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Yes -- libraries are rightfully risk-adverse about certain tech-facing facets of their core activities -- specifically, those which pertain to copyright. The nightmare scenario for all libraries and archives is that they make something from their holdings freely available on the Internet when it's in fact not copyright-clear, and then years later someone shows up claiming millions of dollars in damages. Out of necessity, they *must* be conservative when it comes to anything dealing with copyright status.

As Ageh mentions, keeping libraries' donors happy is key, and NYPL and most similar institutions are incredibly under-funded by the gov't and literally live and die by their wealthy patrons. So the technology footprint needs to be aligned with the wants of the donor to a certain extent. Because these people are often older, sometimes they don't have a firm grasp of why the library would want to spend their money on "tech," so the money goes elsewhere. The big donors pretty much get what they want, and sometimes that's more than having a branch named after themselves.

Now, can libraries do cool stuff when it comes to tech? Absolutely, and they do, including NYPL (check out NYPL Labs) and of course, the Library of Congress and their long-term digital strategy. But all of these activities are subject to the two rules above.

some nations...Africa was colonised by 7 European countries—Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. http://exhibitions.nypl.org/af...

That's "hic sunt dracones" -- while you won't find that included in the Map Warper, it is in the NYPL Digital Collections. Here's the view that actually says hic sunt dracones (just right of center).

That's "hic sunt dracones" -- while you won't find that included in the Map Warper, it is in the NYPL Digital Collections. Here's the view that actually says hic sunt dracones (just right of center).

There's a copy of it at the New York Public Library and one of his relatives has a site with a scan of the book (I can't believe they let me photocopy the whole book!) and pictures of the plates.

Unfortunately, it's mostly not that interesting of a read.

Ah, yes. The METRO cards. It worked, but I had to go to the NYPL in person to fill out the card, and then take the card to the cooperating library (usually Columbia U. medical library) and use their collection. Technically I was supposed to only read a maximum of four journals or something, but once I got in to the library I could use the stacks just like any other reader.

Actually the public university libraries aren't always open to the public, even though they're paid for by public taxes. I used to live around the block from John Jay College, which had a pretty good collection of core science journals and an excellent collection of criminal justice publications. I used to use their library regularly, but then their new librarian decided to end public access. It was like going blind.

The bottom line is that you can get a lot of journals with some effort, but you can't get them all and sometimes by the time you get the journal through ILL your article is already written. One librarian told me, "You can get it elsewhere. You only want to use our library for convenience." Yeah, it is convenience. I can get a lot more work done in a library that closes at 11pm every night like a university library, than I can at a public library that closes at 6pm or 8pm. http://www.nypl.org/locations/sibl . It often makes the difference between getting the job done and not getting it done at all.

Another problem with the public library is that some publishers charge libraries for online access based on their number of clients. For university libraries, that's the number of students and faculty, but for public libraries, as one public librarian told me, some publishers count the entire population of New York as their clients. That's why you can't get the online-only material in the New England Journal of Medicine. The director of the NYPL made this brilliant move to the digital library, but many of the digital subscriptions are prohibitively expensive. The last time I went to SIBL, I needed to use Science Citation Index, but they didn't have it because it was too expensive. In some ways they had better collections before computers.

The problem is, this isn't the digital library of the future that they promised us 50 years ago. like Vannevar Bush's memex. When I read about the libraries of the future, I always wondered, "Who's going to pay for all this?" and I assumed that the public libraries would still be there. Now the public libraries have gone through such cutbacks that you can't use them for research the way you used to. They've suffered from this anti-tax and anti-government movement.

We have a digital divide between the people who have access to information and the people who don't. Do you have a medical question? If you're in the digital underclass, you can curry together an answer from Wikipedia and Medscape, and a million hits from sites that are trying to sell you something. Or you can do what I do, and what the medical librarians recommended to me, which is to start with review articles in the major journals -- New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Lancet. It's a lot easier and more reliable to just go to the reliable sources in the first place.

Do you want to live in a country where all people have access to academic-quality public libraries, as we used to have until the cutbacks of the 1970s? Or do you want people to live in ignorance? To most of us here the answer is obvious, but there are people out there who just want to cut taxes.

Same here. I use Kindle's Lending library quite a bit. The other thing this is competing against is just plain public library lending through Overdrive.

One of the best kept secrets in New York is that all residents of New York *State* can get a New York City Public Library Card. http://nypl.org/
NYPL has one of the richest ebooks collection for lending around. Works great through Overdrive with Kindle.

