“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 Mali government has begun work to create a library that will house material from Timbuktu’s golden age. Material consists of works of law, history, poetry, and science, much of which has been gathered from private collections, and storerooms, many having been in danger of decay for lack of proper care.
The material is being made available on the web through Aluka, a project which works to make digital content from and about Africa available on the web. Aluka does require users to be members to access their content. The project also counts with the help of the Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University.
You can read more about this story form an article in the NYT.
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.
Microsoft Research just came out with a tool that allows you to see the galaxy up close. After downloading the free software, WorldWide Telescope will bring you to a wide range of images of the galaxy, which you can then explore. The interface is easy enough to use, just use your mouse to scroll across the sky and zoom into whatever catches your attention. As you zoom in and out, the browser allows you to access information which has been hyperlinked to provide more context to what you are seeing.
The WorldWide Telescope functions by gathering the best images of telescopes around the planet and in space, and it seamlessly knits them together to create a holistic image.
This is a video showing the program and describing what it can do.
A few librarians in Guatemala have set out to create a directory of Guatemala’s librarians in wiki format. The project is still quite new and with only a few entries, but they already have a number of enthusiasts offering their help either with providing content or helping with the technology needed.
As most wikis, the project is meant to be collaborative, and everyone is encouraged to contribute. The front page also offers a few links to existing projects which provide some information on Guatemala’s libraries; these include UNESCO, The Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, and a project through the International Center for Scientific Research.
In the last couple of days it has come to light that the term “abortion” had been taken out of Popline, a publicly funded health database managed by John Hopkins University. Popline receives money from USAID (United Stated Agency for International Development). Representatives of the university acknowledge that the term had been programmed out of the database, but later reinstated when the dean of the Public Health School objected.
Initially the term was disabled after complains from the development agency claiming that the database contained two articles which they believed did not meet the database’s standards (they were about abortion advocacy). A Popline manager explained at information could still be retrieved through “related” terms such as “fertility control, postconception” or “pregnancy, unwanted”, what they failed to point out is that these terms do not mean the same as “abortion”, and in any case, they are restricting information to the general public.
It’s amazing to me that such draconian measures were taken to appease an over zealous political position. There is no need to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Just because certain powerful people do not like a few articles in a database, is no reason to restrict everyone else’s access to them.
Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association (ALA) best summed up the situation.
“Any federal policy or rule that requires or encourages information providers to block access to scientific information because of partisan or religious bias is censorship,” she said. “Such policies promote ideology over science and only serve to deny researchers, students and individuals on all sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information.”
You can read more about this case from an article form the NYT here, and Wired Magazine here.
Earlier this week Footnote.com and the National Archives and Records Administration offered a new Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The actual memorial consist of two large granite walls inscribed with the names of over 58,000 American casualties of the way, the online version, which was created by combining over 2,000 photographs of the actual site, make the walls searchable from your home computer. The new version also allows you to link each name to the person’s service record, and add content to the record.
This project is different from a previous one called The Wall, which is maintained by the veterans of the 4th Battalion 9th Infantry Regiment. The Wall originally went online back in 1996, and has been evolving ever since. The Wall allows you to search by name, but in addition offers links to “Today’s Wall Birthdays” and “Today’s Wall Causalities,” and provides some basic facts of the war.
The physical Vietnam Veterans Memorial is located in Washington DC, was designed by Maya Lin, and holds 58,249 names, it is managed by the National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior. Each day rangers gather items left at the site (except food and flowers), which are then tagged and taken to the Archive for future preservation. Although the full archive is not open to the public, selections of it are on display at the American History Museum.
The Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial site does warn that is has been experiencing high traffic, so connections might be slow.
You can read more about the online Vietnam Memorial from an article in Wired Magazine here, and read the Wikipedia entry here.
Stanford law professor Larry Lessing has come up with a new tool (still in beta) to try and keep the USA government clean and honest. The Change Congress aims to enlist the help of volunteers across the country to keep track on their representatives’ responses on a variety of issues, and then make this seemingly abstract information, concrete through Google mash-ups. Lessing wants congress representatives to commit to four different issues; 1) to promise to not take money from lobbyist and Political Action Committees (PAC), 2) support publicly financed elections, 3) help pass legislation to stop spending money on questionable projects in their districts, and 4) to help make Congress a more transparent place over all. Candidates who wish to be measured by these guidelines can do so by filling out a form on the website.
It is hoped that the project will have bi-partisan appeal, and that volunteers across the country will participate. The project anticipates that there is wide ranging dissatisfaction with congress in general, and that this energy can be channeled into making congress a more accountable place for all of us.
You can read more about this project from an article in Wired Magazine here. You can read Lessig’s blog here, and his Youtube page here.
This morning the New York Times had an article about two parallel art exhibits displaying art looted during WWII. The exhibit is a collaboration between France and Israel in aims at reconnecting these pieces with their original owners. Most of the art on display was either outright looted or forcefully “bought” by the Nazi, and so far has gone unclaimed, presumably because the original owners were likely killed in the Holocaust. The collections contain a number of “common” pieces, but also works from renown artist such as Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Chagall, Delacroix, and Monet among others.
Art and other cultural pieces are often looted during times of war and much has been written and discussed on the subject. Actually a couple semesters ago I attended a lecture by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a Harvard professor who has written extensively on collections held in Russian archives which previously belong to other nations. Her book, “Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II and the International Politics of Restitution” discusses the complexities of restitution and why countries loot other nations’ cultural treasures.
Fortunately there are efforts around the globe to stop this practice. The Lost Art Internet Database is a project from the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste which is working to reconnect lost cultural property to its original owners. Looted Art is another such initiative, and while many of these efforts circle the Holocaust this is not a phenomenon seen exclusively around WWII, Chile recently returned a number of book taken from the Peruvian National Library about 100 years ago. And it’s not just armies who walk away with cultural property that belongs to others. Some of the largest and best endowed universities and museums around the world have gotten some of their material in such a matter. Egypt has been demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone for years, to name just one example (You can read about this from an article in the BBC). Unfortunately we are still seeing this practice in current times; the National Museum of Iraq was gravely looted during the USA invasion. (You can read about the Iraqi National Museum from an article in the Guardian.)
The European Digital Library project has been working since September 2006 on creating a portal to gather digital collection from National Libraries around Europe, including Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Europeana, as the site has been named, will be part of the European Library providing access to a multitude of digital objects from across Europe.
Currently Europeana is in beta form, and is being demoed to gather input on how to make if as effective as possible before release. The site aims at offering users the possibility of searching content in a multitude of languages and will allow comparisons of related material across different countries.
Hosting for the site will be done by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands. Europeana aims for a November 2008 release, hosting about 2 million items including book, photographs, maps, audio files, and archival records from libraries, archives, and museums throughout Europe.
You can read the press release for Europeana here. You can view the site demo 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.
