Can We Create a National Digital Library? Robert Darnton

The following talk was given at the opening of a conference at Harvard on October 1 to discuss the possibility of creating a National Digital Library.

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss a question of vital importance to the cultural life of our country: Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.

Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.

The ambition behind this project goes back to the founding of this country. Thomas Jefferson formulated it succinctly: “Knowledge is the common property of mankind.” He was right—in principle. But in practice, most of humanity has been cut off from the accumulated wisdom of the ages. In Jefferson’s day, only a tiny elite had access to the world of learning. Today, thanks to the Internet, we can open up that world to all of our fellow citizens. We have the technical means to make Jefferson’s dream come true, but do we have the will?

Read more...http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library/

What Libraries Can (Still) Do James Gleick

Deutsches Historiches Museum/Arne Psille/Art ResourceHeinrich Lukas Arnold: The Reading Room, circa 1840

Of the many institutions suffering through the world’s metamorphosis from analog to digital (real to virtual, offline to online), few are as beleaguered as that bedrock of our culture, the public library. Budgets are being slashed by state and local governments. Even the best libraries are cutting staff and hours. Their information desks are seemingly superseded by Google, their encyclopedias are gathering dust. And their defining product, the one that lines their shelves, now arrives in the form of a weightless doppelgänger that doesn’t require shelves.

In the technocracy, all the world’s information comes to us on screens—desk, pocket, wrist, goggles—and no one trudges through wind and rain with library card in hand to find a single worn object. After all, when you want the text of Magna Carta, you don’t track down the original. Same with books? “Libraries are screwed,” said Eli Neiburger, a Michigan library director, in a much-quoted presentation at a Library Journal conference in 2010. “Libraries are screwed because we are invested in the codex, and the codex has become outmoded.”

So is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold? Perversely, the most popular service at some libraries has become free Internet access. People wait in line for terminals that will let them play solitaire and Minecraft, and librarians provide coffee. Other patrons stay in their cars outside just to use the Wi-Fi. No one can be happy with a situation that reduces the library to a Starbucks wannabe.

Perhaps worst of all: the “bookless library” is now a thing. You can look it up in Wikipedia.

Read more: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/oct/26/what-libraries-can-still-do-bibliotech/

The Library: a new short film on the wonder of libraries - video

Director Jason LaMotte was profoundly affected by his neighbourhood library in Houston Texas – and the magical feeling it carried was the inspiration behind his new film The Library

When Dickens Is a Distraction

Brian Taylor for The Chronicle Review

By Ivan Kreilkamp October 25, 2015 

A recent issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine offers a promising feature: "Guilty (and not-so-guilty) reads of the Yale faculty: What your professors read when nobody’s watching." It’s a potentially juicy idea that yielded disappointingly tepid results.

The editors of the magazine admit, "The first thing we learned when we asked faculty across the campus to share their guilty reads: Not all Yale professors know how to relax. Their summer reading lists included the likes of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — a groundbreaking work by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, but not exactly escapist. Other books sounded suspiciously like fodder for future papers."

As I leafed through the article, I found myself mentally awarding points to any prof whose supposed "guilty reads" were in fact even remotely embarrassing or guilt-inducing.

It’s no surprise that detective fiction — long the acceptable light reading of the professoriate — often turns up in the responses. Robert Stern, dean and architecture professor, recommends Georges Simenon’s Maigret thrillers and Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series, documenting the Peculiar Crimes detective unit in London; Sidney Altman (biology and chemistry) likes mysteries by Philip Kerr and Andrea Camilleri; Diana E.E. Kleiner (art history and classics) suggests Diane Mott Davidson’s culinary mysteries about "a spunky heroine named Goldy Bear."

OK, the Goldy Bear whodunit does sound a little silly. But if a taste for detective fiction was possibly, once upon a time, considered mildly outré in Ivy League faculty clubs, it’s been more than 70 years since Edmund Wilson declared (in his 1944 "Why Do People Read Detective Stories?") that he was "always being reminded that the most serious public figures of our time, from Woodrow Wilson to W.B. Yeats, have been addicts of this form of fiction." Detective fiction has long been a safe harbor for professors who wish to show they can unwind without risking any true status demerit.

Read more....http://chronicle.com/article/When-Dickens-Is-a-Distraction/233854?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elq=c37ffb9c7d8c49b7a558f67709142014&elqCampaignId=1690&elqaid=6681&elqat=1&elqTrackId=ed0194c854254d77aa2cef02d2008094

Reinventing the library by Alberto Manguel

The Oberlausitzische Library of Sciences in Gorlitz, Germany. CreditFlorian Monheim/Arcaid via Corbis

Plato, in the “Timaeus,” says that when one of the wisest men of Greece, the statesman Solon, visited Egypt, he was told by an old priest that the Greeks were like mere children because they possessed no truly ancient traditions or notions “gray with time.” In Egypt, the priest continued proudly, “there is nothing great or beautiful or remarkable that is done here, or in your country, or in any other land that has not been long since put into writing and preserved in our temples.”

