March 2011

It’s Dutch Book Week, and the focus is on (auto)biographies. Ann Frank is shown above (pretty amazing!). From Behance.net:

Each year CPNB (Collective Promotion Dutch Literature) organises the Dutch Book Week to promote Dutch literature. And every year a specific genre is being profiled. This year the(auto) biography is featured. This is translated in the theme ‘GeschrevenPortretten’, which translates in Written Portraits’. Van Wanten Etcetera created the campaign, which show the different faces behind the (auto) biographies. Anne Frank, Vincent van Gogh, Louis van Gaal and Kader Abdollah (writer of the biographic Book Week give away). Souverein made the artwork and did an amazing job creating realistic images. Even original book pages were used for the text inside the portraits to get right structure for each portrait.

Op-ed by Robert Darnton in the NYT

ON Tuesday, Denny Chin, a federal judge in Manhattan, rejected the settlement between Google, which aims to digitize every book ever published, and a group of authors and publishers who had sued the company for copyright infringement. This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage.

Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a digital public library, which would provide these digital copies free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems — legal, financial, technological, political — stand in the way. All can be solved.

Full piece here

Pearson and McGraw-Hill, announced they are investing in Inkling, an online seller of interactive textbooks, and they have also agreed to add their titles to Inkling’s service.

Full article

By Glenna Hall, guest contributor to The Atlantic:

When Jim (James Fallows, regular columnist on temporary book leave) asked us to send him some biographical information, I mentioned that during my five-year stint at the U.S. Library of Congress, I had worked for several obscure non-library-service outfits, one of which was funded by the CIA. At that time, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there were numerous peculiar units stuck around LOC — in basements, in the stacks, in odd corners. For almost a year, another group I worked for was tucked away beneath the gorgeous ceiling of the Great Hall during a major overhaul of the Reading Room. Why was all this stuff located there? Well, that’s where the books were.

My second job at LOC was with a group called the International Organizations Section. When I first arrived, I was struck by how many of the employees spoke English as a second language or were fluent in a number of languages. My immediate supervisor spoke and read Greek; one of my eventual friends was a Czech who also spoke Polish (he taught me how to pronounce “Zbigniew Brzezinski”). There were upward of a dozen desks, arranged in a block. The real feature of the big room, though, was a huge tub file filled with index cards and card dividers.

By Glenna Hall, guest contributor to The Atlantic:

When Jim (James Fallows, regular columnist on temporary book leave) asked us to send him some biographical information, I mentioned that during my five-year stint at the U.S. Library of Congress, I had worked for several obscure non-library-service outfits, one of which was funded by the CIA. At that time, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there were numerous peculiar units stuck around LOC — in basements, in the stacks, in odd corners. For almost a year, another group I worked for was tucked away beneath the gorgeous ceiling of the Great Hall during a major overhaul of the Reading Room. Why was all this stuff located there? Well, that’s where the books were.

My second job at LOC was with a group called the International Organizations Section. When I first arrived, I was struck by how many of the employees spoke English as a second language or were fluent in a number of languages. My immediate supervisor spoke and read Greek; one of my eventual friends was a Czech who also spoke Polish (he taught me how to pronounce “Zbigniew Brzezinski”). There were upward of a dozen desks, arranged in a block. The real feature of the big room, though, was a huge tub file filled with index cards and card dividers. The ostensible purpose of this group was to put together a quarterly publication called “The World List of Future International Meetings.”

Though no one ever said anything explicit, I was led to understand that our funding did not come from Congress or the Library. Rather, it derived from some governmental body referred to by everyone as “The Agency.” Sometimes our contact from The Agency would call the boss on the phone; her name was Mary Smith (oh, sure!). Basically, it was an open secret that we were working for the CIA.

As time went on, what we were doing became clearer to me. The tub file contained cards with information about conferences and meetings of all sorts with multinational attendance. We were supposed to find out as much as we could about sponsoring organizations, locations, presenters, and attendees. Sometimes Mary Smith would call to request further information. On one occasion, for example, I was asked to delve further into an event to be sponsored by the International Red Cross.

Adding another chapter to a long, drawn-out legal saga, a New York federal district court has rejected the controversial settlement in a class-action suit brought against Google Books by the Authors Guild, a publishing industry trade group.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20045967-36.html#ixzz1HMTCX6AE

Residents of Connecticut will not soon forget the brutal home invasion murders that took place in Cheshire in 2007. Now the state has learned that the convicted murderer, Steven Hayes, read books in prison depicting violent murders and the burning of victims.

