#1. Does not happen in a library. Happens to a librarian. No swearing.
#2. Happens in a library. Happens with a librarian. Some swearing, actually mostly swearing.
LoC Authority files, yours to keep!
Tim made the announcement of the announcement (pdf), so I guess this is the announcement of that. Simon Spero, superhero, has released an almost-complete copy of the LoC authority files. You can just … have them. I have a copy. I like to grep through it for fun on snowy evenings (that is how my Nerve personal ad will start, I am certain of it). I am interested to see what happens next. You can’t copyright this data, but you can sell it. Now that it’s available for free, it will be interesting to see if you can even do that.
This phase of the project is dedicated to the men and women at the Library of Congress and outside, who have worked for the past 108 years to build these authorities, often in the face of technology seemingly designed to make the task as difficult as possible.
Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian’s Journal
The New York Times discusses the day to day activities of Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, as detailed on his blog at the British Library.
In mid-January, he published a chart on the impact of sectarian violence on his staff for just the month of December. It included 4 assassinations of employees and 2 kidnappings, 66 murders of staff members’ relatives, 58 death threats and 51 displacements.
The newest entries, posted on Thursday, take readers through Wednesday, Jan. 31. Dr. Eskander writes that the week started off quietly: Most of the staff couldn’t get to work because of blockades and military checkpoints.
e-government shunting extra work to libraries?
FreeGovInfo has this post by Chris Zamarelli about how the perception of libraries as being good places to get access to e-goverment resources is a mixed blessing for libraries who lack staffing and other resources to actually act as public information officers. The huge bummer is that this would be a great role for libaries to fill, IF library staff had better training and suitable funding to actually carry out these positions effectively.
Mary Minow points us to the Handbook on Copyright and Related Issues for Libraries downloadable and redistributable and a slim 700K