, the manuscripts and the books, but the memory that was attacked at that time. Physically, psychologically and spiritually re-stocking the shelves of Sarajevo.

Charles Davis sent over This BBC Story on Images captured by Mary Dillwyn, one of the first women ever to get behind a lens, have been saved from export to America by Wales’s premier library.

some of her work has been saved for the nation after The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth paid £48,165 for an album to prevent it from going abroad. The album contains 42 prints which demonstrate the early use of photography as an art form

“It will be a fine addition to our national collection of over a million photographs dating from the dawn of photography to the new digital age.”