Crítica Biliotecológica (Library and Information Science Critique: Journal of the Information Sciences Recorded in Documents) is a budding publication from the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Mexico. The online, open access, publication will be focusing on information sciences and critical analysis of the field. Some of the broader topics contributors are encouraged to discuss include, analysis of the “information society”, “research methodology”, “the limits of copyright”, “social injustice within the field”, and “privatization and monopolies from information providers”, among other challenging topics.

While the journal will specialize in articles by professionals, paraprofessionals and students debating various sides of issues within the library field, it also welcomes poetry, short stories, and other writings on the matter. The publishers expect to publish 4 times a year (January, April, July and October). Entries are welcome in both Spanish and English.

The first issues is already in the works, but people who wish to contribute and who already have an article that might interest the journal are encouraged to submit their work. (I didn’t find an obvious link where to submit your work, but I guess you can contact one of the organizers.)

Zapopan Martín Muela-Meza - zapopanmuela@gmail.com

José Antonio Torres Reyes - joantreyes@gmail.com

You can expect the first issues here.

A few days ago OCLC and Google Books created a partnership that will allow uses of both services to benefit, and better locate library material. OCLC member libraries who already have agreements with Google Books will now be able to make their MARC records available through Google, which will increase the visibility of material. Basically this partnership will allow users of the web to search for books and other library material be guided towards specific library catalogs, which will then provide full access to books that are already part of Google Books. Ideally this set up will drive up traffic for libraries both online and in person. Web users will be able to access full text books from home, but those who wish to borrow the books will be able to see local libraries’ holding.

You can read OCLCs press release on the matter here.

Yesterday The Harvard Crimson published an Op-Ed by Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, who has set the groundwork to create an Office for Scholarly Communication which will manage an open access repository hosting the works of Harvard’s faculty of arts and science (FAS). This project will be established to make these publications available to the entire world, and not just those who can afford the expensive journals in which they are often published. Articles will be available through the university’s OPAC Hollis.

The project’s goal is two fold. First it aims at sharing Harvard’s wealth of information, and second it hopes to make a statement against the high prices of many academic journals. Darnton has only recently taken on the job of university librarian, but promises large moves towards accessibility and openness. Actually this effort to make all faculty publications freely accessible comes on the heels of other projects at Harvard making more and more of their collections available to everyone. Currently the university participates in the Harvard-Google project which will make monographs in the public domain actually available to the public. Their Open Collection Program is working hard to digitize many of the treasures housed at their various libraries and making them available to everyone.

This new initiative to make faculty’s publications available to the world for free establishes an automatic “op-in” stance, requiring faculty who don’t want to participate to fill out a waiver. In terms of copyright, the project would make faculty share copyright with the university library which would allow the library to publish the material, but it would still allow faculty to publish their work in other venues which allow for non-exclusive copyright. This set up should not hinder or devaluate publications by faculty members, and Darnton explains that for those participating in the project, they will benefit from having the full weight of the institution behind them.

You can read the Op-Ed in the Harvard Crimson here, or an article on the subject from Library Journal here.

05.21.08 - The Harvard Law School has also joined this initiative, making them the first law school to adopts such a commitment towards open access. You can read more about this here.

Yale University has agreed to return most of the Inca artifacts it has housed since Professor Hiram Bingham “rediscovered” Machu Pichu and brought back over 4,000 pieces from the site. The collection includes items such as mummies, ceramics, and bones. Bingham “rediscovered” Machu Pichu back in 1911, bringing it to world attention.

Part of this new agreement has been to promote a traveling exhibit with the pieces, which will eventually find a permanent home at a local museum in Cuzco, Peru, scheduled to coincide with the centenary of Bingham’s “finding” of the site. It will also allow a few selected pieces to remain at Yale a while longer for further scientific research.

In the past a many other countries, and native people the world over have struggled to recover items that were taken during periods of colonization and dominance by foreign groups. During the 1990s the USA passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring museums to inventory their collections and consider returning certain items, although this only applies to federally recognized indigenous groups.

The British Museum has had to deal with a number of cases concerning repatriation, but their response has usually been non-compliance with request from countries such as Egypt and Greece.

You can read more about this issue from an article in the BBC concerning the Yale-Machu Pichu case, or from an article in Suite 101 discussing whether repatriation is a passing fad or not. Wikipedia also has an entire index dedicated to repatriation, divided by cultures.

