“Calling this machine a robotic librarian is like calling a sandwich vending machine a robotic chef.” Looks like a book dispensing machine to me which is what an earlier news article calls it, the “24 hour book dispenser”. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. Please note that the robot librarian makes you check in your own books [thanks ed!]
Category: books
secrets of book publishing
I’ve been sitting on this link for a while but I figure it’s worth tossing out here. Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known what authors should know about how most (not all) publishers work.
open shelves classification – a project in search of a leader
I’ve always thought that one of the troubles with librarianship was that there are always more great ideas and projects than anyone has time for or can get funding for. As a result we outsource projects to the people who have time and money and thus lose control over the end product. I have no idea if Library Thing’s open source Open Shelves Classification Project is going to wind up looking like a library product or a vendor product, but I’m curious to find out. As Tim Spalding says “You won’t be paid anything, but, hey, there’s probably a paper or two in it, right?” I haven’t seen much chatter, blog or otherwise, about this just yet but I’ll be keeping my eyes open. Whether or not this project it ultimately successful, I think it’s an interesting grass rootsy way of looking at ideas of authority and rejecting the top down let-us-have-you-contribute-and-then-sell-it-back-to-you models we’ve been working under.
Working towards more public books, fewer orphan works
Public domain determination becomes clearer cut, more books entering the public domain thanks to … Google? Jacob Kramer-Duffield explains how Google and Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders put their book-scanning and OCR-ing smarts into trying to solve the thorny orphan works problem to determine which out of print books have had their copyrights renewed and which haven’t. Neat. [via joho]
Reading: Revolting Librarians Redux Remains
John Miedema wrote a review of Revolting Librarians Redux on his blog and also announced he’ll be coming out with Slow Reading the book, through Litwin Books. I was surprised during my last set of talks that there were librarians who had copies of RLR (and asked me to sign them) at both places. My co-editor on that book, K.R. Roberto has also come out with Radical Cataloging which looks like it will be a similarly irreverent and yet serious look at another part of our profession. With essay titles like “This Subfield Kills Fascists” and “Dr. Strangecataloger: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tag,” it should be on every cataloger’s desk.