Ann Seidle's documentary Hollywood Librarian premiered on opening night of the recently held annual conference of the American Library Association in Washington, D. C.5,000 librarians packed the Washington Convention Center to watch the film and hear from the director. There was a red carpet, there were people in gowns and tuxedos and there were people taking pictures. The opening was also covered in the Sunday Style section of the Washington Post with an article by Monica Hesse, The Modern Library: A Role Worth Checking Out .After the screening Seidl unveiled her distribution plan for the film. The plan is not...
Google Book Search: A Report From the "Google Five"
The first five libraries that jumped on the Google digital book train took time at the recent ALA Annual Conference to weigh in on how things are going. The Google Five are the libraries of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan and Stanford and the New York Public Library.Though all five said that they were "pleased with the progress" they also acknowledged that there have been some issues, which range from books being damaged to questions about the quality of searches being performed. One library had someone complain because some of the scans have thumbs visible! And over at Oxford's Bodleian Library they...
POD Talk
Print on Demand has arrived on main street. There has been a tremendous amount of publicity surrounding the recent installation of the Espresso Machine at the NYPL.For a nice primer on the print on demand issue check out Peter Brantley's post "Where lies the Print on Demand" over at O'Reilly Radar.He reproduces a highly informative thread of "a debate on POD business models."All you booksellers out there need to keep your seat belt on for this is going to shake the book tree as hard as the advent of online bookselling did.Book Patrol post from December 06 - Books: Espresso...
The Hunt Is On In the U.K.
The public libraries of the United Kingdom are on a treasure hunt.The goal:To find the coolest item in their collection that has yet to be digitized and enter it into a contest being run by the British Library.The contest is sponsored by the British Library with financial support coming from Microsoft.If a particular library doesn't feel they have anything worthy they can they include "local partners such as museums, archives, churches or stately homes" to come up with their submission.Finalists will be "invited to a high-profile awards ceremony at the British Library."There will be one winner for each part of...
Who Needs a Bookmobile?
Here's the deal:The Seattle Public Library bought this roving library three years ago to serve the various populations that can't easily get to any of their 25 branches. Day care centers, assisted living facilities and underserved neighborhoods all benefit greatly from this book bus.But, lo and behold, the bookmobile is up for sale.How can that be?Because its too big. Our beloved city of Seattle is pretty near impossible for a car to drive in let alone a book RV, we have so many hills that there only a few places you can drive straight. Why this wasn't apparent 3 years...