Recently in The Library Category

The Library is also a deposit library, which means that publishers in Vienna and the neighbouring federal states are required by law to send two free copies of everything that they are publishing to the Library. Recently, the colleague in charge of these reference copies told me about the reluctance of some publishers to fulfil their legal duties, the publishers' arguments why they do not want to submit the required copies, and how only threatening with a lawsuit seems to convince some of them.

In some ways, all of this reminded me of the whole Internet piracy debate; I found that the two parties involved here (Library vs. publishers) seem to have pretty much the same opposing arguments as the opponents in the online piracy debate; only in the library case, things seem much more in perspective.

This is The Library's author index listing all of its books acquired until 1931. All of these volumes were handwritten by librarians in the late 1920s and early 1930s. If you want to see what's inside these volumes, you can access this catalogue online.

As can be seen on the picture, each volume is about as tall and as wide as a standard fire exinguisher.

At the moment, there is a big uproar because Amazon removed some books from users' Kindle devices (see also [1] [2] [3]).

I quote:

This means that all the reassuring talks by Amazon that e-books are just like books, but better is a load of absolute nonsense. You're not allowed to resell them, you're not allowed to give them away, and apparently, you don't even own them, as Amazon can delete them from your Kindle at any given moment. (Thom Holwerda, osnews.com)

But yes, of course. Excuse me for being blunt, but only highly naive technophiles would ever believe that anything other than the above is the case.

What to do with a book...

“Awfullibrarybooks.wordpress.com is a collection of the worst library holdings. The items featured here are so old, obsolete, awful or just plain stupid that we are horrified that people might be actually checking these items out and depending on the information.”

Recent highlights from their collection include:

• I Want to Be a Librarian
• Bert Bacharach's Book for Men
• How to Deal With Parents and Other Problems
• Aleene's Craft Quickies
• Careers in a Library
• Diseases From Space
• What to Do With the Rest of Your Life

and much, much more.

As you can never know enough about awful library books, you can also stay up to date with the worst some libraries have to offer by following ALB's Twitter feed.

Many thanks to Richard for the link.

The results of the 2009 BIX (Bibliotheksindex), a quantitative performance index of libraries in central Europe (mostly Germany and Austria), are now available online at http://www.bix-bibliotheksindex.de/. (via netbib)

Hermann Rösch: Academic Libraries und Cyberinfrastructure in den USA. - Wiesbaden: Dinges & Frick, 2008

Hermann Rösch writes in the abstract to this book that he wants to take a look at academic libraries in the USA and to see how the digital revolution affects scientific communication in general and the structural development of libraries in particular, and how libraries manage to supply information in a changing environment.

The book is first and foremost an exercise in stocktaking; Rösch is not so much interested in potentials and future developments, but he is creating a pretty clear picture of the academic library landscape. One could argue whether it is necessary to give a detailed 30-page description of the history and organisational development of libraries in the USA, but it certainly helps to understand the challenges that the libraries are facing now. On the subject of "Cyberinfrastructure", Rösch remains somewhat vague, probably because the term represents a possible future development rather than a present status. The concept of constant information supply based exclusively on data networks is certainly a critical one as it raises the question to what extent libraries will still be needed as individual bodies rather than extensions of a university's computing centre; Rösch gracefully steers around this topic.