March 2007

Google’s ambitious book-scanning project may be the talk of the publishing world, but some college librarians are more excited by the Open Content Alliance, a similar endeavor led by Brewster Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive. In the inaugural installation of The Chronicle’s new weekly podcast series, Mr. Kahle offers a progress report on his project and outlines his vision for the future of digital libraries. How Digital Libraries Will Change Academe, from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Police recover stolen rare books N.H. Police have recovered more than 400 rare books stolen from a Madison (New Hampshire) estate last month.

Police Chief John Pickering says investigators were led to the 443 books, in Madison, by a tip last week. He said the recovery will not result in immediate arrests, though police have identified suspects and gotten some good clues from the discovery.

Two authors who claimed Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code was largely copied from their earlier book today lost an appeal over the case.

“It does not, however, extend to clothing information, facts, ideas, theories and themes with exclusive property rights, so as to enable the claimants to monopolise historical research or knowledge and prevent the legitimate use of historical and biographical material, theories propounded, general arguments deployed, or general hypotheses suggested (whether they are sound or not) or general themes written about,” he ruled.

Bob dropped me an email to point us all to Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks from over at Wired. Google and Microsoft are racing into libraries to digitize the world’s books, but the success of Learning 2.0 shows that the human problem of retraining workers is often being tackled from the ground up.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,'” said Michael Stephens [of Tame The Web fame], who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

No longer is the map of the world just a browning piece of paper above the blackboard…here is a collection of world maps, using equal area cartograms where territories are re-sized on each map according to particular variables; land-mass and population of course, but also literacy, education, work, poverty/wealth, food consumption, exports/imports, resources, mortality from a variety of causes and so on.

The Worldmapper Project is a collaborative effort between geographers at the University of Sheffield and the University of Michigan. There are 366 maps, also available as PDF posters.

Construction will begin in early April on the new Paul and Irene Bogoni Rare Books Library, an addition to St. Bonaventure University’s Friedsam Memorial Library.

Additional gifts for the addition were received from Leslie C. Quick III and the estate of John R. McGinley Sr., allowing university officials to finalize construction plans. The construction schedule includes a planned hiatus during final exam week in May to minimize noise, said Brenda Snow, vice president for business and finance.

It seems I’ve been sitting on 2 completely unrelated stories about Braille Books.

This One From Florida says about 50 advocates for the blind and visually impaired converge on the Capitol today with a mission to lobby for more services and protest legislation.

This One From The UK says that 100 blind children were protesting at Westminster today over the failure of the state education system to provide them with books in Braille.

Linux.com: The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America’s history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish the results online in multiple formats.

Thanks to a $2 million grant from the Sloan Foundation, “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress” will begin the task of digitizing these rare materials — including Civil War and genealogical documents, technical and artistic works concerning photography, scores of books, and the 850 titles written, printed, edited, or published by Benjamin Franklin. According to Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, which developed the digitizing technology, open source software will play an “absolutely critical” role in getting the job done.

My two favorite story themes we see year after year @LISNews are bookmobiles and odd things found in returned books. The Norwich Bulletin takes a peak in books and finds a photograph, a faded pink ribbon, personal letters, valentines, used engagement calendars, photographs and pressed flowers. Someone also found $75 and better yet, a squirrel’s tail. They also mentioned the Things Found In Books group over at LibraryThing, some funny ones there.

Search-Engines writes “picture shows a dramatic gold and orange sky and a teenage boy in glasses reaching upward? It’s the cover to the seventh and final Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” coming out July 21. As always, the cover was designed by illustrator Mary GrandPre, U.S. publisher Scholastic, Inc., announced Wednesday
Yahoo News Is One Place To See It“