October 2009 In January 2009, the Library of Congress (LC) contracted with R2 Consulting LLC (R2) “to investigate and describe current approaches to the creation and distribution of MARC records in US and Canadian libraries”, with a primary focus from a primarily economics perspective on “in effect” mapping “the marketplace…
David Badertscher One hundred years ago last Tuesday (November 3, 1909) the criminal court building in Manhattan (bounded by Centre, Lafayette, Franklin, and White Streets) was declared unsafe for human occupancy and everyone in the building at the time was ordered to leave immediately. According to a New York Times…
This posting is prompted out of concern for the need to provide open, online access to public documents including CRS reports, two e-mails received during the past two weeks, and two recent requests for recent CRS report referenced in a previous post to this blog. First the e-mails. About a…
On October 9, 2009 an Op-Ed article, A LIBRARY TO LAST FOREVER, by Sergey Brin, Co-Founder and President, Technology of Google Inc. was published in the New York Times.in which he discusses Google’s rationale for their book project. For the informaation I am including in this post the two final…
Hearing and listening to all of the media hype of the last few days, one could be convinced that the Baucus version released a couple of days ago is the only legislation being seriously considered in the present debate. Far from it. Not only do he have at least one…
Today Sept. 16, 2009, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, released the first draft of the committee’s long awaited proposed legislation to overhaul the country’s health care system. The proposal is the result of more than a year of preparation and more than three…
Here is the companion article to “In Appreciation of Library Catalogers and Cataloging Standards” posted by me 7/23/09. At the end of that article I wrote that I had asked Joni Cassidy to consider writing an article for this blog that woud explore RDA in greater depth. Joni agreed, I…
In their September 8 article in Bloomberg News, Cary O’Reilly and Linda Sandler write that “[A]s the White House and Congress debate how to regulate financial crisis, judges have assumed the point position of punishing Wall Street for causing the worst recession since the 1930s.” O’Reilly and Sandler point out…
Title: Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln Author: John Stauffer Publisher: Twelve (Hatchett Book Group) Price: $30.00 ISBN: 13-0978-0-446-58009-0 Pages: 432 Abraham Lincoln has been written about extensively and ranks as one of the most prolifically written about subjects in print. Frederick Douglass is a much…
According to the Editors of The Crime Report, the movement to ban shackling pregnant prisoners is gaining momentum. On August 26, 2009, Governor David Paterson of New York signed a bill (now NY Chapter 411 2009) banning the practice for all but the most unruly inmates. What is happening in…