"Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library."

"Having been on display in the Scottish Poetry Library for a few months, the poetree is now kept behind the counter for safety, but if you ask nicely I'm sure they would let you have a look."

"Increasingly, this seems to be a war for survival.  I understand that traditional publishers are getting more and more desperate as the digital revolution proceeds and they continue to dither about how to address it.  But academic faculty members are the source of almost all the content these publishers publish, so this behavior is an extreme example of biting the hand that feeds them.  It is even more stupid, in my opinion, than the strategy of recording industry who is suing its own customers, because these publishers are attacking a group that is both their customers and those who supply them with a product in the first place."

"A recent post by Seth Godin attempts to define a librarian as something limited by format: print books are bad, digital bits are good. So librarians should become digital wizards, or something. I think the current hip term is "data sherpa who directs and engages conversations," or some other bullshit. And a librarian is bad if she's not continuously evolving and growing toes.

But a good librarian would never exclude a data format from the search results. You ask me for information on turtles and you're getting everything I can find, and that includes printed books. But chances are, you're going to wave your Kindle in my face and say, "I want it here." And regardless of my reply, my eyes will tell you to go fuck yourself.

Sixty percent of the world's people would kill to have a library filled with books. Some countries won't even let you into a library without proper identification. But Americans, on our rapid decent from being a world power toward become the world's bag boy, have lost sight of what has lasting value and moved on to what has recurring monthly fees. In response to Seth's Blog, Bobbi Newman says, "One of the many roles of the public library is to ensure that all people have access to that information."

And that is the fundamental difference with every current view of the library and the real purpose of the library: Libraries are for everyone."

"The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value."

"Environment for DeveLoping KDD-Applications Supported by Index-Structures (ELKI) is a Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD, "data mining") software framework developed for use in research and teaching by the database systems research unit of Professor Hans-Peter Kriegel at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. It aims at allowing the development and evaluation of advanced data mining algorithms and their interaction with database index structures."

"This introduction is based on my experiences with using Protovis in my Visualization and Visual Communication class earlier this spring. While the concepts involved are really not that difficult, they are rather foreign to students who have not been exposed to functional programming. And since that is also the case for a lot of hobbyists and people wanting to do visualization who do not have a computer science background, I imagine they run into the same problems."

"Object orientation provides a flexible framework for the implementation of the convolution of arbitrary distributions of real-valued random variables.
We discuss an algorithm which is based on the Discrete Fourier Transformation and its fast computability via the Fast Fourier Transformation. It directly applies to lattice-supported distributions. In the case of continuous distributions an additional discretization to a linear lattice is necessary and the resulting lattice-supported distributions are suitably smoothed after convolution."

"CouchDB 0.11 lets you create nicer URLs. The path to nicer URLs includes two separate steps: URL Rewriting and Virtual Hosts."

"Copyright for Librarians is a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL), a consortium of libraries from 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. The goal of the project is to provide librarians in developing and transitional countries information concerning copyright law. More specifically, it aspires to inform librarians concerning:
copyright law in general
the aspects of copyright law that most affect libraries
how librarians in the future could most effectively participate in the processes by which copyright law is interpreted and shaped."

"The requirements for building R vary, depending whether the build machine is an Intel-based or PowerPC-based Mac and whether universal build is desired. The following description shows the minimum requirements for building R.…"

"Hook into the rendering pipeline to create special effect. Use low level rendering commands to achieve exactly what you want."

"What does this mean to you?

If you currently receive Time Inc. or Forbes periodical content electronically from Gale or any provider other than EBSCO, you and your patrons will lose access to that content over the next year. While there will remain alternative, high-quality titles in all information providers' products, there will be an impact on users, especially those who access content through long-term statewide subscriptions."

"Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy" comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were "loaned" last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself."

"What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight."

"This page contains links to some of the most useful free software and open-source software for operations research and industrial engineering."

"Your third point, about the founders' vision of America, is something that has been a matter of keen interest to me most of my adult life. In fact, I even wrote a book about it, where I went back and read the founders' early writings about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. What a fascinating time to be alive! What astonishing minds! Here's what I learned: our whole system of government was based on the idea that the purpose of the state was to preserve individual liberties, not to dictate them. The founders uniformly despised many practices in England that compromised matters of individual conscience by restricting freedom of speech. Freedom of speech – the right to talk, write, publish, discuss – was so important to the founders that it was the first amendment to the Constitution – and without it, the Constitution never would have been ratified."

"This is stupid on so many levels that I forced myself to wait a full day before blogging about it so I wouldn’t rant incoherently."

"Based on an article originally published in Technicalities (v. 25, no. 5, Sept./Oct. 2003), this pamphlet provides a brief overview of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as developed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). Using full-color graphics, What is FRBR? outlines the background of the development of the Functional Requirements, the concepts involved and their potential impact on cataloging rules, bibliographic structures and systems design for cataloging applications."

"Dan manages to imply that the problem he encountered can be tagged open-source. Coordinating consistent builds across a tangle of libraries would seem to be hard enough that it would require some orchestration. It’s actually kind of striking how well this works in the loosely inter-project world of open source. Stefano has been known to point out that the friction that rises out of solving this problem creates inter-project social energy that’s extremely valuable. Which I’ll admit to wondering if it’s not a good thing that these problems arise."

"The trade associations argue instead that “alternative means for achieving the desired use should first be pursued including seeking permission from the rights holder.” This is wrong — a non-infringing use is one where prior authorization from the rights holder is not necessary. Reminder: fair use is an unauthorized use. If you are asking permission, then you are not exercising your lawful exception."

"The Mechanics’ Institute sprang up in 19th century England for the ostensible purpose of imparting upon the working class mechanic knowledge of the sciences, literature, and arts. In actuality, a myriad of purposes shrouded the creation of these institutes, which were ultimately appropriated by the middle class when it became apparent that the working class was not as receptive as had been anticipated. ... As the middle class began to move in, the working class retreated to the Institute’s libraries and reading rooms, where they were free to discuss topics that interested them. One of the unintended consequences of the failed Mechanics’ Institutes was the aiding in the creation of a democratic infrastructure for working class access to printed materials.... In short, despite being borne from a desire to regulate, they were an important precursor to the establishment of public libraries and a liberated mass reading public."

"Conclusion: don’t wait. Lots of things need to happen before all this becomes real! If we wait until all the problems are solved, the commons won’t have what it needs to explode. But people aren’t watching IR space, which is the best time to create an open, disruptive system! Use existing ontologies. Work around problems rather than tackling them head-on."

"Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world’s computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA’s 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever."

"We think they [Google] are doing great stuff," Kahle said in a 2006 interview with CNET. "If the materials would be made available for broad public search and educational use we'd be all for it."

"Books have led some to learning, and others to madness..."

What we really need is a distributed solution to scanning orphaned works. Really. All of us. We need to take the centralized policy-makers out of the equation early on, and support OCA with sweat equity.

And I did not see this before I wrote my call to war. Something in the air.

"Mine may be the last generation that defines itself by books, rather than digital data."

I don't think it's that simple.