May 22, 2008
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present unto you The Enlightenment: ” illuminates your shelf rather your soul. Made from plexiglass and lit by an energy-saving bulb, the lamp plugs into an outlet with a standard cord…
March 5, 2008
Nicholson Baker, champion of all those wonderful but yellowing newspapers that those wretched libraries were once thoughtlessly tossing away in a policy of “destroying to preserve” (read Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper if you’re not catching my sarcasm here), has surfaced again. No longer is he the investigative journalist ‘Siva-ing’ or bringing to light and public discussion the questionable enterprises of otherwise do-gooder libraries in the name of preservation, access, and stewardship. Rather, it seems he’s traded in the role of artifact martyr (”pillaging his own savings, Mr. Baker purchased some 6,000 volumes of bound newspapers from the British Library …”) for a new hat as poster boy for user damage of circulating library collections.
Mr. Baker is now a user of Post-it notes as bookmarks, a keeper of more than a Nissan Sentra’s backseat full of the University of New Hampshire’s books in his Maine barn (”piles of Churchill; of Herbert Hoover’s postpresidential papers; war records, biographies, letters, diaries),” a user of microfilmed and online newspapers (!!), and an exemplary culprit in the proper care and handling of library collections (he “fumbled and allowed Hoover and Brittain to squirt from his grasp”).
Oh yes — and about all those newspapers he’d saved from certain extinction: “’I went a little over the edge,’ Mr. Baker said recently about some of his newspaper-gathering efforts, and he added that being able to send his bound volumes to Duke was ‘a blessing.’”
Check out the full article from the NYT, but also breeze through the publicly viewable discussion on the PADG listserv. The author “Concerned in Bethesda” provided me with my first and best laugh of the day: “Leave the poor artifacts alone I say!”
February 21, 2008
Two burnination items caught my eye yesterday. First, the cover of the February 25, 2008 New Yorker has a sorta funny cartoon about the life of a book (author writes book, publisher agrees to publish book; reader buys and reads book; reader put book out with recycling; homeless man picks up book out of recycling and burns it for warmth).
Moments later, a promo for Out of Ashes: Recovering the Lost Library of Herculaneum popped up on our PBS HD channel. I can’t find a listing for any upcoming airings of this documentary, but the promo showed charred scrolls which would seemingly turn to dust if touched or if the wind blew just strongly enough:
“For 250 years, scholars have struggled to unroll and read a collection of 1,800 carbonized and crumbling papyrus scrolls found in the wealthy Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. In the 21st century, promising new multispectral imaging technologies-enlisted by the National Library in Naples and Brigham Young University-reveal text that has not been seen for 2,000 years.
…. Ironically, the destructive force of the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved this collection of papyri; the library probably would have deteriorated if it hadn’t been carbonized and sealed under volcanic material.”
Interesting!
February 7, 2008
Sure — you’ve probably heard the University of Michigan folks shouting from their blogs and website that they placed their “millionth book from their collection online.” Now, I’m unclear if this marks the millionth book digitized via their Google Book Search partnership, or if this is a combination of their in-house digitization projects plus their Google Book Search efforts … anybody out there know? And is this their millionth digitized book that’s available in the public domain or just their millionth digitized book? There’s a big difference in this milestone, depending!
What’s really cool is that the Michigan Digitization Project celebrates the hard-working staff who made this milestone possible. When I see their numbers (436 contributing staff members) and think of our current staffing levels (take that number, divide by 100, add FTE) of … well, we’ve got a way to go to 1,000,000.
But what’s SUPER COOL is the Details of Digitization photo set. Did anyone subscribe to National Geographic World (the youth version of National Geographic magazine) when they were growing up? The back of the magazine was my favorite part, with close-up photos where you were to figure out “What in the World...?” This great photo set has beautiful closeups of broken books, conserved books, in-process books, and the equipment, tools, and supplies used in conservation.
January 28, 2008
The blogosphere is fetishing up Tom Stoppard’s book satchel, featured in yesterday’s New York Times Fashion and Style section. Now that we know what it looks like inside, I’d love to know what the how much the satchel weighs on its own … and what the sticker on the right side says.
