TILT-y Mail #19
Access to justice via the library
I was away on Friday which is my usual ship date for this newsletter. I attended the Library Leaders Forum (hashtag: LibraryLeaders2016) an event the Internet Archive puts on after their annual birthday celebration. I did a LOT of repping of Open Library and some of our new features. This was bittersweet since the project is well-loved but undersupported institutionally (I am a very part time worker there). I think this is true for most non-profit projects, definitely true for a lot of library projects. The Archive has always run like a cross between a start-up and a non-profit, so allocation of resources is a strange and mercurial beast.
This project was announced there. Georgetown Law scanning their entire library and making it available online. Details getting worked out, but exciting to see them trying. Listening to them discuss this project was interesting. They said “Yes we think we might get sued, but we think this is Fair Use and we’re prepared to defend that.” I wish more libraries were willing to do this.
I met a lot of people doing interesting things and saw some of my favorite librarians (Sarah! Heidi! Andrea! Mel! Merrilee!). A few projects
- The Authors Alliance is helping authors reclaim the rights to their works and publish them freely online. I made an FAQ of how to use Open Library for this. They also have this cool Termination of Transfers tool which can help authors use a complicated and obscure piece of copyright law to help them get their author rights back.
- Hathi Trust has created the Copyright Review Management System (tough to find good landing page link to this but here’s info about it) which can help institutions do copyright status determinations about items they own.
- CatMapper (nb: not technically a library tool)
- GifCities the animated GIF search engine from GeoCities sites (all available via the Archive)
As I was preparing a set of links to show off Open Library at the many demos we gave, I found scanned copies of Pseudepigrapha the “official bulletin” for San Francisco Public Library staffers back in the sixties. I pulled out a lot of fun bits including this one that I think announces the new use of some sort of computer.
And this announcement about the end of the fax machine “experiment” in July 1968.
All of these newsletters are keyword searchable. Library history nuts should check out the whole collection.
You can see more about the things the Archive launched via their blog or the new or improved features in Open Library via our blog. Link dumping resumes next week. New Hampshire librarians, I will be at NHLA’s business meeting this Thursday at 10 am which is my last speaking gig for 2016. I will also probably be at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center Open House next Monday somewhere between 3–5 pm. Please say hello if you see me.
TILT-Y MAIL is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