$10/month is too steep. I would reconsider if the price came down to a yearly subscription of $50.

Frankly, I trust wild eyed revolutionaries like you less than I trust them. Most revolutionaries promise utopia, none deliver them. It isn't uncommon for what comes after revolution to be far worse than what preceded it. The fact that you advocate mass murder as the start of building your utopia is a warning sign. The fact that you would throw away the US Constitution with its many protections and separations of power for something unspecified but somehow better is another warning sign. You are being carried away by your imagination. Beware, or you may end up being carried away by men in uniform, either white or blue.

The Soviet Story (2008)

Well... despite the ALA policy above there IS quite a bit of restriction built-in.
It's probably just the case of them not considering something as basic as a "library card" an actual restriction.
Note the language used and the ages in question.
And the burden of "thinking about the children" being placed squarely on their parents' shoulders.

As for "actual knowledge of typical librarian policies" - I could ask my friend who is a librarian. Let me know exactly what you want to know and I'll relay it to her.

But bear in mind that "typical" and "official" policies may be two VERY different things here.
Actually, considering that each canton has its own ministry of education, plus the Federal one, plus the one for Republika Srpska...
That's like... what? Twenty four different things?
And, while Tuzla may not be very fundie, situation in other places CAN and DOES differ.

I mean, every couple of years some idiot comes out against Santa Claus - cause that's Christian propaganda aimed at Muslim children.
And naturally, those are not the most serious cases.

And don't think it's just the Muslims.
It is generally understood that Croat means Catholic, Serb an East Orthodox Christian and Bosnian or Bosniak a Muslim Such logic is even imposed on the constitution through the fact that only member of those three nationalities can and may be elected as presidents. Of which we have three at the same time.
And couple of years ago when a Croat from a socialist-democratic party (as opposed to several Croat nationalist parties) was elected into the presidency as the representative of the Bosnian Croats - those from the Croat nationalist parties called for his resignation because he was not "a real Croat" in their mind and because they claimed that he was elected by Muslims.
Remember that "Obama can't be the presidn't cause he ain't 'merican" nonsense?
Well... Imagine if it was republican party that demanded his resignation cause a) he is not a U.S. citizen and b) cause only blacks voted for him.

I'm guessing that there MUST be some mechanism at play which ensures that kids don't go home with "erotic materials" one day, coming back with an angry loud parent in tow the next day.

Those would be the parents who didn't bother to supervise their children, and who were misusing the library as a daycare center. I'd be quite gratified to see librarians not knuckle under to that particular brand of bad, responsibility-abdicating parent.

That said, taking the first major U.S. library system that came to mind (the New York Public Library), it appears that their policy is that anyone from age 12 up can get their own library card as long as they have suitable identification. Under-12 kids need the in-person approval of a parent or guardian to obtain a card, and the parent can choose whether their borrowing is open to the full collection or restricted to the 'juvenile' stacks.

Even considering that type of restriction, however, I've never been to a public library that checked identification or age before allowing access to the stacks; even a kid with borrowing restrictions - or no card at all - could still pull books off the shelf and read them in the library.

My local library in New York has a decent ebook lending program. Essentially it uses DRM-ed PDFs. Also, the New York (City) Public Library has a rather large eBook library, although it's locked into the Kindle universe.

I'd prefer to see a more cross-compatible standard that works with all the eBook readers out there, and doesn't give Amazon a monopoly, but this is better than nothing.

Most libraries have privacy policies that state they delete the record of a book being checked out once it is returned. For example, you can find the policy for NYC public libraries here: http://www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/legal-notices/privacy-policy. They even state that they backup their data, and the record of your returned book may exist for an additional 4 weeks in their rolling backup system. I love that they give you this level of detail into how they operate.

http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

This essay could be considered supporting Alan Kay's suggestion that
"the computer revolution hasn't happened yet".
http://squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/face_to_face.html

Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
by Paul D. Fernhout
January, 2007

Educational technology has been a big success at homes, in libraries, in
museums, and in business.

Let's say you have an interest in, say, Aardvarks. At home and want to
know the weight of a typical aardvark right now? Google it:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aardvark+weight
Want to buy one? :-) Try Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Safari-Aardvark/dp/B000H6H4VK
Want to sell one you no longer need? Try ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Aardvark-Direct-Pro-Q10-PCI-Audio-Interface-w-CubaseLE_W0QQitemZ270076288454QQihZ017QQcategoryZ64446QQcmdZViewItem
Want to collaborate with others on making one better? Try sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aardvark
Want a 3D simulation written by an aardvark?
http://flyawaysimulation.com/article746.html
Want to make your own educational simulation about aardvarks? Try one of
the tools linked here:
http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
An endless variety of information related to just one arbitrary topic,
easily accessible using Google or another search engine.

