Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Tag: Internet Archive

  • Internet Archive – When a Library Closes

    Internet Archive – When a Library Closes

    I like this latest update from the Internet Archive. Their news release read:

    “‘For a poet, the library is life’, mused Valerie Deering, Marygrove College Class of 1972. So when her beloved alma mater in Detroit closed for good in 2019, Deering worried about what would happen to Marygrove’s 70,000-volume library. For more than a century, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who founded the college, had been curating a one-of-a-kind collection of books about social justice, African American history and Detroit. How could these precious books do the most good in the world? Marygrove’s solution: donate the books to the Internet Archive to be digitized and preserved. Now, less than a year after the physical library closed, the Marygrove College Library Digital Collection is open for borrowing.”

    The collection of books can be found at https://archive.org/details/marygrovecollege. I’ve noted that the book ‘Called Up, Sent Down : the Bevin Boys’ War’ by Tom Hickman is available, so I will peruse that today. There’s some question about the legality of this, but I hope they find a way forwards at the Internet Archive, this is a wonderful contribution towards literature.

     

  • Internet Archive and Legal Action

    Internet Archive and Legal Action

    There is a very useful resource of books and publications at the Internet Archive that offers the text of hundreds of thousands of books. They’re in the challenging situation now of finding themselves being sued by four publishers, the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House. The aim of the Internet Archive is to make older books available on-line, and for those books still in copyright, they restrict the number of copies that can be lent out in a similar set-up to traditional libraries.

    It would perhaps be a great shame if the publishers are able to bring down this project at the Internet Archive, but a real problem remains that libraries are failing to service the need of many readers. The stock of titles on the shelves of Norfolk libraries is, to be honest, erratic and users have to pay per book to access the vast majority of useful stock which is at the “County Reserve Store”. The library service does an excellent job of supplying modern fiction titles, but their selection of non-fiction misses out some key texts that I’m not sure any library should be without, not helped by the problem mentioned to me by the library staff member at Dereham that they lost many books to thieves.

    Many of the books at the Internet Archive are out of print, so can only be obtained at some cost from second-hand book dealers. The publishers will probably win their campaign against the Internet Archive, but I’m hoping there is some compromise available. Anyway, the text of their case (in .PDF) is here.