Library Stuff

WSJ – “China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google.”

Bloomberg – “In December, Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. got a call with an offer that was too good to refuse: a chance to exhibit a 400-year-old complete map of the world, the first China had seen.”

NYT – “The Chinese government is taking a cautious approach to the dispute with Google, treating the conflict as a business dispute that requires commercial negotiations and not a political matter that could affect relations with the United States.”

NYT – “Google has agreed to hand over a list of books by Chinese authors that it has scanned in recent years, company executives said on Monday, in an apparent effort to placate writers who say their works were digitized without their permission.”

Reuters – “China has issued new Internet regulations, including what appears to be an effort to create a “whitelist” of approved websites that could potentially place much of the Internet off-limits to Chinese readers.”

CNN – “It’s been a year since China’s government lifted its ban on the Chinese version of U.S.-based Wikipedia yet it remains unclear whether Wikipedia has gained any share of the country’s massive Internet readership.”

Guardian – “News websites in China have begun requiring new users to register their true identities before allowing them to post comments – a move rejected by internet companies and users in the past.”

NYTimes – “News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.”

BBC NEWS – “On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen killings, social networking sites such as Twitter and the photo-sharing site Flickr were blocked in China in an attempt by the government to prevent online discussion on the subject”

Press Release – “The National Library of China, the largest library in Asia, will add its bibliographic records to the OCLC WorldCat database, the world’s most comprehensive online resource for finding items held in libraries, making those records available to researchers worldwide.”