May 2011

Two Massachusetts Bookstores Close, One by Fire…

From Publishers Weekly:
After putting 29-year-old Globe Corner Bookstore up for sale last November because of a health issue, president Patrick Carrier announced today that the travel book and map store in Harvard Square Cambridge will close by the end of June. When Globe Corner opened in downtown Boston in 1982, it was one of the first travel bookstores in the U.S. It has been in Harvard Square for the past 24 years.

“Although we did receive several offers, none met our requirements for selling the business,” says Carrier, who plans to continue to sell online through the store’s website. In addition, Carrier will continue to solicit offers for the company’s assets, including its Web presence and databases and rights to the Globe Corner brand.

Across the state in Worcester, MA one of the area’s oldest used and antiquarian bookstores was forced to close over the Memorial Day weekend. Forty-six year-old Ben Franklin Bookstore, which had been slated to close at the end of the summer, was destroyed in a fire on Friday night. Although no one was harmed in the blaze, the inventory was destroyed and both bookstore cats died.

Health Reporting and Its Sources

Impartial sources are hard to find

Medical journals have been called “an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies”, because industry funding can affect a study’s results and/or the way those results are presented in the paper. When a paper with favourable results manages to pass through peer-review and get published in a major journal it is “worth thousands of pages of advertising.” That is, first, because people who aren’t that affected by commercials (say, your doctor) take trials published by a major journal much more seriously [9]. If the media pick up the paper as well, the pharmaceutical company can enjoy further advertising, this time straight to the general public.

Who Should Digitize (And Who Should Profit From) a Nation’s Newspaper Archives?

Google announced last week that it was shutting down its News Archive Project. Akin to the massive Google Books project, this was a plan to digitize the world’s newspaper archives and make them searchable online. But if you’re worried about the digitization and preservation of British newspapers, fear not. As The Guardian reports today, the British Library is moving forward with its plans to digitize some 40 million newspaper pages from its vast 750 million collection.

Full piece

How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’

How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.

‘Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza’

Tattered documents, dating back centuries, endure in a synagogue.

About 120 years ago, a cache of manuscripts, mostly fragments, was discovered in the storeroom of an old Cairo synagogue. Its members had deposited them there over many centuries. This collection of documents managed to be both heterogeneous and comprehensive at the same time.

Adina Hoffman is the author of “House of Windows: Portraits From a Jerusalem Neighborhood.” Peter Cole is a poet and translator. As they relate in their engaging book “Sacred Trash,” the materials in the storeroom included letters, wills, bills of lading, prayers, marriage contracts and writs of divorce, Bibles, money orders, court depositions, business inventories, leases, magic charms and receipts. One early examiner of the cache described the scene as a “battlefield of books.” The most recent deposits were made in the 19th century; there were fragments that dated back to the 10th century. Another early visitor described the scene thus: “For centuries, whitewash has tumbled” upon the documents “from the walls and ceiling; the sand of the desert has lodged in their folds and wrinkles; water from some unknown source has drenched them; they have squeezed and hurt each other.”

Full article

Book Covers That Got Away

A gallery of rejected book cover designs whose creators couldn’t quite let them rest in peace.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/15/books/review/15covers-gallery.html?ref=books

Pint of bitter and a juicy murder story, please, librarian

Libraries axed under coalition spending cuts could be resurrected in pubs, shops and GPs’ surgeries if radical proposals being studied by ministers are put into action.

Councils have already invited Starbucks to open coffee bars between the book shelves to generate funds, while people in rural areas are being told that they can keep up their reading by borrowing e-books.

With local authorities ordered to save millions of pounds this year, libraries were quickly singled out for closure. For several, including some in London, this is imminent. But after an angry backlash from readers and authors, a blueprint for the library of the future is being developed.

Full article:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/pint-of-bitter-and-a-juicy-murder-story-please-librarian-2290408.html