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Over in Japan, the Daily Yomiuri has a story about the conflicts between bookstores, publishers, and libraries.

The prolonged economic slump lies behind the sluggish book sales, but authors organizations and publishing houses feel public libraries are becoming a problem, too.

A Huntsville Times story about school librarians protesting a new parental advisory labeling system for books.

In a recent memo to principals, school officials have asked teachers to examine novels and other reading assignments for controversial content. Teachers are supposed to mark the controversial books with an asterisk on the students’ reading lists.

Grissom High School English teacher Pam Smith complained to board members earlier this month that the labeling isn’t needed because teachers would not assign books they didn’t approve of anyway.

CNN has the story about two recovered items that were looted from Baghdad’s main museum.

The Akkadian Bassetki, a copper statue of a seated man dating from 2300 BC, and an ancient Assyrian firebox that a king would have used to keep himself warm were recovered by police investigators, the authorities said Thursday.

Bibliofuture writes “In a NY Times article about Amazon.com’s new full-text search feature there is a quote, “Mr. Johnson wrote last week in an online forum.” The online forum being mentioned was lisnews.com.

I wonder why LISnews isn’t mentioned by name since it seems the other online sources were.

From the NY Times:
Troy Johnson, a reference law librarian at Creighton University in Omaha, plans to use the feature to impress his patrons. He wants to see the look on their faces when he points them to the exact pages that answer their questions. “Should look good when I tell someone, ‘On Page 45 of book xyz they talk about your subject,’ ” Mr. Johnson wrote last week in an online forum. “Librarians should think of how they can exploit this tool.”

Read the original reply here and the article about Amazon’s “Search inside the book” here.

A NY Times article detailing current uses for “virtual books” in art museums in the UK and US.

The granddaddy and gold standard for this sort of device — often referred to as a “virtual book” — is probably Turning the Pages, developed by the British Library as a temporary display for their new building, which opened in April 1998. Initially, six interactive kiosks offered digitized versions of four of the library’s treasures, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, an eighth-century illuminated manuscript, and the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest dated printed book. The kiosks proved so popular that they’re now a permanent fixture. Six more manuscripts and books have been digitized; two larger kiosks have been added; and this year, the library began to market its technology, now in its third iteration, called Turning the Pages 3D.

A little blurb in the UK’s Telegraph about the Legal Deposit Libraries Act, which entitles six depository libraries copies of electronic publications, when they differ significantly from the print. So what about publications that are online only?

Chris Mole, the MP who sponsored the legislation as a Private Member’s Bill, said: “We must ensure that the 21st century is not written about in future centuries as a new Dark Age where significant data and records are missing because certain formats were not collected and saved for posterity.”

CNN has a story about a plan to dig up the grave of Francesco Petrarch to find out more about his appearance and health.

The 14th century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch left hundreds of letters detailing his life and thoughts. Now scientists plan to dig up his remains to find out more about his flesh and bones.

Petrarch became famous for the hundreds of love poems he wrote to the mysterious Laura, a woman he worshiped from afar. For her, the poet perfected the sonnet form that would influence William Shakespeare and many others.

In contrast to the earlier reports about pre-schoolers not reading enough, now here’s a report about the admittedly incredibly small phenomenon of “Hogwarts headaches.”

A pediatrician says he had three otherwise healthy children complain of headaches for two to three days last summer. It turns out all had been reading the 870-page “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” in marathon sessions.

A Palm Beach Post article about a proposal for a new library building – with six floors of condos on top of it.

Some say they wouldn’t mind such a hybrid. Others derisively call it a “librando.”

“I think that even as we see libraries becoming gateways to information, we also see them more important as public spaces,” she said.

Originally published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence (vol. 16, no. 3 (July/Sept. 2003) pp. 409-427), The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind by John P.C. Matthews is an article about a little-known operation under which more than 10
million books and journals were sent to scholars and professionals in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. More than 500
publishers in Europe and the U.S. cooperated.