Virtual physical library

Via the Daily Dish, a 360-degree panorama of the Philosophical Hall in Prague's Strahov monastery. You can zoom in close enough to read the spines of individual books, or zoom out enough to see the entire room. Don't forget the ceiling!

Story here at Wired.

TJ's library

In the news today: the discovery that Washington University in St. Louis has (previously unbeknownst to them) been harboring some six dozen books from Thomas Jefferson's private library.

It took a little detective work: knowing that Jefferson's granddaughter's husband had purchased some of his books at auction; learning that the family of said grandson had donated their books to Washington University in 1880; finding an early-20th Century library ledger that helped to identify the donated books; and then discovering Jefferson's initials in the suspect books. It's no wonder that even the library didn't know the noteworthy provenance of their possessions.

Jefferson initialed his books in a peculiar way. When books are bound, groups of pages known as signatures are stitched together; the signatures need to be marked so that they get assembled in the correct order, and were often marked with letters of the alphabet. So where Jefferson found "I," he added a "T" in front of it; after the "T," he added an "I." Why "I"? Doh! You saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! You know that "I" is used in Latin for "J," and why it's a matter of life or death to know that!

This reminds me of a memo I read a few months ago in the Special Collections here at UM. The very first purchase of books for the Library were made in 1838 by Asa Gray, who had been hired by the University of Michigan before some sort of funding mixup led him to take a position at Harvard instead. Around 1970 or so, the Library got a little history-conscious and began trying to track down those books that had been part of his original purchase. Some of the departments that held the books didn't want to give them up and I recall a pleading memo to the effect of, "If you can't take this rare and singular book off your shelves, could you at least put it on reserve and stop letting the students take it home?" I expect Jefferson's books were no longer in open stacks, but had probably experienced similar use in their day.

By the way, how cool is it that some of Jefferson's books would have accidentally ended up in St. Louis, of all places, the Gateway to the West that he had purchased? Seems utterly fitting.

Unsurprising news to librarians

From Inside Higher Ed:

“The digital divide used to be about the hardware haves and have-nots,” she [Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas] said. “What we’re seeing now is that it’s less about who has hardware, but who has access to information; who has those problem-solving skills. And that’s going to be the digital divide that we’re going to see in the future … the ability to deal with information.”

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

And from the New York Times:

A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results.

Young people today use technology, but it doesn't mean they understand what they're doing, anymore than driving a car makes me an auto mechanic (and it doesn't, not one bit). But it may be unfair to pick on the youngsters: their elders once trusted Walter Cronkite and now they give that same uncritical allegiance to Rush Limbaugh. Information assessment is a crying need ... and I'm seeing librarians, knowing they can't survive as curators of books, eager to take on this task that almost no one else wants to do.

Beautiful libraries

I work here:



Nice. But can you blame me for wanting to work at one of these libraries?

Friday photo

Statue of Minerva, with lamp.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. March 2007.

The Jefferson Building's Great Hall opened in 1897, when the Library of Congress was almost a century old, and I like to think Jefferson would have loved the relentless symbolism with which the room nearly drips. It's the only place I know where even I respond to the heavy-handed effort to inspire awe and reverence. And if you have to fill the place with god-figures, they could have hardly have chosen better than to place statues of Minerva/Athena, goddess of Wisdom, all about the room.

Progress and tradition

U-M Library to remove card catalog

UM Libraries are removing the card catalog, last updated in 1988, from its basement location in the graduate library. My younger colleague asks, "What card catalog?"

Finding a use for the National Union Catalogue

What do you do if you have hundred of green-covered books that are hopelessly obsolete? You build a Christmas tree!


Via librarian.net

electronic v. print

Transitional phases can be confused and inconsistent. How confused is the transition from print to electronic publishing? UM's Taubman Medical Library has five print copies of the "APA Style Guide for Electronic Resources":

More trouble for the Google Books settlement

French publishers have brought suit in Paris to stop the Google settlement, because the newly-digitized collection certainly contains many French works without their publishers' permission. The rhetoric is a wee bit hyperbolic: the president of the publishers group Syndicat National de l’Edition refers to the settlement as a "cultural rape," from which you would think scanning books is comparable to, oh, Napoleon filling the Louvre with the pillaged treasures of Europe or something. Ridiculous.

I had to search several articles before I could discover that Google is scanning books from a French library, which is the only avenue I can see for thinking French courts would have any jurisdiction at all; my (shallow) understanding of the Berne Convention is that French books in America fall under American law (the main point of the convention is that they do get the protection of the other country's laws and are not fair game for plagiarism and republishing). So I dunno - it might be a stretch to have Paris courts weighing in on the settlement. But in any event, the challenges are mounting and we may be much farther from that wonderful electronic library than we need to be.

