Robert-Goldwater-Library

The road to Infotopia? On digitizing the world's books

Anthony Grafton in this week's New Yorker provides a lucid and level-headed analysis of the many fervid efforts to digitize the universe of the printed word, such as the Google Library Project and Microsoft's Live Search Books Publishers Program, as well as more focused (and frequently non-profit) ventures such as the Open Content Alliance and more subject-focused efforts such as Aluka (about which you've previously read in this space).

In fact, writes Grafton, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing ...

Google and Microsoft pursue their own interests, in ways that they think will generate income, and this has prompted a number of major libraries to work with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit book-digitizing venture. Many important books will remain untouched: Google, for example, has no immediate plans to scan books from the first couple of centuries of printing ... Other sectors of the world’s book production are not even catalogued and accessible on site, much less available for digitization. The materials from the poorest societies may not attract companies that rely on subscriptions or on advertising for cash flow.

Closer to home Grafton also provides a concise and complimentary history of libraries from third millennium B.C. Mesopotamia to the present. The conclusion includes an encomium to libraries that might remind readers of the retardaire Nicholson Baker. But unlike Baker Grafton makes a case for libraries being an enduring participant in the research process, not the sole player:

For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come.

Apart from the article, "Future reading: digitization and its discontents," there is a complementary online-only article with links to many of the web resources cited in the article.

ILLUSTRATION: TOM GAULD

NEW ARRIVALS @ The Goldwater Library, no.60

A list of newly arrived books at the Goldwater Library will be posted bi-monthly as an easily downloadable text file. Here is the list for Summer 2007:

Download newarrivals-no_60_Summer2007.txt

Timbuktu digital library project

From the NY Times, 8/7/2007

A copy of the Koran from the 12th century. According to notes in the text, it was bought for a Moroccan king for a sum of gold. (Candace Feit for The New York Times)

Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival
by LYDIA POLGREEN

TIMBUKTU, Mali — Ismaël Diadié Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that has somehow endured through 11 generations — a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.

“This is our family’s story,” he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. “It was written in 1519.”

Photo source >
The musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten outpost’s future.

A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden for centuries in houses along Timbuktu’s dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu — a city whose name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere — may once again claim a place at the intellectual heart of Africa.

“I am a historian,” Mr. Haïdara said. “I know from my research that great cities seldom get a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to our past.”

This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge of a renaissance.

“We want to build an Alexandria for black Africa,” said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run library in Timbuktu. “This is our chance to regain our place in history.”

The South African government is building a new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their contents available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city’s musty family libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.

The Libyan government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktu’s only swimming pool and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu’s new seekers have a variety of motives. South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links to some of the history stored here, while American charities began giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary series in the late 1990s.

This new chapter in the story of Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it ... [Read more]

• Library of Congress online exhibition of Malian manuscripts from Timbuktu
• Timbuktu Manuscript Project (University of Oslo Centre for Development and the Environment)
  • Visit the Timbuktu Libraries
• Search WATSONLINE

Call For Items: New Blog, ARLIS/NY

Announcing the new blog for the Art Libraries Society of North America, NY Chapter (ARLIS/NY): http://www.arlisny.org - see also their Flickr photos.

via their home page:

To give our blog a personal touch, we are asking for your help in sending our way art-related, newsy information about yourself. Our membership is made up of creative, fascinating, cultured and knowledgeable people. Let's find out what we are all doing and share our news.

Information can include:

art-related awards you've received, milestones, professional activities, presentations, articles you've written, announcements, staffing changes etc.

Photos are also welcome.

Send submissions to Suz Massen at [email protected] or Alexandra de Luise

at [email protected]

Thanks for your help in making the blog something we can all call our own.

Suz Massen & Alexandra de Luise

EH, we salute you!

Congratulations to goldwaterlibrary.org blogger extraordinaire Erika Hauser on her much-deserved promotion to Senior Library Associate. Woo-hoo!

