“Edward de Grazia, a lawyer and teacher who in the 1950s and ’60s broadened the scope of what Americans would be allowed to read by helping to defeat government bans on sexually explicit books, died on April 11 in Potomac, Md. He was 86.” (via NYTimes.com)
“Don R. Swanson believed laboratories weren’t the only source of new scientific discoveries. Swanson, a specialist in the relationship between natural and computer languages, thought electronic databases also held the key to medical knowledge. A trailblazing information scientist, Swanson died Nov. 18 at age 88. Concerned that excessive specialization could inhibit scientific creativity, Swanson pioneered the field of literature-based discovery, which uses existing research to create new knowledge. The three-term dean of the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School and professor emeritus in the Humanities Division believed that unearthing unseen links between two distinct areas of study could yield new discoveries—what he called “undiscovered public knowledge.”
AJC – “Inspired by his mother, a civil rights activist in Atlanta during the turbulent 1960s, George “Ray” Mitchell took a courageous stand in 1971 in the South Georgia library district where he was newly hired. “There was a sign that advertised story hours. He put another sign up saying, everyone is welcome at the library,” said Mr. Mitchell’s daughter, Sarah Yates of Savannah. Mrs. Yates said she and her siblings were not told the details of what happened next, “but I know at the board level and in the community, he stood them down – my father was very strong. First of all he was 6-foot-4, a tremendous person to be in the presence of. He was not much for words. But they knew he meant it, and no one fought it in the end.”
Jacket Copy – “Project Gutenberg announced Wednesday that founder Michael S. Hart has died. Hart, 64, died Tuesday in Illinois. Project Gutenberg provides free e-books of thousands of works that are in the public domain. Hart first got the idea of sharing significant documents electronically early, in 1971.”
WSJ – “Barbara A. Ringer, a scrivener in an odd niche of the federal bureaucracy who died April 9 at age 83, negotiated and drafted the Copyright Act of 1976, the first major revision in seven decades of a basic law governing intellectual property.”
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