Monthly Archives: April 2007

Redirect

By Michael Becker | Published: April 30, 2007
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus Blog: Adventures in Fair-Use Doctrine: Fair-use doc­trine, as cod­i­fied in U.S. law, allows peo­ple to repro­duce por­tions of copy­righted works “for pur­poses such as crit­i­cism, com­ment, news report­ing, teach­ing, schol­ar­ship, or research.” That seems straight­for­ward enough. But there’s a span­ner in the works, as Shelley Batts can [...]
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The Post-Digital Library

By Michael Becker | Published: April 28, 2007
In the May issue of Harper’s, Gideon Lewis-Krauss writes about the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, a pri­vately owned and oper­ated library a few blocks from the city’s pub­lic library. Its own­ers, Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger, focus their col­lec­tion on phys­i­cal mate­ri­als work­ing together with dig­i­tal hold­ings. The cou­ple sees libraries as refuges [...]
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“Interesting places are rubbish!”

By Michael Becker | Published: April 28, 2007
I’ve just got­ten back into town after a trip to Helena to see author Neil Gaiman in per­son at the Montana Library Association’s annual con­ven­tion. The English writer, who’s behind such graphic novel hits at the “Sandman” series and nov­els like Good Omens and American Gods, read an unpub­lished short story and answered audi­ence ques­tions [...]
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Contemporaeity

By Michael Becker | Published: April 27, 2007
Dan Visel at the Institute for the Future of the Book writes about how con­tem­po­rary and reac­tionary blogs must be. With blogs, he writes, peo­ple check the most recent entries to see what is new. After all, that’s how blogs work. The most recent news gets top billing. As a result, it’s hard for dig­i­tal [...]
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Corrupting English

By Michael Becker | Published: April 26, 2007
Text mes­sag­ing is trash­ing Irish stu­dents’ writ­ing, the Irish Department of Education reported. The said “The fre­quency of errors in gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion has become a seri­ous con­cern” after study­ing the writ­ing habits of 15-year-olds. They go on: “Text mes­sag­ing, with its use of pho­netic spelling and lit­tle or no punc­tu­a­tion, seems to pose a [...]
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