Library Stuff

Washington Post – “The scene unfolded at a collection day organized this week by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial center, as part of a national campaign to find and preserve materials from that period that are scattered in homes across the country. Since its launch in April, the project, called “Gathering the Fragments,” has accumulated more than 33,000 items, including diaries, art works, personal belongings, letters and photographs.”

WSJ – “From around the mid 1970s into the 1990s analog recording became popular and affordable. Photocopiers, audio and video cassette recorders may seem slow and cumbersome now, but then they put capabilities into the hands of individuals which had previously only been available to fairly large organizations.In the days of punk, photocopied “fanzines” spread the word. For other forms of music, home-made mix cassette tapes were often the chosen medium. At the time, their ephemeral nature was perhaps part of the attraction, but now people are beginning to look for ways to preserve examples of a past that often represents their youth.”

FOX News – “Con enthsba! Look familiar? Those confusing semi-words you retype to buy Rolling Stones tickets on TicketMaster.com or sell an antique lamp on Craigslist might not read as real words, but they are. They’re actually images from the pages of books — and thanks to reCAPTCHA technology, they’re a key reason Google has digitized more than 15 million books since 2004. The Google Books project has vastly improved the quality of digitized text, thanks in part to those curvy, sometimes colorful words on the web that are filled out 200 million times a day, explained Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Luis von Ahn, the inventor of the reCAPTCHA system.”

AP – “A New Jersey university will be the new home for nearly 15,000 documents associated with Bruce Springsteen. Books, concert programs, magazines and newspaper articles formerly kept at the Asbury Park Public Library will be moved to Monmouth University in West Long Branch on Nov. 1.”

PBS – “Since the founding of Zeega, one of the primary areas in which we’ve been working is the radically changing domain of libraries and archives. In the digital age, we believe libraries and archives pose one of the most exciting opportunities for re-imagining the ecosystem of public knowledge production and sharing.”

AP – “Precious Bible manuscripts originating in the Jewish community of Damascus, Syria, went on display for several hours Wednesday, offering a rare glimpse at a collection that includes books spirited to Israel in clandestine operations before the ancient community disappeared at the end of the 20th century. The books are held at Israel’s national library. Because of security and conservation concerns, most of the collection has been on display just once before, also for just a few hours, more than a decade ago.”

AP – “A project by the libraries at the University of South Carolina has taken 19 newspapers from across the state and made editions between 1860 and 1922 available on a website. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant is paying for the South Carolina Digital Newspaper Program. USC Libraries Dean Tom McNally says the old newspapers help the history of communities come alive.”

AP – “The University of Connecticut is preserving about 5,000 fragile court documents from Puerto Rico dating to the 19th century and putting them online for researchers, scholars and genealogists. The double-sided, handwritten documents cover civil disputes over land, slaves and livestock that occurred in the Arecibo court district from 1844 to 1900.”

AP – ” Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word. Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.”

Emory University – “Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) has a new collecting focus: African Americans in sports. The collection brings to light the effect athletes and others in the sports world had on the civil rights movement and their struggle to be recognized for the impact of their achievements on society.”