World Book and Copyright Day (what a mouthful) is a yearly event to commemorate Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, all major figures in world writing (and I wonder where the women are…). Legend says that all these great men died on April 23, 1616, although more accurate calculations reveal that Shakespeare’s death date was actually marked on a Julian calendar, and therefore should be May 3^rd on the Gregorian calendar.

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.

• Bibliotecas Municipales de Málaga, Spain
  
• Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico
• General celebrations in Colombia
• Canada’s Education Ministry

Image info here.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is a collaboration, started in 1989, of the 53 Commonwealth head’s of state to promote open and distance learning (ODL), as well as sharing resources and technologies. COL works with government officials to promote information and communication technologies (ICT) as a means to impact the areas of education, learning for livelihoods, and human environment.

One of the projects launched by the COL is the WikiEducator, a website that gathers people who believe education should be free and available to all. They aim at helping users plan, and develop educational projects, especially those based on free content. Through their Learning4Content program they are working at conducting workshops, train educators, and develop free educational content. At times all of this work is done virtually, other times participants have been able to meet to collaborate.

COL also helped coordinate the development of a Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC). During its initial stage, the VUSSC will focus on creating courses in Tourism and Hospitality, and Small Business Management.

The COL understands that millions of children worldwide have no access to basic education, and many more are taught by poorly trained teachers, and study in schools with few resources. Estimates are that about a billion adults worldwide are illiterate, or have received a very rudimentary education. And while COL focuses on the Commonwealth countries, it aims to help improve opportunities for all adults, children and the generations to come.

I truly love the “radical” idea behind these projects, that education should be free and accessible to all! May the Commonwealth of Learning continue with many more great projects!

Image info here.

This week NYC is celebrating a legacy of immigration through Immigrant Heritage Week. The New York Public Library has created a number of events highlighting the culture of a number of immigrant groups. Events include bilingual story time, exploration of traditional Latin music, classes of Chinese ribbon dance, photographs illustrating Greek immigration into the city, a guitarist playing Caribbean tones, music from Bangladesh, Dominican folk dances, Mexican Mariachis, Flamenco music and dance, among others.

If you happen to live in NYC or close enough, stop by and enjoy the festivities!

You can find a full schedule of events here.

Audio historian David Giovannoni, who from First Sound, seemed to have found the first human voice recording in a French patent office. The recording is of a human signing “Au Claire de la Lune” and is dated back to 1860, almost two decades earlier than Thomas Edison’s recoding of “Mary had a little lamb.” The clip is only ten seconds long, and the quality is not great, but it is amazing that the recoding exists.

The audio was captured using a phonautograph, a machine invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, which created visual recordings from sound waves. The machine has a needle that recorded sound waves onto paper coated in soot from an oil lamp. Now the sound was extracted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by creating digital scans of the original papers and a “virtual stylus”, and then compensated for the fact that the original machine was hand cranked which created a distortion because the turning wasn’t always constant.

You can listen to the actual recording here.

You can read an article about this from the BBC here, and from Wired Magazine here.

Image info 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.)

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.

Image from AP Photo/Bernat Armangue.

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.

Image from Europeana.eu

I started out being hesitant to go down the road that is making OPACs and other library related tools look more like Google, Amazon.com and the like, but the more I learn about what these new tools can achieve the more I’m growing to like them. One of the latest examples of these new initiatives is The Commons, the Library of Congress‘ (LOC) Flickr page. The collections’ subtitle perfectly summarizes this project, “Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photos collections.”

LOC has started out by making two collections available on Flickr, the first titled 1930s-40s in Color, and the second one is News in the 1910s. The idea behind this project is to make these collections available to much larger groups of people that those who can actually visit the LOC. Second the fact that users can add tags to these photos as they please means that they have more accessible than they had previously been. Library of Congress Subject Headings are very useful to people who know how to use them, but can be rather frustrating to those who don’t. For example LOC uses “cookery” while cataloging cookbooks. How many of us would have guesses this to begin with? Being this the case, having user provided tags in everyday language and spelling can help make material more accessible. The user provided tags on Flickr are doing just this for these two collections.

Both collections hold material for which that LOC has determined to have “no known copyright restrictions.” LOC defines this label in two ways; Material for which copyright has not been renewed, or material from the late 19th and 20th century for which there is no evidence of a copyright holder. (You can read more about LOCs copyright standards here.)

Image info here.

01. 27. 08 - There is a similar collection of photographs of the battle at Normandie on Flickr. The collection includes close to 3,000 images documenting the event; information and tags for this collection are all in French. This was a project led by Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie (Regional Council of Basse-Normandie) in 2004, for the D-Day 60th anniversary. The photo source for the project is the Archives Normandie 1939-1945. You can access the Flickr collection here.

Photograph credits are with the “Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie / National Archives USA”

Image info here.

Yes! You can enjoy the opera at the movie theater! Last season Peter Gelb, director of the Metropolitan Opera began this amazing project of doing live broadcast to a number of HD movie theaters across the USA and around the world. Tickets do cost about twice as much as regular movie tickets, but this project is still bringing extraordinary cultural events to a much larger audience that those who can afford regular opera tickets.

Presentations also include some behind the scene takes, allowing the audience to see how the sets are installed and some of the makeup and props used during the production. During the broadcast of Hansel and Gretel, Renée Fleming also provided background commentary and short interviews with the two main singers and the stage director, giving the presentation a very interesting and well rounded approach.

During the presentation I attended today, we did have some technical difficulties with the sound during the second part of the show, but people after the theater was notified, the rest of the presentation went very smoothly. All in all is was a great experience and I was delighted to be able to access a world class cultural event at an affordable price.

For more information on the Metropolitan Opera’s HD presentations check out their website. On the left you will find a link to buy tickets in the USA or around the world. Other countries participating in this project include Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, among others.

On Friday, January 4, 2008, Tom Ashbrook, presenter of WBUR’s On Point interviewed Peter Gelb about this project. You can listen to the interview here.

As the year comes to an end the Million Book Project has reached its goal of scanning and making freely available a million books! This project is spearheaded by the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Sciences and University Libraries, with a number of partnerships including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States National Agricultural Library, the National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Education in China, and the University of California at Merced who negotiated to acquire copyright permission for the books which are not currently in the public domain.

So far the project has scanned 1.5 million books in 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic and Telugo. The books have also been scanned using OCR to enable full text searching. The project also collaborates with the OCA, acknowledging that both are working towards the same goal of making content easily available to everyone.

You can learn more about the project here, and can access their catalog here.