Happy ninth birthday to the entire crew at LISNews. Blake’s written a nice little “how it’s going” blurb and would like anyone who is interested to chip in and contribute. If you’re a nascent blogger and don’t feel ready for your own blog, consider adding the occasional comment or story over at LISNews.
Harvard decides to opt out of Google book scanning
In light of the recent Google Books/APA settlement, Harvard has examined the details and decided not to be part of the project after all.
Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff, “the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.†He also expressed concern about the quality of the scanned books, which “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations, and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research.â€
Update: According to the comments, I had this sort of wrong. Harvard is deciding to not have Google scan their copyrighted books but the digitzation project proceeds apace. Thanks Jon.
podcast suggest: Unquiet History
For those of you who thrilled to Matthew Battles’ book Library: An Unquiet History should try out his podcast — similarly titled but not library-specific — Unquiet History. I’m currently enjoying listening to a short history of medeival urban garbage. Fun!
2008 debates – I am a sucker for sexy factchecking
John McCain mentioned in one presidential debate that Barack Obama wastefully earmarked $3 million for “an overhead projector” for Adler Planetarium. If you’re like me, you were probably thinking “What? Projectors don’t cost that much!” It’s true, the regular kind don’t, but an Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI projector does. I enjoyed reading the press release that the Adler put out in response.
Supreme Court decision concerning “free exercise”
I think this is important. It’s a case, one of hundreds, that the US Supreme Court declined to review. “There is no free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations … public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, particularly when the school imposes no requirement that the student agree with or affirm those ideas,” the court said. Some more details from a previous OIF post and the School Law blog.