Lubuto means knowledge, enlightenment and light in the Bemba language, and this is exactly what the Lubuto Library Project is proving vulnerable children throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

The project is a non-profit based in Washington DC which has been providing library services since 2005. Their aim is to help provide information, a space for socialization, and a positive physical environment for children throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The project began after seeing the success a makeshift library at the Fountain of Hope Center which provided help for street children, victims of the AIDS crisis.

Each Lubuto Library has starts out with a collection of 5,000 items, primarily non-fiction, and covering a wide range of subjects. The initial collection has only English language books, but material in local languages is added once the library is established.

Interestingly, this project helps children in the USA as well. The project aims to educate children in the USA about the impact of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, while helping create the collections, organizing them, and helping out with other aspects of the project, as well as learning about the children these libraries will impact.

The above video shows the libraries, the children they service, as well as the children in the USA who organize book drives and help keep the project going in a number of other ways.

You can learn more about this project by visiting their website.

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.

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.

Based on the belief that American popular culture is shaping a new global environment which each day looks more hegemonic, the National Library of Venezuela has decided to fight back. Under the direction of Fernando Báez, the National Library of Venezuela will now try to fight what they believe is a global commercialization of world libraries, an effort, they believe is spearheaded by the Library of Congress in the USA. This project wishes to expand the country’s network of public libraries, promoting nation-wide reading, and build a National Digital Library.

Fernando Báez is the author of the world wide best seller “Historia universal de la destrucción de libros,” (Universal History of the Destruction of Books) and “La destrucción cultural de Iraq” (The cultural Destruction of Iraq) which made him a persona non grata in the USA.

Granted that this program could just as well limit local diversity, it is interesting to see a formal attempt at preserving local flavor. We’ll have to keep an eye on this one to see how it unfolds.

You can read the press release (in Spanish) from the National Library of Venezuela 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 4^th Battalion 9^th 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.

Photographs by colombianflowers.

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.

Yesterday Wired magazine had an interesting article titled “Web Has Unexpected Effect on Journalism,” about the effect that the web has had on journalism, and it’s not what I would have initially thought. The article explains that, rather than making journalism more democratic, the web instead serves as a medium for recycling many of the same stories over and over. Some of the examples given include how “international news” has been boiled down almost exclusively to Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan, leaving the rest of the world uncovered.

On the flip side, the article does mention that many journalists are adaptation to new environments and using the web to their advantage. Apparently many journalists have taken to writing blogs and many appreciate readers input on their stories. Still there seems to be a difference between how large “mainstream media” and “private, personal” blog treat participation; curiously the “mainstream” blog seem to allow more participation from readers, while owners of personal blogs tend to limit comments to those deemed more palatable.

You can read the complete article by David Bauder 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.

This morning on NPRs Morning Edition I heard a fascinating story about schools in Tucson that are trying to address both the high rates of Latino student dropout from school, and the lack of bilingual interpreters in the city. The school is beginning to harness these children’s language skills by training them to be simultaneous interpreters in the hopes that this will provide the children with enough incentive to stay in school, allow them to have a good job upon graduation and supply enough interpreters to meet the city’s demand.

Some of the children interviewed for the show commented that they have been working as interpreters from a very young age, since many have family members who need help communicating.

How refreshing to see programs encouraging children to be multilingual and multicultural. This type of program is the perfect example of how all of us can greatly benefit by encouraging the assets that each cultural group brings with it. Hopefully this is the beginning of a new trend that helps these students achieve in any field, not just as interpreters.

You can listen to the program here.

Memory Archive is an online project that is gathering memoirs from everyday people. The site allows you to search for memoirs indexed for particular words (either in the title or in the text), or you can brows various collections through category pages (here is an examples of the category page for “places“). Another good way of browsing through the site is with the “Random” bottom at the far left of the page.

Some of the writings I saw were fairly short, being made up of no more than a paragraph or two, while others went on for much longer. Some comment on life changing events like the San Francisco earthquake, while others reminisce on some of life’s simples pleasures, such as getting a new kitten.

Currently there are close to 1,300 memoirs, and growing. The site allows you to contribute from their main page, and warn people that entries are edited for format issues, and will index as needed. Once an entry is up, it will not be modified again unless the creator specifically requests a change. Under the page giving teachers ideas of how to use this site in the classroom there is also a cautionary note reminding users to be careful about including personal information in their narrative.

While looking around the site I was very pleased to see that there is talk of expanding the project to into languages other than English. Currently there are proposals to gather memories in French, Polish, and Russian.