From today’s New York Times:
(as we know quite well…) Libraries aren’t just for books, or even e-books, anymore. They are for checking out cake pans (North Haven, Conn.), snowshoes (Biddeford, Me.), telescopes and microscopes (Ann Arbor, Mich.), American Girl dolls etc.
The findings from a new survey by Pew Research Center highlight how this is a crossroads moment for libraries. The data paint a complex portrait of disruption and aspiration. There are relatively active constituents who hope libraries will maintain valuable legacy functions such as lending printed books. At the same time, there are those who support the idea that libraries should adapt to a world where more and more information lives in digital form, accessible anytime and anywhere.
From Which Americans Use Libraries and What They Do There | Pew Research Center
After a year, you go to “inactive” status and begin getting emails saying the library misses you. These alone have brought back 13,000 people so far, Anderson said. Interestingly enough, the library’s found that the No. 1 thing inactive users do first is to actually go into a branch and check out a book.
More granular demographic clusters include “dependables,” or heavy users, “rising stars,” or children who check out books regularly, “audiophiles,” who use audiobooks, or “bedtime stories,” or people checking out a lot of fiction/nonfiction books.
The data project coincides with a special advertising campaign the library is introducing this fall. Beginning this month, the library will have billboards on I-77, I-85 and Independence Boulevard, each for eight weeks at a time.
From How Charlotte Mecklenburg Library convinced 13,000 people to come back – Charlotte Agenda
The Future of Books
The curated, summarized, and digital future of books
From The Future of Books – The curated, summarized, and digital future of books by Product Hunt
An extensive archive from comedian Jerry Lewis’ career, including rarely seen films, long-lost TV recordings and home videos, will have a new home at the Library of Congress, curators announced Monday.
The collection includes thousands of documents and recordings. Lewis is donating some items, while others are being purchased by the library from his personal archive. Some materials will be available immediately to researchers in Washington.
From Jerry Lewis career archive enters the Library of Congress
federal law protects some of your email from government snooping without a warrant. But it doesn’t protect your email if it’s been left on a server for too long, and, worse, it doesn’t protect your metadata—information that can get you arrested and prosecuted, that can reveal intimate secrets about you, and that would expose the entire network of people you talk to. On Wednesday the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to address the first problem, but reform efforts in both houses of Congress have largely passed over the second issue. In dodging the problem of metadata, legislators have missed the forest for the twigs.
From ECPA reform: The 1986 email privacy law might finally get updated.
In an opinion (PDF) published this morning, the three-judge panel found that Universal Music Group’s view of fair use is flawed. The record label must face a trial over whether it wrongfully sent a copyright takedown notice over a 2007 YouTube video of a toddler dancing to a Prince song. That toddler’s mother, Stephanie Lenz, acquired pro bono counsel from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF in turn sued Universal in 2007, saying that its takedown practices violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
From Appeals court strikes a blow for fair use in long-awaited copyright ruling | Ars Technica
The United States’ excessive copyright terms have led to an orphan works crisis in this country. Tens of thousands of books, films, music recordings, and other cultural works across decades have been made completely inaccessible by copyright’s strict monopoly, which can last more than 140 years. That casts a shroud of legal uncertainty over orphan works—works where the author or rightsholder cannot be identified or located—which makes using, preserving, or sharing them risky and essentially renders them culturally invisible and forbidden.
And even if memory institutions clear copyright hurdles—after countless hours of digital transformations and metadata documentation—they still need to make the sound and video clips findable. Their own online channels stand at odds with other online media platforms in engaging the public. YouTube will inevitably reach more eyes than a little-publicized Library of Congress sub-webpage. If going digital comes with so many caveats, is digitizing a country’s entire audiovisual history ultimately more trouble than it’s worth?
From The Trouble With Digitizing History | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
My nominee for the post, and I’m far from alone in saying this, is Brewster Kahle. (Disclosure: He’s a friend.) For the past two decades he’s led one of the genuine treasures of our age, as founder and director—he calls himself “digital librarian”—of the Internet Archive. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he’s been a founder or co-founder of some of the most path-breaking technology projects in recent times, including the Wide Area Information Server, an early Internet publishing system, and the Alexa Internet catalog system, which he sold to Amazon in the 1990s. His biography is amazing, and his commitment to the public good is inspiring.
From Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive, should be the next Librarian of Congress.
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