Earlier this week I was in NYC to witness the auction of a portion of a collection I helped inventory about two years ago. The collection was pieced together by Maury Bromsen, a rare book collector based in Boston, who passed away in 2005, bequeathing the entire collection to the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) in Providence Rhode Island. The Bromsen collection originally included material by and about Simon Bolivar, which had already been donated to the JCB, along with material mostly, but not exclusively, from the 18th, 19th and 20th century spanning the length and width of Latin America. Among the material I inventoried were original proclamations of the Mexican independence, along with entire collection by Andres Bello. There was also material on tourism, politics, novels, memoirs, cookbook, and all kinds of other literary pieces emerging from the region.

The auction, which took place at Swann Auction Galleries, included 68 lots from the original Bromsen collection, all of which were sold in about an hour. This sale was set up as a shelf sale, meaning that everything had to sell, regardless of the price; this would be in contrast to a catalog sale where the seller set a minimum price, and items will be kept if there are no buyers willing to pay this price.

Buyers in this occasion were mainly book dealers who had to buy entire book lots to get a few hidden gems, which they would later resell individually. Someone else that was there buying and whom I got to meet was the director of the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, in Bogotá, Colombia. The fact that she came all the way from Colombia to buy books on Latin America in New York was very telling of how the flow of books works these days.

There are still thousands of book from the Bromsen collection that will be auction off sometime in the future. The next sale will likely be middle prices material, and the last one will be for all the remaining treasures.

Photograph by colombianflowers.

It seems like a lot of the rich and famous spend a good amount of time and money collecting books, manuscripts and other library material, which they treasure during their life time and which later become great assets to libraries once they are bequeathed. A number of very prestigious libraries have started out by such generous donations.

Harvard’s libraries started when John Harvard donated his collection to the institution back in 1638. Later Eleanor Elkins Widener, gave another significant push when she carried out her sons wish to donate his collection to the university. Her son, Harry Elkin Widener, class of 1907, perished with the Titanic.

The John Carter Brown Library, affiliated with Brown University has also greatly benefited from the donation of personal libraries. John Carter Brown was an avid collector of Americana; his collection was further developed by his son John Nicholas Brown, who subsequently assigned the funds to house this collection. During more recent times whey had also received the Paul R. Dupee Jr. collection which focused on Mexican History. And in two different installment, rare book collector Maury Bromsen donated the vast majority of his collection to the John Carter Brown Library as well.

Significant library collections are also established by those who don’t specialize in books. Collections of letters, diaries, and pretty much anything else can eventually also make it into libraries, and are usually considered part of Special Collections. Morehouse College holds the larger portion of the Martin Luther King Jr. Collection. While the University of Texas at Austin, Benson Latin American Collection acquired the Gloria E. Anzaldua collection just a few years ago.

This week the NYT had an article on CEOs personal libraries, describing both some of the treasures that are to be found in them, as well as commenting on just how protective some of these people are about their books. It’s also interesting to learn that some of these collections have hardly anything in common with these people’s professions. For instance, Steven P. Jobs from Apple had a large collection on William Blake.

While as a librarian I’m initially a little uneasy with having such treasures in personal hands, I’m comforted to know that in the end many of these personal treasures do end up in libraries where they can be used and enjoyed by all.

A few weeks ago dozens upon dozens of giant red books started arriving where I work and no one knew why or if anyone had ordered them. Turns out this isn’t the only place where Adnan Oktar, also know as Harun Yahya , has been sending unsolicited copies of his latest publication, “Atlas of Creation;” they have been showing up at libraries, museums and even the USA congress.

Today the NYT had an article about just this phenomenon and it seems that where ever the book arrives it is producing the same reaction, something along the lines of “The book is gorgeously produced, but we aren’t adding it to the collection because it is full of information that just isn’t accurate.” Basically the book is a beautiful book, covered in full color photographs on heavy glossy paper, but it’s point is to argue that evolution has not occurred since there are plenty of creatures today which look just like their ancient relatives.

Apparently the book hasn’t only gotten around the USA; Earlier this year a French translation actually showed up in schools, universities and museums around France, where scientist quickly spoke out against the book, and the centralized school system facilitated the books removal.

It seems that the author’s intent to debunk Darwin has come to little effect, and mainly what he has achieved is to have everyone wondering where the money has come from to produce such a magnificent book, and then mail them all over the country, when each copy weighs about 12 pounds!

You can take a look at Harun Yahya website here.

08.30.07 - Here is some else’s comments on Yahya’s reaction to blog posts on his work. He’s apparently gotten local officials in Turkey to blog WordPress comments on his work.

Image info here.

Earlier this week I attended a lecture that addressed social tagging and its use to libraries. Today more and more libraries and archives are trying to make themselves more visible by creating engaging websites, starting blog and posting photographs on flickr. While many of these are started to attract people to the library, it was fascinating to see the information that is coming out of these open spaces.

