“In order to be really good as a librarian, everything counts towards your work, every play you go see, every concert you hear, every trip you take, everything you read, everything you know.” – Allen Smith, PhD
The OLPC has reinvented their signature laptop and come out with a new model that looks more like an e-books, is more energy efficient, and will cost only $75. This new model looses the keyboard, but but functions through two touch screens, one of which can function as a keyboard. Another development on this project has been the adoption of Microsoft’s Windows as the machines operating systems. The new laptop will have a dual booting system.
Colombia’s Caldas region has signed up to offer OX laptops to about 65,000 children. Caldas’ governor Mario Aristizabal expressed the desire to offer children in this region the same advantages offered to children in developed countries around the world. There are plans for Manizales to join the OLPC project as well.
You can read about the new design here, and about the Colombian project here.
This morning I was reading Críticas and found a fascinating article by Loida García-Fedo about Wilton Hurtado Cuero, a man truly dedicated to making this world a better place. Hurtado Cuero is a librarian in Chocó, a department (state) on Colombia’s Pacific coast where poverty is prevalent, there is little infrastructure, and citizens have seen a lot of violence in recent years.
This dedicated man saw a need for services and did something about it. When a flood destroyed the public library where he worked, he asked the government for help in order to continue offering the community library services. Hurtado Cuero took up a bag full of books and started walking up and down the Santiago River bringing books to a number of schools and households in the area. This project became known as La Maleta Viejara (Traveling Suitcase). His visits later revealed that many of the children he was seeing where suffering from poor nutrition, which in part was attributed to the fumigations which are supposed to be killing coca plantations, but are instead destroying local crops. Hurtado Cuero worked to provide food security to this community.
Over the years I’ve discovered a number of similar projects. People truly dedicated to providing library services and promoting education. I’ve read about a Colombian who provides library services with a donkey, and a project where camels are used to provide library services to nomadic tribes in Kenya. These stories made me want to leave the comfort of the academic library I work at, and join these people who are truly improving the world we live in. On the other hand, I’m reminded that even in Colombia such noble actions get little attention. I asked my father, who lives in Colombia, about Hurtado Cuero and he said there was no mention anywhere. I also tried searching for more information about on him and came up empty handed. Still, if I can bring some attention to these brave souls, I want to do so, and I hope this drop in the bucket encourages others to take their careers to the full extent of the possibilities!
You can read Loida García-Fedo’s article here, and see Wilton Hurtado Cuero’s brief bio here.
In any case, the date was proposed to the UNESCO’s International Union of Editor as a day to promote culture and raise awareness around intellectual property rights. Final approval came on November 15, 1995.
Current festivities include a rotating title of World Book Capital. This began in 2001 with Madrid, last year it was Bogotá, and this year the world’s book capital is Amsterdam, next year it will be Beirut.
Click here for UNESCO’s page on World Book and Copyright Day.
At random, here are a few links to how a handful of libraries around the world are celebrating.
Medellin’s neighborhood of Santo Domingo Savio is changing its face thanks to a new library that was inaugurated back in August 2007. The library includes a computer room, daycare center, art gallery and an auditorium. The library also offers training for adults, workshops for personal expression and story time for children.
In the past this area of the city was made famous (or infamous) though its depiction as one of the most violent places in the country at the hight of the country’s drug war. The city and its people have been included in books and movie that exhorted only its high levels of violence. Novels such as Fernando Vallejo’s “La Virgen de los Sicarios”, and Jorge Franco’s “Rosario Tijeras”, as well as the documentary “La Sierra” have shown the brutality of life in the region. Yet today things are turning around; today Medellin is a much safer and quieter city where residents are once again able to enjoy the city. This new renaissance is also being felt in the poorest areas of the city such as Santo Domingo Savio.
The new library has gained a significant amount of attention because of its unusual architecture, but hopefully soon news will come out as to how the collection is impacting the community. The library resembles three large borders siting precariously on the edge of a steep incline that overlooks Medellin. You can read -in Spanish- a detailed explanation of the architecture, including photographs here). The library fits into the overall renovation the city has been undergoing which aims at creating more public spaces that encourage people to come out, enjoy the city, and meet their neighbors.
This library is also part of an ongoing initiative to promote libraries in Colombia. In February of this year Japan donated enough money to build 13 new libraries (read the article -in Spanish- here), to be build in various cities through the country. There is also a heavy emphasis on promoting public libraries, something that certainly wasn’t the case when I lived there. You can access Senderos, the web portal -in Spanish- for Colombia’s public libraries here.
The video above -in Spanish- show the inauguration of the library and describes how the community has been changing in recent years.
Nowadays is seems that so many of us spend hours and hours commuting back and forth, (hopefully we are doing this on public transportation). For those of us lucky enough to be able to read while traveling it seems that a few public transportation systems are starting to offer us options. In Colombia the TransMilenio has been experimented with lending out book. This project is promoted by the Instituto de Cultura y Turismo which extended their Libro Al Viento campaign onto TrasMilenio. Here users don’t need to be affiliated with any library; great literature is made available to anyone traveling, with hopes that the books will be returned. Readers are encouraged to pick up these book and take them home or to the office until their are finished with it, and then return them to the system for another to use. This project has since extended into local grocery stores, and public markets around the city.
The Contra Costa Public Library has joined forces with BART to offer library services to commuters. The program named, Library-a-GO-Go, will install book lending machines that will allow patrons to check out books while in their commute. The first machines will be installed at the Pittsburgh/Bay Point station in April, with more machines to come at the Pleasant Hill and the Byron/Discovery Bay stations.
