Pete

Darwin’s Entire Library Aboard The HMS Beagle Is Now Available Online

This from the usually forward looking site io9, “A historian has reconstructed the lost library of books that accompanied Charles Darwin during his five-year scientific voyage across the world, allowing the public to read the more than 400 volumes that served as reference and inspiration for the young naturalist whose theories would revolutionize biology.

The library was dispersed at the conclusion of the voyage. But now, nearly 180 years later, it has been electronically reconstructed in its entirety by historian John van Wyhe and is freely available at his Darwin Online website. The collection consists of more than 195,000 pages containing over 5,000 illustrations.”

Here’s the link to the Charles Darwin Beagle Library

What’s Really Wrong With Google? And Why Librarians Rock!

Nancy K. Humphries gets to the heart of the matter in this Huffington Post piece.

“Google often fails to serve people who search it or the people trying to get their sites noticed. All too often Google’s results completely miss the mark….

Google will never equal the library in precision and accuracy because this company is too arrogant to even listen to a librarian. Google employees are young, so young they still believe that only they know how to do things.

I personally witnessed a speaker from Google tell members of The American Society of Indexers at a San Francisco conference that Google had gotten rid of the one librarian on staff in Palo Alto. She was a former cataloger; she was too “nitpicky.””

Milwaukee PL to sell famous ‘Bookworm’ painting by Carl Spitzweg?

From Milwaukee’s JSOnline:

“The Milwaukee Public Library board will meet Tuesday to discuss the possible sale or permanent loan of one of its treasures, “The Bookworm,” the most famous canvas by German romantic painter Carl Spitzweg.

The board will consider an active offer from an undisclosed party for the work, which is valued at $400,000, said Paula Kiely, director of the Milwaukee Public Library.”

Should authors use Snapchat to target a younger audience?

Teleread asks if authors should be using the Snapchat social media platform to promote themselves. Why?

“In this article on Brand Driven Digital, Nick Westergaard gives Snapchat a look and explains why it matters. Here’s why young adult authors and publishers should pay attention: “nearly half of Americans 12–24 use Snapchat.”

Oh? The exact audience that young adult writers crave.”

This begs the question: Should libraries be using Snapchat?

Conan Doyle Estate Says Sherlock Not Free Yet

In a follow up to an earlier story, the Conan Doyle estate may appeal the ruling against it’s copyright claim according to this Publishers Weekly story.

“Is Sherlock Holmes truly a free man? Not so fast say attorneys for the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In a December 23 decision, an Illinois federal court held that Holmes and other characters and story elements in more than 50 Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain. But attorneys for the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this week insisted that the complete characters of Holmes and Watson won’t be freed until the final 10 stories published after 1922 enter the public domain, in 2022.”

Sherlock Holmes Is in the Public Domain, American Judge Rules

This New York Times story has the details.

“A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works Arthur Conan Doyle published before January 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law, and can be freely used by new creators without paying any licensing fee to the Conan Doyle estate.”

When did there become too many books to read in one lifetime?

A tough nut to crack to be sure, but Randall Munroe has taken a stab at it on his wonderfully quirky What If? site.

“The average person can read at 200-300 words per minute. If the average living writer, over their entire lifetime, falls somewhere between Isaac Asimov and Harper Lee, they might produce 0.05 words per minute over their entire lifetime. If you were to read for 16 hours a day at 300 words per minute,[4] you could keep up with a world containing an average population of 100,000 living Harper Lees or 400 living Isaac Asimovs.”

Norway is digitizing its whole library

The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s.

Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library’s holdings.

By law, “all published content, in all media, [must] be deposited with the National Library of Norway,” so when the library is finished scanning, the entire record of a people’s language and literature will be machine-readable and sitting in whatever we call the cloud in 15 years.

The whole story is at The Atlantic.