-- Her fellow bloggers Ross & Joy

Too Cool for Their Shush-shirts

EAT, DRINK, BE LITERARY From left, Jessica Pigza, Maria Falgoust, Jeff Buckley and Sarah Murphy at a social event for librarians where the author Robert Sullivan, far right, spoke. photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

via NYTimes:

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers
By KARA JESELLA
Published: July 8, 2007
ON a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists.

SOCIAL BOOKWORMS Maria Falgoust helped start Desk Set to meet like-minded librarians. Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“Maria Falgoust, 31, is also a founder of Desk Set, which took its name from the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy romantic comedy. A student who works part time at the library at Saint Ann’s School, she was inspired to become a librarian by a friend, a public librarian who works with teenagers and goes to rock shows regularly.

Since matriculating to Palmer, Ms. Falgoust has met plenty of other like-minded librarians at places such as Brooklyn Label, a restaurant, and at Punk Rope, an exercise class. “They’re everywhere you go,” she said.”

When talk turned to a dance party the group had recently given at a nearby restaurant, their profession became clearer.

“Did you try the special drinks?” Sarah Gentile, 29, asked Jennifer Yao, 31, referring to the colorfully named cocktails.

“I got the Joy of Sex,” Ms. Yao replied. “I thought for sure it was French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

Ms. Yao could be forgiven for being confused: the drink was numbered and the guests had to guess the name. “613.96 C,” said Ms. Yao, cryptically, then apologized: “Sorry if I talk in Dewey.”

That would be the Dewey Decimal System. The groups’ members were librarians. Or, in some cases, guybrarians.

“He hates being called that,” said Sarah Murphy, one of the evening’s organizers and a founder of the Desk Set, a social group for librarians and library students.

Ms. Murphy was speaking of Jeff Buckley, a reference librarian at a law firm, who had a tattoo of the logo from the Federal Depository Library Program peeking out of his black T-shirt sleeve.

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

When the cult film “Party Girl” appeared in 1995, with Parker Posey as a night life impresario who finds happiness in the stacks, the idea that a librarian could be cool was a joke.

Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young literati. “Unshelved,” a comic about librarians — yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.

“We’re not the typical librarians anymore,” said Rick Block, an adjunct professor at the Long Island University Palmer School and at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, both graduate schools for librarians, in New York City.

“When I was in library school in the early ’80s, the students weren’t as interesting,” Mr. Block said. 

Since then, however, library organizations have been trying to recruit a more diverse group of students and to mentor younger members of the profession.

“I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.

In the last few years, articles have decried the graying of the profession, noting a large percentage of librarians that would soon be retiring and a seemingly insurmountable demand for replacements. But worries about a mass exodus appear to have been unfounded.

Michele Besant, the librarian at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Association of Library and Information Science statistics show a steady increase in library information science enrollments over the last 10 years. Further, at hers and other schools there is a trend for students to be entering masters programs at a younger age.

The myth prevails that librarians are becoming obsolete. “There’s Google, no one needs us,” Ms. Gentile said, mockingly, over a drink at Daddy’s.

Still, these are high-tech times. Why are people getting into this profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many of the members of the Desk Set wear?

“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.

read on...

Yuki rides again!

The fame of the Goldwater Library's most faithful visitor, Yuki Endo, grows ever wider.

Yuki is featured prominently in the March 2007 (2007年3月) issue of Sotokoto magazine. The issue features a multi-page photo essay on Yuki and the places he regularly visits on the Upper East Side. (We're still busy translating the Japanese to see if the Goldwater Library is mentioned among them.)

Yuki was previously featured in an article in the New York Times (which goldwaterlibrary.org blogged here).

NEW ARRIVALS @ The Goldwater Library, no.59

A list of newly arrived books at the Goldwater Library will be posted bi-monthly as an easily downloadable text file. Here is the list for April-May 2007:

Download newarrivals-no_59_AprMay2007.txt

A Schomburg Renaissance

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

A 1925 sign from the New York Public Library’s Negro division.

via the NY Times:

Harlem’s Cultural Anchor in a Sea of Ideas
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: May 11, 2007

YOU could almost see the ghosts among the new furniture and modern recessed lighting. It was a few days before the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, finished hanging two exhibitions and stripping the paper off the doors at its bigger, brighter new entrance. Amid the sounds of hammers and drills, they prepared for tomorrow’s public celebration of the center’s two-year, $11 million renovation.