At the library, want to find a good book on, say, Zebras? Use an online
library catalog system:
http://leopac.nypl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&aspect=basic&npp=10&ipp=20&ri=&index=GW&term=zebras

Want to make a museum kiosk showing protein folding in action in 3D? Write
a simulation with Python:
https://simtk.org/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=&topics=18+307

Does your business need to know more about "quality control" to prevent
customer complaints? Lots of online resources:
http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=quality+control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_control

So, at home, library, museum, or business, technology is delivering the
goods (physical or digital) and making these places all a lot better.

With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on d

When was it renamed ??

As soon as the check cleared.
http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman

In the minds of many New Yorkers, including me, it will always be the New York Public Library, one block from 6th Ave.

I agree that one and a half cents per page is a fantastically cheap rate for library scanning. The New York Public Library charges twenty-five cents per page plus all sorts of additional fees. One of these three-dollar packages would easily run more than eighty bucks from the New York Public Library. (A little less if you got it by mail rather than PDF, but not much.)

On the other hand, these needed to be scanned precisely once; the labor is entirely a sunken cost. There are plenty of people (looking at you, Distributed Proofreaders) who undertake truly staggering tasks of scanning and proofreading in their spare time, using bandwidth donated by the internet archive.

This sort of archive could have been scanned by volunteers (it's partially funded by a library, so it may in fact have been), and I'm sure that Brewster Kahle would have been happy to donate bandwidth. I'm aware that that's not how things were done, and that the library is charging an extraordinarily reasonable rate for access to what would normally be very restricted collections, but it could have been done as a freebie rather than as a fundraising opportunity for the Foundation. (Which has very admirable aims, I agree.)

Yes, and Both Romes fell, the third endures, and a fourth there will never be , which was a statement of the Orthodox Church, but also was used to support the Ultimate Victory of Communism(TM) for a time.

But skipping back to your closing statement, how do you know that? >p> Let me take it as a statement of your faith that Now That We Have Modern Accomplishments (TM), that good guys will win, and indeed must win.

I like the sounds of that. It reminds me of WWI, the War to End all Wars(TM). Clearly, though, their technology was not as advanced as ours, and so the ultimate human spirit didn't shine through. Or maybe poverty, which was supposed to go away with the New Deal type programs (or with the UN), hadn't quite vanished by then, since Poverty is the Source of All Evil(TM).

But I have seen conflicting statements of faith that just might go against that. For example, certain evangelical Baptists think that China will rise up with a million-man army for a final battle in the Middle East. That doesn't sound like Technology in Service of Humanity(TM) to me.

So exactly which statement of faith should I believe, and why?

Because right now, I'm not convinced that Technology Solves the Problem of Human Evil. Call me a skeptic.

If you have a NYC public library card you can access the past year for free via NYPL.org

You may want to start with the Internet Public Library or your public library. (In this case, that's my local public library.)

They basically admit that the material is in the public domain, but that seeing as they own the material, they don't have to give you a look at it. I guess that's true. If you own a copy of a book in the public domain, you can reproduce it all you want. But it doesn't give you the right to break into your neighbor's house to get a copy of a book *he* owns that is in the public domain!

So, they're not charging for the image because they own the image, they're charging for the *file* because they own the *file*. I guess that's no more unreasonable than selling a copy of a book of the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is most definitely in the public domain, but it still costs money to print the books. People can and do both sell and buy them...

The interesting thing is this: while they can charge for the file, AFAIK they can't prevent *you* from both selling and giving away the file yourself. It's kind of like GPL software: you can charge as much as you want for it. You just can't prevent anyone *else* from giving it away themselves...

Like my favorites, the Lewis Hine photos of the Depression-Era construction of the Empire State Building. Anybody who says photography is not art should view them. http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/hi nex/empire/empire.html/

Let's play a game.

How many hardhats can you spot?

Like my favorites, the Lewis Hine photos of the Depression-Era construction of the Empire State Building. Anybody who says photography is not art should view them.
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/hi nex/empire/empire.html
Not slashdotted at the moment.

