librarian.net

A few people from the Early Modern Studies Group at Harvard have created the Theatrum Catalogorum which collates “library catalogs from every major European country” The next version should countain North American catalogs as well. Of particular interest is the fact that these catalogs are not just linked, they are annotated somewhat. While most of these notes are jus tinformation for English speakers on how to search the catalogs, library geeks will enjoy some of the meta-commentary such as “Many early modern holdings probably lost in an eighteenth-century fire.” or “Don’t bother looking in 1930-1991 or 1992-present catalogs.” [thanks pk]

Books are getting lost. When they’re lost people don’t check them out. When people don’t check them out, we think people don’t like them. When we think people don’t like them, we sometimes weed them (if we can find them). Why is this happening? Bad cataloging, especially in books written in non-English languages. What’s going on, and how is rampant copy-cataloging making the problem worse?

Recently, [researcher Joyce] Flynn checked Harvard’s less-than-25-year-old computer-based catalogue system, and discovered that many - perhaps most - of the Gaelic and Irish books with Na … titles are miscatalogued and so, in this odd way, are half-missing. That catalogue system is now the only way the public can access titles in the Harvard College Library collections.

“The issue goes beyond just Harvard’s Widener Library,” Flynn says. “Because Widener is often the first North American library to acquire and catalogue an obscure foreign language title, Widener’s cataloguing data frequently become the standard for libraries that acquire the book later.

Gov Docs May Make Way For New Café. [thanks dan]

Interesting wrinkle in the Google Print Library project as it’s being worked out at Harvard Library. Publishers think Google needs to ask their permission before it copies their works, even if they’re in the public domain.

“The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitisation is) by a commercial organisation of works that are still in copyright,” she wrote. “It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied.”

Morris wrote that Google needs to obtain permission from publishers before using their work. While she wrote that it may be impractical to ask every publisher, Google should ask permission through collective licensing organizations.

Also interesting, seems that while Google Print actually destroys the books it scans, Google Print Library does not.