The Schomburg is as much a monument to an idea as it is a building. So those ghosts, workaday and luminous, inhabit a space of many incarnations, tracing its roots back to the 135th Street New York Public Library branch that opened there in 1905. Predominantly Jewish then, Harlem was mostly black by 1924. Over the years, Alex Haley researched “Roots” at the Schomburg; James Baldwin and Gordon Parks both found it a refuge; a young Ossie Davis honed his craft there.

By the time it officially became the Schomburg in 1972, taking its name from Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Puerto Rican-born black bibliophile who donated his collection, it was a one-stop connection with the global black experience. Its wonders include a rare recording of a Marcus Garvey speech, documents signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a signed first edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, daguerreotypes of African-Americans from the 1830s, Benjamin Banneker’s almanacs. Its exhibitions have tracked black migration and displayed the contents of Malcolm X’s pocket when he was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom.

“The center has increasingly become one of the cultural anchors of the greater Harlem community, one of the top three tourist destinations, along with the Apollo and the Studio Museum in Harlem,” said Howard Dodson, the Schomburg director. “The kind of change that’s taking place in Harlem is of political, social and historical interest to the center, and we’ll be here to document it. We are not going anywhere.”

As the Schomburg unveils its facelift, Harlem itself is also undergoing one of its periodic renaissances. There’s new real estate development, new stores and restaurants, new places to imbibe culture. The association with Harlem has been the constant for the Schomburg trove of more than five million items: art, manuscripts, films, photographs. The center has been a place for community meetings and for local politicians, for schoolchildren and eminent researchers like the historian John Hope Franklin.

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, is among those who see the renovated Schomburg as an emblem of a Harlem at the top of its game. Hundreds of thousands of tourists pour into Harlem annually to shop in the stores on 125th Street, sit in the pews of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church or revel in the serendipity of finding new cafes or dowager buildings.

“The Schomburg stands as a bearer of the idea that our history and culture are important,” said Ms. Golden, who is African-American. “The renovation will reinvent the sense of the institution as living, breathing space. All the cultural institutions in Harlem are going through a period of incredible growth, and it’s not just about physical renovation.”

A walk through Harlem makes vivid its embrace of many worlds. There are the tiny African braiding shops, mom-and-pop restaurants with an African or Caribbean flavor, as well as Citarella and Starbucks amid the cacophony of 125th Street, the area’s commercial spine. It is dotted with stores like Old Navy, as well as the Apollo and the Studio Museum. The streets are cleaner and safer than they have been in years. (read on ...)

And take note of the following:

Two exhibitions will be on view through Oct. 28: “Stereotypes vs. Humantypes: Images of Blacks in the 19th and 20th Centuries” and “Black Art: Treasures From the Schomburg.”

The “Stereotypes” exhibition is meant to show the prevalence of caricatured images of blacks for most of the early 19th and early 20 centuries. It uses items like sheet music, posters, advertisements and postcards to show how words like “darktown” and “coon” were casual companions to depictions of blacks with distorted features.

Some of the items are on loan from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich.

“A small amount of this is from the South,” Mr. Dodson noted. “A significant amount of the stereotypical ads come from New York.”

The propaganda is contrasted with real-life black images from that period: couples in their wedding finery, 1920s bathing beauties, formal banquets.

“Black Treasures” is an eclectic display that includes the 1868 marble and bronze “Portrait of Ira Aldridge as Othello,” by Pietro Calvi, as well as the 1969 collage “Black Manhattan,” by Romare Bearden, and dozens of other work by Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippin, Faith Ringgold and others.

   

NEW ARRIVALS @ The Goldwater Library, no.57/58

A list of newly arrived books at the Goldwater Library will be posted bi-monthly as an easily downloadable text file. Here is the list for February-March 2007:

Download newarrivals-no_57-58_FebMar2007.txt