From the ABC-TV affiliate: The new rules for Connecticut’s prison libraries will be in place around July 1. Leo Arnone told the legislature’s Judiciary Committee on Monday that committees in each prison will come up with policies for approving books. The Department of Correction receives most of its books from donations.

State Sen. John Kissel proposed a bill requiring DOC to review the federal rules. “I think most people’s common sense view on this issue is that violent inmates should not have access to books that graphically depict violence against people, especially women,” said State Sen. John Kissel.

Kissel said most of the book Hayes read had graphic details about strangulation, rape and murder. Many of the books were donated and the prison systems needs to review the books and decide which may not be suitable. The reading list includes David Baldacci’s “Split Second, Greg Iles'”Mortal Fear” and “First To Die” by James Patterson.

David McGuirea with the ACLU believes this is censorship and is skeptical about who decides what books are OK and which aren’t.

Residents of Connecticut will not soon forget the brutal home invasion murders that took place in Cheshire in 2007. Now the state has learned that the convicted murderer, Steven Hayes, read books in prison depicting violent murders and the burning of victims.

From the ABC-TV affiliate: The new rules for Connecticut’s prison libraries will be in place around July 1. Leo Arnone told the legislature’s Judiciary Committee on Monday that committees in each prison will come up with policies for approving books. The Department of Correction receives most of its books from donations.

State Sen. John Kissel proposed a bill requiring DOC to review the federal rules. “I think most people’s common sense view on this issue is that violent inmates should not have access to books that graphically depict violence against people, especially women,” said State Sen. John Kissel.

Kissel said most of the book Hayes read had graphic details about strangulation, rape and murder. Many of the books were donated and the prison systems needs to review the books and decide which may not be suitable. The reading list includes David Baldacci’s “Split Second, Greg Iles'”Mortal Fear” and “First To Die” by James Patterson.

David McGuirea with the ACLU believes this is censorship and is skeptical about who decides what books are OK and which aren’t.
“If a prison has a legitimate safety and security reason, they can prevent someone from reading about escaping from prison or building a bomb, .but a well-respected book with murder plot should not be censored by the DOC,” he said.

Since Amazon gave Kindle users the ability to loan their e-books in December, we’ve seen a number of startups launch in the e-book lending space, creating networks to help readers find someone who is willing to let them borrow an e-book title.

There haven’t been any moves to crack down on these exchanges (other than the requirement that the Kindle Lending Club rebrand). But now it appears that Amazon has shut down one such site, Lendle. The company’s website went down briefly today, and Lendle tweeted that Amazon has revoked its access to the API.

Full story

A few months ago, someone wrote an opinion article for LJ about “big tent” librarianship, arguing that “all librarians are intrinsically connected in their personal motivations for entering the profession” and “are connected by core beliefs across the different library types.” It was written “to combat the illusion of separation that currently exists within the field.”

I read it at the time, and thought, eh, okay, interesting idea. It’s not terribly new, and is pretty much what the ALA has preached for decades with its bills of rights and mission statements and other documents that supposedly cover all libraries. The ALA implies that librarians all have something in common, though the existence of the SLA, MLA, and AALL should tell us something.

The same author, a real go-getter it seems, has also be active in the campaign against HarperCollins and the creation of the Ebook reader’s bill of rights. All well and good. The library needs more public intellectuals who aren’t prattling about social media all the time and actually write about substantive issues in the field.

Full post – Annoyed Librarian

Books on social problems always seem to end with suggestions that are banal, utopian or beside the point.

Essay in the Sunday NYT Book Review

In chapter five Carr summarizes the transition and migration of the written word and other communication media from physical to digital. Obviously, printed books, magazines, and newspapers are still being produced and haven’t been completely replaced by digital equivalents. However, Carr strongly states that even if old and new techologies exist side by side, …”the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force…”And then quoting Marshall McLuhan in his seminal work “Understanding Media” “..nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them”. Carr also points to studies and stats of dwindling print periodical use and stats.

1. What makes a book a book – is it its package or the contents?

2. Do you agree with Carr that reading an online text is significantly different than reading the paper version?

3. Does it matter on what type of device or site you read the text on, e.g. a plain text site vs a more media and hyperlinked text?, Or a dedicated ebook reader vs. a desktop (with multiple programs open, minimized, etc.)

a. Are online texts inherently connected with the distraction factors of the Net?

B. Can any distraction factors of the Internet be lessened or eliminated by concentrated effort, i.e., is there a digital quivalent of “hunkering down” in the library?