Tag: LIBRARY

Less than two weeks after Harper Collins incited a firestorm with news of its e-book library circulation cap, the American Library Association has thrown its hat into the ring. This week, one of the group's recently-convened electronic book task forces met in D.C. to draw up recommendations for an ALA response to stingy publishers' licenses. Among the recommendations suggested by the ...

HarperCollins has placed a restriction on the number of times its e-books can be checked out from a public library. After 26 checkouts, the expired title becomes locked in the library's virtual collection until a new digital copy has been purchased. The idea is that the physical copy of a HarperCollins book would be worn out after about 26 checkouts, and the library would then have to ...

The library honoring John F. Kennedy is about to publish all of its documents online, just days before the 50th anniversary of the late President's inauguration. The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation will formally announce the launch later today, making it the first presidential library to make its entire collection available on the Internet. Today's announcement caps a four-year, $10 million ...

Copyright law doesn't just pose a threat to file sharers and pirates. According to the Library of Congress, it may very well kill audio archiving, as well. In a recently published study, the Library of Congress concluded that current copyright law poses a formidable threat to music archivers, who must now work around strict regulations that the Library deems "restrictive and anachronistic" in ...

Public libraries, in theory, are supposed to be bastions of information. But with the rise of the Internet, many libraries have begun putting up online filters, to make sure users are using public broadband connections to search for actual information and not, well, porn. To many, it's a practical measure. But is it constitutional? According to the Washington state Supreme Court, it is. As the ...

While most of us continue to "ooh" and "ahh" over the flood of books that have been newly digitized for iPads and e-readers, blind bibliophiles are confined to the comparatively piddling collection of digitized books published in formats accessible to them. San Francisco's Internet Archive, however, has undertaken an ambitious digital archiving project to make sure that blind and dyslexic readers ...

There are tons of one joke blogs out there, but most of them are a tad low brow. It's a relief, then, to see Awful Library Books marry our love for quick, cheap laughs with something a little more sophisticated than stripper moms. Awful Library Books was started by Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, a pair of Michigan public librarians who have taken it upon themselves to point out some of the outdated ...

In an attempt to attract youngsters, employees of one Nebraska public library recently instituted a gaming workshop, until, that is, constroversy paralyzed the effort. One local taxpayer caught wind of the Omaha librarians' unorthodox event via the above video, which shows the librarians playing the game 'Rock Band' in what appears to be the library's study room. The librarians had posted the ...

Poor libraries -- they just want to fill our kids' heads with porn and violence. Is that so wrong? First, libraries were forced to start filtering out obscene content in 2000. Then came the Patriot Act, which granted the government the right to examine the books you checked out and the sites you visited on a library's public computers. Now, lawmakers are trying to ban children from accessing ...