Earlier this month, I had reported on a new way to search handwritten manuscripts that was developed by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Today, the New York Times has written about this exciting development, along with the fact that the head of the project is going to brief Google on it next month. So …
I don’t know what I could say that hasn’t already been said about the disaster in southeast Asia on Sunday. It is a tragedy beyond my comprehension — easily the worst thing that has ever happened in my lifetime. So many tens of thousands of people of all ages and from all walks of life… …
The New York Times today has a story about the closing of the Salinas Public Library. What a sad situation. In a community comprised of many migrant and blue collar workers, losing the library may have a tremendous impact on community life (especially for children, immigrants, and the elderly). They may not realize it now, …
Hi! The newest issue (Jan ’05) of Cites and Insights is out with some commentary on conference blogging, blogging ethics, and a bit on Google Print. Walt Crawford brings up the blog ethics debate started by Karen at Free Range Librarian: Karen paints herself in the awkward middle — people who want to do the …
This will be my last post before Christmas. My posts may be a bit sporadic until Tuesday as my adorable niece and nephew are coming down for a visit with my sister-in-law. YAY! Here are pics of my niece and nephew at our wedding last August: Are they insanely cute or what? I hope everyone …
D-Lib has an article about a new grant-funded partnership between the library and information studies departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University at Bloomington to develop a program in digital libraries. They will offer it as part of the masters curriculum and as a post-masters program: The project directors envision two …
The Librarian in Black pointed the way to a fabulous tutorial on digital preservation. Anyone interested in the subject should take a look at Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term Strategies for Long-term Problems. Here are some other interesting works on digitization: Selecting Research Collections for Digitization by Dan Hazen, Jeffrey Horrell, Jan Merrill-Oldham. Washington State …
Wow! In an age of shrinking budgets and shrinking staffs, the Phoenix Public Libraries has secured $175,000 to hire one full time professional librarian and three paraprofessionals to police their no-porn policies. The professional, this “Internet Resource Specialist”, would monitor people’s use of the Internet and deal with people’s requests to turn off the filters …
Here is a disappointing story about the licensing and intellectual property rights . The award-winning documentary, Eyes on the Prize, about the civil rights movement, can no longer be aired on TV or sold on DVD (or new VHS’s) because the filmmakers could only afford to pay for a few years of rights to the …
I’m not one of those people who really notices the sound my computer makes. All through college I practically slept with my laptop on the bed next to me (how romantic!). My husband, on the other hand, is really sensitive to noise, and has made it his life’s mission to build silent and cool running …
Here’s an interesting article from the San Francisco Gate about how Google has so far undertaken their Herculean digitization task. According to the article, at the rate they’re going at the University of Michigan, it will take approximately 19 years to do all 7 million books in the collection (and at $10 a book will …
Since I was up for a teen librarian position (which I did not get, sigh…) I’ve been thinking a lot about what libraries do for teens. The library I was interviewing at had a small area by the DVDs that was called the “teen section.” All this consisted of was YA books and magazines and …
According to the Curmudgeony Librarian, the FCC has declined a request by a Saul Levine — a California radio station owner — to apply the same standards to satellite radio as they do to AM/FM radio. Essentially, he wanted satellite radio to be censored just like AM/FM radio: Levine argued among other things that this …
The ALA president-elect, Michael Gorman, has expressed his opinion on Google print and book digitization in an op-ed piece in today’s Newsday. He essentially thinks that the Google deal is a lot of hype and that putting most of these books online really won’t offer that much to users: The nub of the matter lies …
I don’t always agree with everything Free Range Librarian writes, but I think she is pretty darn right in her entry today about confidentiality and discretion. We librarians are all about free speech. But the First Amendment won’t make you less of a chump for kiss-and-tell blogging, and it won’t expunge the stain to your …
Here is an interesting article I found via Resource Shelf. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) and Google Scholar by Nick Luft looks at one positive effect Google (and specifically Google Scholar) may have on digital publishing. One of the greatest barriers to retrieving and exchanging scholarly information online is the fact that database vendors (and …
The New York Times has a quite interesting piece today about what we lose and what we gain with the growth of digital libraries. In Questions and Praise for Google Web Library, the author explores a variety of viewpoints regarding Google’s recent announcement about digitizing the works of five of the great world libraries. I …
This is also huge digital library news, but, with the Google frenzy, they’ve really been the victim of bad timing. International Libraries and the Internet Archive collaborate to build Open-Access Text Archives Today, a number of International libraries have committed to putting their digitized books in open-access archives, starting with one at the Internet Archive. …
I’ve been quietly reading about the Google deal with the libraries of Stanford, University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and New York City, and the resultant debates/rants on various blogs. I didn’t really want to go off on a half-cocked rant of my own, so I’ve spent the last few days thinking about what Google’s digitization …