Such colossal ambition coalesced under the Ptolemaic dynasty. In the third century B.C., more than half a century after Plato wrote his dialogues, the kings ordered that every book in the known world be collected and placed in the great library they had founded in Alexandria. Hardly anything is known of it except its fame: neither its site (it was perhaps a section of the House of the Muses) nor how it was used, nor even how it came to its end. Yet, as one of history’s most distinguished ghosts, the Library of Alexandria became the archetype of all libraries.

Libraries come in countless shapes and sizes. They can be like the Library of Congress or as modest as that of the children’s concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the older girls were in charge of eight volumes that had to be hidden every night so that the Nazi guards wouldn’t confiscate them. They can be built from books found in the garbage, like the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., set up in 1980 by the 24-year-old Aaron Lansky from volumes discarded by the younger generations who no longer spoke the tongue of their elders, or they can be catalogued in the mind of their exiled readers, in the hope of resurrection, like the libraries plundered by the Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories of Palestine. It is in the nature of libraries to adapt to changing circumstances and threats, and all libraries exist in constant danger of being destroyed by war, vermin, fire, water or the idiocies of bureaucracy.

Read more: http://nyti.ms/1R0E2G8

After 10 Years, Google Books Is Legal Thanks to a landmark ruling, information just got a little more free.

The New York Public Library was an early partner in the Google Books scanning program.

• ROBINSON MEYER
 
•  OCT 20, 2015

On Friday, a federal circuit court made clear that Google Books is legal. A three-judge panel on the Second Circuit ruled decisively for the software giant against the Authors Guild, a professional group of published writers which had alleged Google’s scanning of library books and displaying of free “snippets” online violated its members’s copyright.

To some digital-rights followers, the Google Books case had seemed to drag on forever: The Authors Guild first filed suit 10 years ago. But the theory behind the eventual ruling was a quarter-century in the making.
In 1990, a district-court judge named Pierre Leval published an article in theHarvard Law Review proposing a new theory of fair use. In fact, the article was named “Toward a Fair Use Standard.” (The Harvard Law Review, by the way, had one month earlier elected its first black president.)

Fair use—which lets people use and adapt copyrighted works without getting the explicit permission of their owner—is a distinctly American concept. Instead of setting out specific statutory exemptions to copyright, as many other countries do, U.S. law issues four broad factors which guide whether the permission-less use of a copyrighted work is fair. This means that fair use can evolve and change over time; it also means that the only real way to find out if something is “fair use” is to ask a federal court.

Read more:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/fair-use-transformative-leval-google-books/411058/?utm_source=SFFB

Suffragette Movie: 3 Alternative Books to Read BY NICOLE FROIO

The movie Suffragette, featuring Helena Bonham Carter, Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan, premiered in the UK on Wednesday, October 7. In true feminist fashion, the movie was welcomed by feminists who stormed the red carpet to protest against UK government cuts that have been harming British women.

It was a badass show of activism by SistersUncut and I absolutely loved it.

However, I am the feminist killjoy who pops your suffragette-admiring bubble to say that Emmeline Pankhurst (and other suffragettes) was kind of racist (and very pro-colonisation in her later years). As much as the suffragettes were absolutely essential to the fight for equality, they often compared (white) women’s lack of rights to slavery – effectively excluding black women from their fight for women’s suffrage. This was extensively pointed out in social media after Suffragette actresses were picturedwearing shirts with one of Pankhurst’s most famous (and offensive) quotes: “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.” (As if slavery was a choice but OK EMMELINE, WELL DONE). (ALSO, can we talk about why these actresses thought wearing this quote across their chest was OK?!!? Meryl, I thought you were cool.)

There’s a lot to be said about whether it’s right or wrong to admire the suffragettes if we look at the movement with an intersectional feminist lens, but I believe the best way to make that decision is to educate yourself. All of our idols will be problematic in one way or another and while I will definitely be watching the movie, I will also be reading some additional materials to make sure I understand the full picture of the suffragette movement in terms of intersectionality (or lack thereof). Below are the books I will be reading to seek this knowledge.

On a quick side note, it’s important to say that the racism in the British and American suffragette movements were very different (it was definitely more overt in the US, with suffragettes arguing against black men having the right to vote) but that it existed in both countries.

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