We have 8 million people, and since we all live in close proximity to each other, we understand the need for good public services. Some quick facts about the NYPL:

- over 49 million items in 4 research libraries and 85 branch libraries
- 74% of funding is from government; they get the other 26% from contributions, endowment, etc.
- 15 million visitors/year
http://www.nypl.org/pr/objects/pdf/2003nyplfacts.p df

They need an assistant director for digital stuff, among their 3000+ employees, because their website gets 10M hits/year, and they're working hard on digital collections -- an eBook program, cardholder access to hundreds of databases, and digitizing their own collection.

For example, they have done a great job with a digital version of this new exhibit at one of the research libraries:
http://www.inmotionaame.org/

Besides, if we want a government 1/7th the size of the federal govt, why shouldn't we have one?

I guess I was wrong, the NY Public Library is for New York City

And people wonder why the city of NY has a government 1/7th the size of the federal government...

How does storing media on a foreign server make someone a "pirate"? Has this term been abused to also include stealing disk space?

Or...does he look like this?

The suit is for trademark infringement, not copyright or patent infringement.

In the U.S. Trademark rights can be held indefinitely by the registrant, or it's successors in interest as in this case, with timely filing of required paperwork and paying of appropriate fees.

What I find amusing is that the designer's of the hotel clearly did not do their homework. The research branch of the New York Public Library doesn't even use the Dewey system. It uses the Library of Congress categories. Here's the NYPL's online catalog. I guess the designer's went into the Library to look at the architecture, but didn't actually bother to call for a book, or even check the catalog. Had they, they wouldn't be in this pickle.

I call bullshit on this. The reason to use XHTML isn't because some standards nazi masturbates to good code. It's because XHTML provides long-term durability and significant portability as the world transitions to XML, and as non-desktop browsers, like phones and PDAs become more and more popular as browsing devices.

From a good source, here's some real answers as to the reasons behind XHTML.

It's a bit low-tech, but since I moved to NY I've been getting four or five movies a week from the public library. The selection is vastly larger than my local Blockbuster, you can request things online (telnet lives!) and they send them to your local branch and then e-mail you when it comes in, you can have up to 15 requests active, you get the movies for a full week, and it's all completely free! Most films even come in DVD now. (The system is for books, too. Remember books?) It's amazing. Plus, when you pay your dollar-a-day overdue fee you get a warm fuzzy feeling for giving to the library, as opposed to handing four bucks to some mumbling chowderhead at the video megalopoly outlet. The NY site is here.

* That doesn't mean using Dreamweaver or any other GUI HTML design software. Real HTML-ers write it by hand. Real Men use vi from what I hear but I like BBEdit for UNIX.

The "Premium Discount Search" actually looks like a pretty good deal. Since Northern Light charges $1-$4/document normally, this discount rate could be very economical.

There is one *free* source of premium online info that is often not well known: Your local library.

By entering in my PIN # from my library card, the New York City, Westchester and White Plains library systems have some decent online tools.

They may not be Nexis/Lexis, but they are free, have some pretty decent information available, both in breadth and depth.

Actually, I had a good reason for using one search engine to find another just last week.

I was at a branch of the New York Public Library. They've been switching over from dumb terminals (which you can use from home - just telnet to nyplgate.nypl.org and login as "leo") to a Windows-based GUI, hybridized with a Netscape browser. However, to prevent the average user from surfing the Web on machines obstensibly set up for searching the library catalog, URLs cannot be entered into the Location field and the Open Page dialog is disabled.

As I was on the road during my lunch hour, and needed to check an address for my next stop, I spent about 5 minutes coming to the realization I have described above. Fortunately, the NYPL GUI helpfully links you to "approved" or "recommended" web resources, such as other libraries and literary sites. It took me about another minute to find an "approved" site that got me to Yahoo. From there, I went to AltaVista. From there, I could have gone anywhere -- with or without the ability to explicitly enter the URL.

WRT to the library, this whole incident demonstrates the idiocy of the library's effort to disable normal browser usage. The web is too interconnected to give a user a tiny subsection, short of not actually connecting to the Internet and using cached/offline versions of the "accepted" pages.

But, much more importantly, WRT to search engines confusing or removing their competitors from their search databases, it runs contrary to the spirit of the web and their entire raison d'etre. You want to find out about Yahoo on Lycos? No problem! Here's Yahoo itself, here's a parody site, here's a testimonial for Oracle. Search engines are expected to rate according to relevance, but not to editorialize. It's unprofessional, and confusing as all hell to the newbies.

If a search engine wants to distinguish itself on technical merits (like Google) or excellent design, it shouldn't act like a sleazy appliance salesman ("you don't wanna shop there, buddy...I gotta great deal for you right here....")

- Richie