January 2015

Paper Books Will Never Die

This blog post on Gizmodo makes the case for paper bound books.

“So how can I be confident that paper books are going to be with us for a long time to come? First of all, because they’re lovely and I refuse to believe they’ll ever disappear. But also because paper books are still a fantastic and irreplaceable piece of technology.

Believe it or not, paper book sales have made a modest comeback in the past year. Ebooks are mainstream. But paper books have too many benefits to simply die out anytime soon.”

Library social worker helps homeless seeking quiet refuge


Meet the nation’s first full-time library social worker. Instead of trying to keep homeless residents from taking shelter in the urban haven of public libraries, San Francisco has adopted a new approach: employing a trained professional to address the needs of these visitors. The NewsHour’s Cat Wise reports.

In South Florida, A Lover and Donor of Unique Books

It all started with his work as a library volunteer. From The Sun Sentinel:

For Arthur Jaffe, books weren’t just to be read. They were to be treasured as works of art. Jaffe, who donated a lot of money and his vast collection of hand-crafted books to Florida Atlantic University, died Sunday. He was 93.

Though he passed away this week, his legacy will live on through the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at FAU’s Wimberly Library, where he spent 13 years as curator before retiring in 2011. The collection has grown from Jaffe’s original donation of 2,800 handmade books to 12,000 today.

The Jaffe collection includes children’s pop-ups, wood cuts and lithographs. There are several versions of the Bible, classics like “Moby Dick” and “Hamlet,” and more unusual volumes, such as “Ghost Diary” by Maureen Cummins, a rare book made of glass. Even after retiring in 2011, he continued to visit the center on a regular basis. In 2012, he launched a project that seemed unusual for the book arts center: a documentary on the tattoos of FAU students.

“Here was a 91-year-old looking at all these tattooed kids and saying, ‘they’re all walking books,'” Cutrone said. “Sometimes you think of older people as being set in their ways, but that was not Arthur. He was willing to see the other side of things.”

Fair Use Is Not An Exception to Copyright, It’s Essential to Copyright

Unfortunately, there is tremendous pressure in DC right now to rewrite the law and undermine that balance. Fair use has been under assault for decades, thanks to laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes it illegal to bypass a technical protection measure under most circumstances even if your conduct is an otherwise lawful fair use. Now, more than ever, we must insist that fair use is indispensable to copyright. That’s how we take copyright back.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/fair-use-not-exception-copyright-its-essential-copyright

Alexandria Still Burns. This is What a Librarian Looks Like

Maybe you’ve heard about a photo/video project by Kyle Cassidy that was looking for funding last year. You’ll be happy to know that the project has been funded on Kickstarter.

On June 29th, 2014 618 backers carried our Kickstarter across the finish line with $12,245, allowing us to not only photograph and interview more than 300 Librarians at the ALA conference in Las Vegas, but to also fund the stretch goals of creating a series of stock photographs for libraries to use, doing five hours of video interviews, and doing some photography for the new Joan of Dark book on knitting projects for book lovers.

If you’re not familiar with the project, here’s more about it .

X-ray technique ‘reads’ burnt Vesuvius scroll

There’s rare books and then there’s even more rare scrolls. From the BBC:

For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79.
The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile.

Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes used in breast scans. They believe that other scrolls could also be deciphered without unrolling.

The work appears in the journal Nature Communications.

How J.K. Rowling Plotted Harry Potter with a Hand-Drawn Spreadsheet

“If you think about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, that’s it,” writes /Film’s Germain Lussier. “Those columns pretty much encompass the whole story.” Rowling, of course, hardly counts as the only novelist to write with such techniques, and based on this example, hers don’t get nearly as elaborate as some.

Library offers new way to share books

The Montgomery County Library System soon will add a new offering to its usual items for check-out.

Instead of just borrowing a book, selected county residents will be able to take a “Little Free Library” out on loan – and set it up in their neighborhood or in front of a business.

Melissa Baker, library marketing and program coordinator, explained that Little Free Library is a movement started by Todd Bol and Rick Brooks in Wisconsin in 2009.

http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/woodlands/news/article/Library-offers-new-way-to-share-books-6012872.php

Artist Draws His Impression of 99 Branches of the Toronto Library

From August through October of last year, 25-year-old artist and geographer Daniel Rotsztain boarded buses, trains, streetcars and his bike with an inky pen in hand and plenty of paper. His goal was to capture the city’s bastions of books by drawing each one of them in a “homey, but blue print style”— a feat he sometimes conquered amidst scorching heat and drizzling rain.

The project was born out of a conversation Rotsztain had with friends about their favourite library branches. “It’s a love letter to the library,” he told The Toronto Star. It is hard to just wander randomly, but to have this quest oriented me well to explore every corner of every borough of the city.”

He is releasing the images on his website and is eagerly anticipating drawing the 100th library to open in the Scarborough Centre area this spring.

Hat tip to Steven Cohen Library Stuff.