Merrilee Proffitt (Merrilee) is on a mission to bring American librarians closer to Wikipedia—a group she think is hesitant towards the idea of a community edited encyclopedia.
From Bringing libraries closer to Wikipedia: Merrilee Proffitt « Wikimedia blog
This raises an interesting question: When one person finds a rare book, is their gain always at the expense of somebody else? “That can be true,” Barry says, “but among the booksellers I work with, especially those that belong to organizations like the ABAA or the ILAB, there’s an ethical obligation not to swindle each other or people who don’t know any better, like little old ladies selling their husband’s things. Personally, if I were to go to a garage sale and thought I had found a $5,000 book on sale for a dollar, I would feel conflicted. In most cases, though, the more common example is that you see a book you feel like you’ve seen before and decide to take a chance on it. It’s only after you get it home and do your research that you know if you’ve hit the jackpot—or overpaid.”
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine – the original web server – is still at CERN. As part of the project to restore the first website, in 2013 CERN reinstated the world’s first website to its original address.
On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open licence, as a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.
While it’d be a stretch to say that the physical book is thriving, it’s at least staying strong. The same can’t be said of the e-book, which is seeing a decline in popularity. A Pew Research Center study in October found that fewer Americans are buying and using e-reading devices like Kindles and Nooks than they did in past years.
Assuming these trends continue, 2016 might just be the year that the physical book makes—fingers crossed—a real comeback.
From Against all odds, print books are on the rise again in the US – Quartz
For those who are wondering, I’m talking about a remark the chief justice made last month during oral arguments in Bruce v. Samuels, a dispute about federal prisoners paying legal fees. Here I quote from Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog: When reminded that prisons maintain libraries, “Roberts then shot back, presumably sarcastically, ‘I’m sure they are very good libraries too.’”
From Don’t sneer at prison libraries, Chief Justice Roberts – Chicago Tribune
Because of the shady circumstances of the book’s publication, Poe sustained some career damage, being accused of plagiarism and finding himself blacklisted for a time with Wyatt’s publisher. Nonetheless, the book’s first edition sold out in two months; during Poe’s lifetime, the Conchologist’s First had the best sales of all his books.
From Edgar Allan Poe’s textbook on seashells was his only bestseller
“We’ve had enough. We’ve marked our line in the sand here. The government is behaving as if it doesn’t have a duty of care and they do, under the law. We think it’s time to be clear about what that means,” said Nick Poole, the chief executive of Cilip, after it was announced that more than 100 library branches were shut last year, and as further branches up and down the UK face closure.
From Librarians take legal battle against library closures to government | Books | The Guardian
From time to time this blog shows damaged manuscripts. One may be inclined to think that books are better off in pristine condition. However, Karin Scheper, conservator at the University Library Leiden, explains why it is sometimes better to leave a book be. Here is an intriguing guest post about useful disrepair and the upsides of damage. Enjoy! Erik Kwakkel
From “To conserve or not to conserve, that is the question” | medievalbooks
www.CRSReports.com joins at least two other efforts to wrest the highly regarded studies by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service from the confidential files of Senate and House lawmakers, who request the research and keep it secret unless they choose to release it themselves.
[Trying to crack open Congress’s confidential think tank after a century of secrecy]
“What we’re doing is simply accessing publicly available websites and downloading what we think are CRS documents,” said Antoine McGrath, 30, who is based in San Francisco and has a passion for digital archives. “We’re casting a wide net.”
This large chain in the U.K. made a shocking turnaround by doing something surprising: trusting its booksellers.
From Barnes & Noble is dying. Waterstones in the U.K. is thriving.
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