random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man -- I looked at the student next me -- who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight. One has certain foolish vanities.
Following an action at my own BPL, the anti-DRM organization Defective by Design is calling for libraries to boycott products that use DRM.
The Open Letter to Libraries is posted @ DBD’s website, and they have also made a sample letter / template available for us to send our own letters.
Link via cory @ boingboing
Although it feels weird to talk about Colombia without addressing the political issues, I nevertheless present this io9 link + pictures of a beautiful and strange library in Casanera.
The Section 108 study group has finally released their report. See:
Section 108 Study Group
Executive Summary of Report
Full report
For those who are not copyright or library geeks, Section 108 is one of the most important parts of the Copyright Act for libraries.
For those who are having trouble reading the medium-grey on light blue summaries of recommendations [...]
* Judge White withdrew his order requiring the shutdown of wikileaks.org. See also 3/1 bits blog. (NYT 3/1)
* The music industry has yet to pay artists any of the money it has received in settlements and lawsuits; the artists are pissed. NY Post 2/27)
* The owners of the game scrabble are pissed off at Scrabulous. [...]
Why does Elsevier hate the environment and all the trees and all the little children who will be living in a world 50 years from now harmed by Elsevier’s really stupid insistence that its electronic documents be PRINTED and then SCANNED IN before being sent out for ILL ????
Seriously, faculty should really reconsider submitting to [...]
siva linked to “scan this book!”, a NYT magazine article by kevin kelly, with a promise to post comments about it soon. i look forward to them, and in the meantime will post my own (hurried & no-doubt flawed) quick reactions to one point:
Authors and publishers (including publishers of music and film) have relied [...]
Today is a beautifully misty day, perfect for leisurely procrastination from holiday tasks like installing back-up hard drives for the mom-in-law. (Well, “in-law” if we were in Mass.; everywhere else in the US, “mom-in-out-law”.) So naturally I found myself doing a little backlog reading of blogs that I don’t read every day, and [...]
As a former medical librarian I thought this editorial by a medical librarian in the BMJ was fascinating.
First this amazing information:
Within a year of its release Google Scholar has led more visitors to many biomedical journal websites than has PubMed (J Sack, personal communication, 2005).
… which certainly lends credence to the pro-tagging, anti- or indifferent-to-cataloging [...]
I’m pleased to see the Google Print issue spurring discussion of the role of corporations in controlling access to information. See, e.g., today’s post @ Gnuosphere [link from sivacracy]
Gnuosphere, Siva, and others point out that Google isn’t doing Google Print out of the goodness of its heart; the company is scanning, indexing, and providing [...]
I like the flow of the google / library discussion: what’s the essence of library? and suspect I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time to come. (It sounds like a delightful perfume: a bit musty with an sweet undernote of decaying paper and an overnote of astringent preservative, maybe.)
Just [...]
More on Google and Siva’s response (and my responses to Siva):
Recap: In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is implementing an opt-out provision in its scan-copyrighted-library-books program, and delaying scans of copyrighted books until November. [google blog] This has been widely reported as Google backing down. See, e.g., [...]
Sony is claiming copyright over “Zorro” and has sent a C&D to Sobini Films, which is wanting to produce a movie set in the future (well, 2010 - barely the future any more!) about Zorro. Johnston McCulley first introduced Zorro in 1919 in The Curse of Capistrano. The BBC article states it thusly: [...]
Not content with their shared top-ten ranking in teen births, Louisiana State Rep. A. G. Crowe (R-Slidell) wants Louisiana to join with Oklahoma and Alabama in segregating (or banning) gay books.
Good for you, Rep. Crowe. You tackle those problems that Louisiana is facing (high cancer mortality rates, high teen pregnancy rate, low education rates, [...]
The 10th anniversary of SF MOMA prompted an article in SFGate today [1/13] about MOMA’s architectural values, functionality as an art museum, and fitness into the SOMA neighborhood. I particularly liked the opening observation:
A big problem with architectural criticism is that buildings often are treated as if they are inert works of art, sculptures [...]
