June 2015

AUTHOR John Spurling has won a £25,000 literary prize with a “mesmerising” book that was rejected 44 times before being published.

He was awarded the sixth Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for his novel set in imperial China, The Ten Thousand Things.

The book is set in 14th-century China, during the final years of the Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty, and is the story of Wang Meng, one of the era’s four great masters of painting.

From Author, whose book was rejected 44 times, has won a £25,000 Scottish literary prize with a ‘mesmerising’ work – Daily Record

A book about libraries from 1903 that is in the Project Gutenberg collection.

Here are the first twelve chapters shown in the table of contents. There are 55 chapters in the book.

I, The beginnings—Library law 9
II, Preliminary work 10
III, What does a public library do for a community? 12
IV, General policy of the library 15
V, Trustees 17
VI, The librarian 20
VII, The trained librarian 23
VIII, Rooms, building, fixtures, furniture 25
IX, Things needed in beginning work 30
X, The Library Bureau 35
XI, Selecting books 39
XII, Reference books for a small library 46

Across the country, in city art collections and special collections of public libraries, one-of-a-kind items are routinely misfiled, misplaced, lost or stolen. And sometimes, routine mistakes and slipshod documentation grow into a much more intractable problem, with large portions of public collections being managed by institutions who have no idea what’s in them and no full inventory of their holdings.

From Libraries And Cities Are Terrible At Keeping Track of Art | Atlas Obscura

European regulators have launched a formal investigation into Amazon’s practices in the e-book market.

In a statement released Thursday, the European Commission announced that its antitrust investigation will focus on Amazon’s contracts with publishers — and whether the Internet retailer is abusing its dominant position as the largest e-book distributor in Europe.

The commission, the 28-member executive arm of the European Union, is especially concerned with a few key parts of those contracts.

In particular, NPR’s Lynn Neary reports, “The commission is concerned about specific clauses that require publishers to inform Amazon about more favorable or alternative terms offered by its competitors.”

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/11/413676630/eu-launches-antitrust-probe-of-amazons-e-book-business

The President, in this case, Barack Obama, appoints the Librarian of Congress. Here’s the statute about that particular appointment.

Should it be a presidential appointment? Should the next office holder have a degree in Library Science (Mr. Billington did not).

Infodocket has more information on the period of transition, including this:

LC tells us that while no timeline is in place at the moment, President Obama has “roughly” six months to consider nominees for the vacancy. If a new Librarian of Congress is not confirmed by the time of Dr. Billington’s retirement, David Mao, Deputy Librarian, would serve as Acting Librarian of Congress until the time a new leader is confirmed by the Senate. Mao holds both legal and library degrees.

James Billington, the librarian of Congress who has led the world’s largest library for nearly three decades and brought it into the digital age, announced Wednesday that he will step down at year’s end.

The Library of Congress said Billington, 86, will retire on Jan. 1. He notified President Barack Obama of his plans, and the post will be filled by a presidential nomination with Senate confirmation.

From Librarian of Congress to step down after nearly 3 decades – The Washington Post

Published on Jun 9, 2015
Hi, Im Austin and I am a media student at Blackburn College. This is the short documentary I have made for my final project with Frank Turner and Get It Loud In Libraries.

From Get It Loud In Libraries with Frank Turner – YouTube

The all things Science Fiction site, i09, tells of an interesting find at the University of New Brunswick library,

“File this under “Why we need libraries and librarians”: A copy of the original shooting script for Star Wars Episode IV was found sitting on a shelf in the University of New Brunswick’s library in Saint John. And it may settle whether or not Han shot first.”

One and a half minute video on how to slim your wallet. A library card is part of this plan. In your library system, if a library card was used this way, would the library still allow the card to be used?

As of June 30, the celebrated historian, digital library pioneer, and champion of books will leave the University he first saw as an undergraduate in 1957. A scholar of Enlightenment France and of the history of the book, he returned to Harvard in 1965 to join the Society of Fellows, decamped to Princeton University in 1968 for 39 years, and came back to Harvard in 2007.

From Robert Darnton closes the book | Harvard Gazette