Take for example the Beyond Brown Paper site. This is a project based out of Plymouth State University, and it aims to digitize and preserve a photography collection about the paper mills that used to function in the area. The collection contains about 11,000 photographs that are gradually making their way on to their site. The fascinating thing is that the site allows for comments and collaboration, and this has brought new information to the project. Locals who used to work at these mills have seen some of the photographs, and through their comments have started to fill in the information gaps.

Item # 718 is an image of two men working on some equipment. The subject headings that were initially allocated are “Tightening, Securing lid on digester, Wrenches, Digester, and Burgess Mill.” In early March someone posted a comment giving us more information on what the digester does. Later in the month someone else identified one of the men in the photograph.

In cataloging, usually the more information we provide the better since it provides more access points to the item. But librarians, archivers and the like don’t know everything, so it’s fascinating that we can get help from the people who lived and experienced the history and documents we are trying to help manage. And while there can be a concern of people volunteering inaccurate information, I think the risk isn’t a serious one. Besides we can always acknowledge where the information came from.

A similar case was seen on flickr. Here someone posted their pictures of vacation in Newfoundland, which included a close up of a Humpback Whale’s tail. Another person who knew about whales was later able to identify this particular whale as one that scientist had been following under the “name” of HWC#2943, last seen in 1984!

You can learn more about this project and how it came about at maisonbisson. Bisson is also behind the Cook Memorial Library project which is also based on WordPress.

- Photograph used with permission-

I just got back from the Charles Darwin (1809-1882) exhibit, and even though I already knew the basics of his life (My dad is a big admirer of his), I was still very impressed by it.

Darwin was born into a family of privilege in the UK and as a young man his father pushed him to pursue first a career in medicine and then as a clergy man. His father is quoted as having told him, “you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Initially Darwin didn’t try to go against his father’s wishes, but instead found ways of working around them. If he were to become a clergy man in a small rural community he would then have all the time he wanted to explore the countryside and its wonders.

Luckily for us, Darwin did begin to associate with some of the scientists of the time and was eventually invited by one of them on a world tour aboard the Beagle. This voyage was to last two years, but instead lasted more than five, yet it is also the trip that squarely set Darwin on the path of finding an theory to explain the natural diversity that surrounded him. About this trip he wrote, “The Vogayes of the Beagle“.
By 1842 Darwin had a pretty clear theory to explain evolution though natural selection, but it took him almost two decades to make his findings public. Before making his work public, Darwin wanted more time to think about his theory, and to gather more evidence to convince those who he knew would criticize his work. He also wanted to have a more solid reputation in the field and for the general societal climate to change, since he realized his ideas would be attacked by the church. Eventually a letter outlining another man’s version of natural selection finally got him to publish.

On a curious note; According to the exhibit, Darwin didn’t believe in waste, and often gave his children discarded manuscript pages of the “Origin of Species” to draw on. Because of this there are only 28 pages of the original document known to exist.

Today, 150 years after he first published the “Origin of Species” Darwin regularly becomes a topic of controversy. Oddly (sadly) enough, his work continues to be challenged with the same arguments and objections that were used when his work first came out. The exhibit acknowledges this controversy, but did so with only one small display tucked away in a corner.

My only disappointment with the exhibit was that there were very few original documents on display; almost every single one was a facsimile of the original.

“There is a grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” -Charles Darwin

04.29.07 - Darwin’s writings covered a vast array of subject. You can find practically everything he ever wrote at The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Each document has been scanned so you can see the original, but they have also been retyped to allow keyword scanning.

05.16.07 - Tomorrow the University of Cambridge will be releasing digitized versions of approximatley 5,000 letters Darwin wrote over the course of his life. You can find these letters at the Darwin Correspondence Project. The BBC has an article about this today.

1st image, Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Darwin; 2nd image, Voyages of the Beagle, both available here.

There is a good amount of discussion in the library world that revolve around how and if we want to make library services more like Google or Amazon.com. The belief is that library users today want information to be available very quickly and without much effort, and that recommendations such as those used in Amazon.com might help patrons. Well Primo®, created by Ex Libris seems to have made these thoughts in to reality.

The North Carolina State University Libraries have already implemented this system. The search page on their OPAC is very simple, giving you the option to search for words, or a phrase, and then qualify these searches. A search for “Garcia Marquez”, “Anywhere” will give you an amazing amount of information. It gives you specific titles both by and about Garcia Marquez. It shows you the different call number ranges under which you can find material mentioning Garcia Marquez as author or subject; it gives you results by genre, format, region, time period, and languages, all on the same page. The possibilities seem to be endless.