Ryan

Waggish has posted some impressive photos of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental, library-inspired artwork “Volkszahlung” (“Census”). The piece is at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart in Berlin.

Via wood s lot.

Today’s Washington Post profiles Lebanon’s Public Library of His Eminence, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah (the Fadlallah Library for short):

Nearby are the autobiographies of Bill Clinton and Malcolm X. There are tomes on Che Guevara, Muhammad Ali and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Behind [librarian Hoda] Jaloul is a memoir of Richard Nixon; alongside that is “My Life,” the autobiography of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former Iranian president. The memoir of the late King Hussein of Jordan sits on another shelf. “It’s Not Easy to Be a King,” the title reads.

Jaloul, 32, a black and tan veil covering her hair, is a stern woman, with the seriousness that accompanies a sense of mission. “There must be everything available in a library,” she said.

Complete article (registration required).

The New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature has purchased an important collection of William Burroughs’ papers:

In Folio 110 of a meticulously constructed, voluminous personal archive, William S. Burroughs offers a fanciful autobiographical sketch that is part “Junky,” part “Naked Lunch.”

“As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous,” he wrote in an unpublished essay that serves as a sort of cornerstone for the archive. “They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow ponge silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hasiesh and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. …”

The New York Public Library is expected to announce today that it has purchased the Burroughs archive for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The acquisition will make the Berg Collection, which also includes Kerouac’s literary and personal archive, perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats.

Complete story from the New York Times (registration required).

The February issue of D-LIB is available:

*A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive
*Copyright Issues in Open Access Research Journals: The Authors Perspective
*Observed Web Robot Behavior on Decaying Web Subsites
*OSTI’s E-print Network experiences rapid growth

Thanks to Resource Shelf for the heads up.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University has issued a report on the reclassification of long-available National Archives holdings by intelligence agencies:

The CIA and other federal agencies have secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration, according to a report published today on the World Wide Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Matthew Aid, author of the report and a visiting fellow at the Archive, discovered this secret program through his wide-ranging research in intelligence, military, and diplomatic records at NARA and found that the CIA and military agencies have reviewed millions of pages at an unknown cost to taxpayers in order to sequester documents from collections that had been open for years.

National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton appeared on NPR yesterday to discuss the reclassification program. This article from last March provides some useful context.

From the New York Times:

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians …

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy … it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives’ open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents, mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department’s history series, “Foreign Relations of the United States.”

“The stuff they pulled should never have been removed,” he said. “Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous.”

Complete article (registration required).

From the New York Times:

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians …

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy … it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives’ open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department’s history series, “Foreign Relations of the United States.”

“The stuff they pulled should never have been removed,” he said. “Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous.”

Complete article (registration required).

The February 2006 issue of Ariadne is available – it’s their 10th anniversary!

Projects into Services: The UK Experience:
Peter Brophy reviews the experience of the UK academic sector in turning digital library projects into sustainable services.

What Users Want: An Academic Hybrid Library Perspective: Reg Carr reflects on the development of a user-centred approach in academic libraries over recent decades and into the era of the hybrid library.

The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After: Lorcan Dempsey considers how the digital library environment has changed in the ten years since Ariadne was first published.

Delivering Open Access: From Promise to Practice:
Derek Law predicts how the open access agenda will develop over the next ten years.

Research Libraries Engage the Digital World: A US-UK Comparative Examination of Recent History and Future Prospects: Clifford Lynch looks at how the emergence of e-research has changed our thinking about the future of research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Google Challenges for Academic Libraries: John MacColl analyses the reactions many academic libraries may be having to the range of tools Google is currently rolling out and outlines a strategy for institutions in the face of such potentially radical developments.

Excuse Me … Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?: Chris Rusbridge argues with himself about some of the assumptions behind digital preservation thinking.

Joan Airoldi and ALA’s Michael Gorman blasted the “revised” PATRIOT Act on today’s All Things Considered.

The new issue of Campus Technology looks into the state of digital libraries:

Keeping a history of peace studies. Cataloging audio and video broadcasts important to the Northwest. Digitizing images and other documents older than the state of California. All of these efforts are important steps toward preserving the history of our nation’s development. And all of them are going on right now, thanks to various digital library efforts. Digital library initiatives are nothing new; the effort to digitize data for posterity has been alive and well now for the better part of two decades. (Opening a Digital Library Campus Technology, Sept. 2005.) Still, the world of digital libraries changes furiously every month, and it seems there’s always something new to explore. Here are details on some of the newest stories, and predictions about the digital library movement in the months to come …

Complete article, via resource shelf.