On helpfulness

I'm back at a certain small Midwestern University and we have a new stats-tracking database - no more check marks on paper. During the summer,when things were slow, librarians were careful to record their transactions in some detail, and my coworker has pointed me to this one:

Q: Best question ever - "Do you have books on vampires?"

A: "Novels or more like non-fiction history?"
"Non-fiction. I've been bitten by a vampire"
"When was this?"
"A couple weeks ago in my room"
"Did you have it checked by a medical professional?"
"No, I have not"

That was recommended, along with a few books in GR830.

(GR830, btw, is where you would shelve books on folklore and magical creatures; I'm guessing it takes up more shelving at Hogwarts than it does here.)

Scary books

I don't know about you, but the idea of black ops dentistry scares the sh!t out of me.

Dillinger was here

A new Johnny Depp movie comes out tomorrow, about the 1930's crime spree of one John Herbert Dillinger. An enterprising library in the middle of Dillinger's old stomping grounds has a tie-in:



GIS Research and Map Collection at Ball State University


P.S. Speaking of Depp, I hear that he and Tim Burton are working on a new film of Dark Shadows, the campy/wonderful gothic soap opera from the 1960's. This could be awesome or awful, but I strongly suspect it will be the latter. It's one thing to go back and redo a bad show and this time get it right - e.g., Battlestar Galactica. But a show that was lovable for its low-budget challenges - how do you approach that? If you try to take it too seriously, you miss most of the charm. If you try to recreate camp - well, can that even be done successfully?

Secret libraries

Well, you can't believe everything you read on the internet, but I so want to believe that this is real.

Via librarian.net.

Cornell releases public domain works

Cornell University Library Removes All Restrictions on Use of Public Domain Reproductions

In a dramatic change of practice, Cornell University Library has announced it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the Library or available via Web sites, without seeking any further permission.

* snip*

"The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks."

This is a nice development. Most libraries have required permission before others can publish digitized versions of public domain works and, while this has often been cited as an example of copyfraud, I think it's probably legal. The library is trying to control their own copy, not the work itself. But as Kenney observes, what's the point? If libraries are going to present themselves as champions of disseminating information, they should quit trying to control it. So sure, some naughty yahoo will take Cornell's digitized document and include it in some commercial product of his own, but isn't it better just to blow that off and let everyone enjoy the benefits of widespread creativity and research?

Good call.


[Thanks to Digitization101 and the Archives Listserv.]

The times

Lincoln Museum stays in Indiana

Indiana retains Lincoln Museum collection

The collection will be split between the Allen County Public Library and the State Museum, with the library in general receiving the collection's books, documents and manuscripts. The state museum will get the three-dimensional artifacts.

The Indiana consortium stressed a need for increased access to the collection. The library's goal is to digitize the document collection and make it available for research.

I'm a bit surprised about all this, since they had to cobble together a consortium on short notice and compete with the Smithsonian and the Lincoln Library at Springfield, IL. I wonder what this all looked like behind the scenes?

Don't go messin' with no librarians

Ann Arbor library director shows thief she's no pushover

On Sunday, Parker pursued a thief after he grabbed a collection box of money donated for a local charity called the Family Book Club. In the process, she broke her leg and the thief got away - but not with any money.

Happy Halloween!

A coworker passes this along:

Ghosts in the Library!

EPA libraries

From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:
SHUTTERED EPA LIBRARIES OPEN DOORS TOMORROW AFTER TWO YEARS

Of course, the damage is not so easily undone:

This ends a 30-month campaign by the Bush administration to restrict availability of technical materials within EPA but leaves in its wake scattered and incomplete collections.

National Security Letters

[Note: an earlier version of this post was accidentally zapped out of existence]

Via Library Juice, Mother Jones magazine on the Connecticut librarians' resistance to national security letters. My favorite part:

The Supreme Court subsequently ordered the Justice Department to unseal the court documents in the case. Among the evidence the government had tried to keep secret were quotes from previous Supreme Court cases; copies of New York Times articles; and the text of the Connecticut law that guarantees the confidentiality of library records. The Justice Department had also sealed arguments made by the ACLU attorneys, including this passage: "Now that John Doe's identity has been widely disseminated, the government's sole basis for the gag has wholly evaporated."

Omigod, i would have slept so much better not knowing that ....