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President Obama Nominates New Librarian of Congress Who Supports Open Access (teleread.com)
Dr. Carla Hayden, CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and a former president of the American Library Association, is President Obama's nominee for Librarian of Congress. What a contrast to long-time LoC Librarian James Billington, a stuffy old academic who hated e-books and was so far out of touch that he liked faxing more than e-mail. According to President Obama, "Dr. Hayden has devoted her career to modernizing libraries so that everyone can participate in today's digital culture." Dr. Hayden was a fierce opponent of the Patriot Act and believes strongly in speaking out against surveillance. What's more, she would be the 14th Librarian of Congress, in charge of the Copyright Office, and the first woman and first African-American to hold the position.
This really should be left up to the next elected president, if we are to believe the do-nothing blow-hards in Congress.
The next President should pick the Librarian!!!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Never did understand why exemptions needed to be renewed...
I thought a book burning, and armbands for the muslims.
No more wasting tax payers dollars on books or education.
Clearly we should find out: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Maybe we could take this opportunity to express excitement about the incoming librarian rather than shit all over her predecessor. No matter what you thought of the guy, this is not a great time to say it.
Oook? Ook.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
With NSF's public access policy in place, PubMed provides open-access to a lot of journal papers in a variety of formats, including EPUB.
I've found the PubMed site itself to be one of the best-laid-out reference web sites I've used, period -- its links to external journals, full and partial papers in various formats, and ability to bookmark items of interest, are all very functional and easy to access.
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2015/15-174.html
https://www.loc.gov/about/about-the-librarian/previous-librarians-of-congress/james-h-billington/
Billington doubled the size of the Library’s traditional analog collections while simultaneously creating a massive new digital Library of Congress providing official legislative information, primary documents of American history, international cultural treasures and a host of web-based innovations such as electronic copyright registration, mobile access to reading materials for the blind and physically handicapped and modernized cataloging standards for libraries nationwide.
He established the National Book Festival, the John W. Kluge Center and its Nobel-level John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, the world’s largest and most state-of-the-art audio-visual conservation center, the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and other programs to "get the champagne out of the bottle" for the American public.
Billington also raised half a billion dollars in private support to supplement Congressional appropriations during a period of exponential growth, and despite a 30 percent reduction in personnel.
The second link has even more about that "stuffy old academic". It really does a disservice to him and to Slashdot for yaelk to base the story on Dr. Carla Hayden's nomination on some noname jackass's blog. My hopes that Slashdot was going to improve its article selection with the new ownership is fast fading.
Uh, what's the TLDR?
"What a contrast to long-time LoC Librarian James Billington, a stuffy old academic who hated e-books and was so far out of touch that he liked faxing more than e-mail."
What the fucking fuck. I read this sentence and my bullshit detector went so that I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and read for myself. Please learn to read and form your opinion instead of trusting this asshat submitter.
I read over his entire career and I can't really find much disagreeable with this guy.
During his tenure at the Library of Congress, Billington championed no-fee electronic services,[12] beginning with:
American Memory in 1990, which became The National Digital Library in 1994, providing free access online to digitized American history and culture resources with curatorial explanations for K-12 education
THOMAS.gov website in 1994 to provide free public access to U.S. federal legislative information with ongoing updates; and CONGRESS.gov website to provide a state-of-the-art framework for both Congress and the public in 2012
Educational portal for K-12 teachers and students in 1996, and subsequently new prizes and programs for advancing literacy in 2013
Online social media presence for the Library beginning in 2007, which expanded to include blogs, Flickr, establishment of Flickr Commons, Facebook, iTunesU, Pinterest, RSS, Twitter, YouTube and other new media channels. Twitter donated its digital archive to the Library of Congress in 2010; its vice president of engineering, Greg Pass noted, "I am very grateful that Dr. Billington and the Library recognize the value of this information."
"eCo" online copyright registration, status-checking, processing, and electronic file upload systems in 2008
The World Digital Library in 2009, in association with UNESCO and 181 partners in 81 countries, to make oline copies of professionally curated primary materials of the world's varied cultures free available in multiple languages.
Resource Description and Access (RDA) in 2010, a new cataloguing standard for the digital age implements in 2013
BIBFRAME in 2011, a data model for bibliographic description to provide a foundation for those depending on bibliographic data shared by the Library with partners on the web and in the broader networked world
National Jukebox in 2011 to provide streaming free online access to more than 10,000 out-of-print music and spoken word recordings.
BARD in 2013, digital talking books mobile app for Braille and Audio Reading Downloads in partnership with the Library's National Library Service for the blind and physically handicapped, that enables free downloads of audio and Braille books to mobile devices via the Apple App Store.
I would like to welcome her. Also, I'm really happy with the new NSF and PubMed public access policies. It'll be really nice for people to have non-paywalled access to indexed (hopefully, with good search too) papers. This is probably one of the best things about government, when there are massive open-access public information stores.
This is government over-reach gone mad, There's no need for a "secretary of the length of a football field" or a knight guardian of "areas the size of Belgium" or a minister for the "mass of an SUV".
Where does it end ? Justice presiding over Wiffles ?
Nullius in verba
Ok, I'm either way on gender and race (if you like that she is a woman and African American, then fine, good for you), my real joy would come from (1) adjustment (read overhaul, complete restructuring, massive change) to the copyright office, and (2) adoption of Open/Free technologies/licensing can only be a good thing. The proprietary / locked down world we have inherited is as draconian as Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and any of the worlds 'baddies' as you can imagine. Walt Disney was a control freak, and his descendants backstopped the Sonny Bono Act (aka DMCA) which was a massive clusterfuck. Bill Clinton signed it. I normally like Bill, but I can't ever forgive this. Obama wants to throw *everyone* under the same bus with the TPP. It must be killed, the DMCA repealed.
I was going to make a joke about bananas and "ook ook" but given she's black you just know someone's going to take it out of context.....
Eventually there will be no white people in positions of power - aren't we lucky. That'll show us! Wretched white people, building successful, safe civilisations (at least, before the Jews took them over and then managed to convince us all to start killing our white brothers and sisters in other countries (World War One and World War Two) and the Jews' enemies in the Middle East.
Are you sick of this yet? Good luck living as a white minority in a third world country.
It immediately goes on the offensive against the previous librarian for no reason whatsoever, then quickly jumps on the defensive to preemptively dismiss any criticism as thoughtless racism.
If race isn't a factor, then why did i immediately predict that it would be a black person as soon as I saw the article headline?
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
I'm confused why this is a good thing. I would personally side with the old guy. Some new age hipster coming in and ocr'ing all books and handing them over to Amazon is not "progress". It's indebting yourself. Email is also anything but secure, and was never meant to be. It's proliferation without real sender security layers existing on top of it are still a problem today. Believe it or not, fax is actually still more secure. That's why most government offices still don't email anything of significance.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
think "Selected" President, not elected.