You can read the press release for the Contra Costa - BART project here, and an article (in Spanish) on the TransMilenio project here. You can read about LibroAl Viento in supermarkets (in Spanish) here, and in public markets (in Spanish) here.
A recent article in the BBC shows how recent violence in Kenya sparked from election disputes has affected the flower industry. Usually Valentines means that workers can expect to work longer hours, and make some extra money. Others can take temporary work on these large farms, but this year ethnic violence has forces many of these workers to flee their homes and jobs, leaving the Kenyan flower industry in a difficult situation for the highest demand of the year. The industry seems to be running on about 80% of it’s usual workforce, while some of the more fortunate workers have been offered housing on the farms, and have thus been able to keep their jobs, many have been forced to send their families to live elsewhere. The most unfortunate ones had to leave everything behind, or worst yet were killed.
Violence has also disrupted transportation routs forcing flower farmers to incur more expenses by having to charter flights to deliver their product. And while we can hope that this violence will be passing, failing to deliver on the industry’s most important day can damage confidence in the Kenyans flower industry for years to come.
In Colombia Valentine day has been adopted by workers in the flower as International Day of Flowers Workers; a day designed to raise awareness about the poor conditions in which many workers toil. This movement is being highlighted by Florverde certification which places its symbol on flower production which meets their social and environmental standards. Now Florverde is trying to increase labor standards and work with trade unions to continue improving the industry.
Florverde certification covers about 25% of the Colombian flower industry, and its criteria include standards such as sealing fumigated areas to protect workers. Although these seem like obvious steps it is actually commons to have workers in the same area where pesticides are being used. In the past the industry has also seen some very nasty disputes over labor issues and attempts at unionizing. Currently there are some farms that have greatly improved conditions for workers offering decent wages, and daycare, but many other farms still have a very long way to go.
Now partnerships with European markets may help improve the situation. In order to sell in European markets, Colombian flowers would have to meet UK’s Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). Complying with ETI includes freely chosen employment (no prison labor), freedom of association and respecting collective bargaining, safe and hygienic working conditions, the absence of child labor, living wages, reasonable working hours, the absence of discrimination, having regular employment, as well as no tolerance for harsh or inhumane treatment (read their full code here).
It would be great if the other large consumer of cut flowers would also set up to the plate and help improve conditions in this industry that brighten our days, while exploiting so many others.
You can read the BBC article about Kenya here, Colombia here. You can read another article on the situation in Kenya from the Washington Post here.
In 1960 the Mirabal sisters were brutally murdered after a long struggle against Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The sisters grew up comfortably on the island, but once Trujillo rose to power the family lost everything, and this spurred the Mirabal to form a political group of opposition known as the “Agrupación política 14 de junio”; while working in this group the sisters became known as Las Mariposas (The Butterflies). Over the coming years they would be incarcerated, tortured. On November 15, 1960 the regime murdered three of the four sisters; the aftermath of this event created increase attention world wide for Trujillo’s rule, and in 1961 he too was assassinated.
The Mirabal’s story inspired the modern movement to stop violence against women. In 1981 the first “Encuentro Feminista Latinoamericano y del Caribe”, which took place in Bogotá, declared the date of their death as the day to eliminate violence against women. Later, in 1999 through resolution 54/134, the United Nation’s General Assemble declared the day International Day to Stop Violence Against Women.
This weekend I attended the 31st. Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. I heard about this event after a visit to the John Carter Brown Library and decided to check it out. I saw a number of fascinating book, not all as old as I expected. Some of the exhibitors had material that dated back hundreds and hundreds of years, as well as other book from the 20th century. Newer books were usually first editions and they were usually signed. Among these first editions I saw books by Garcia Marquez, Steven King, and John Steinbeck, among others. Some of the vendors had old maps, prints (including an original Chagall), poster, and I even saw an entire case of glass eyes that was for sale.
I also attended two lectures the first by Anne Bromer, titled Miniature Books: 4,000 of tiny treasures, and the second presentation was titled Japanese Illustrated Books, by Charles Vilnis. During the first presentation I learned about the practical use of miniature books (usually books smaller than 3 inches). We saw a copy of a miniature book version of the Emancipation Proclamation which Lincoln had printed and gave to soldiers to hand out throughout many southern states. I also heard of a collection of classics that were printed in miniature form which people who spend a lot of time on the road could easily take with. In general I was surprised to learn that miniature books were usually created to be read and used, instead of being only for decoration.
During the presentation on prints in Japanese books we saw an amazing selection of images that dated as far back as the 1600s and as recent as the mid 1900. The illustrations ranged from very simple, elegant images, to long scrolls that describes entire journeys.
On November 13, 1985 Colombia suffered one of the biggest natural disasters in its history. The volcano at el nevado del Ruiz erupted and took with it the entire town of Armero. The aftermath of the eruption totaled about 25,000 deaths, over 20,000 injured and displaced the remaining survivors. To add injury to pain, the prior week, the country had lived through the attack of the palace of justice by the M-19. Sadly the death toll in Armero could have been prevented, as the volcano had started fuming the prior year, and a number of seismologist had predicted that it would erupt.
For those of us that were in Colombia the images of this tragedy, as well as the aftermath, including years of nightly public broadcasts of young children looking for their parents from whom they had been separated in the chaos of the disaster, will forever be engraved in our minds…
You can access Wikipedia’s Spanish language entry for the tragedy at Armero here, and the English entry here (they are different articles) . You can read the original report from the BBC here. The English entry at Wikipedia for the siege at the Palace of Justice is here. The English entry for the M-19 is here.
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.
