Digital Invasion 

Sanford Berman's original cataloging to be decommissioned

Folks, Sandy Berman called me today and left a message on my answering machine that contained some bad news. The list of user-centered original subject headings created by him and his staff over two and a half decades at Hennepin County Library is now going to be replaced in the catalog by straight LC subject headings, or something close to that. In Sandy's words, "The curtain is coming down." No hardcopy of the authority file currently exists, and there is no reason to expect that the administration at HCL (which forced Sandy into retirement) will take steps to preserve it. Sandy's ideas about user-centered cataloging live on in the books and articles that he has written. [read more]
(link via Library Juice)

Book Exhibitions Online 

Science and the Artist's Book

Science and the Artist's Book is an exhibition which explores links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) invited a group of nationally recognized book artists to create new works of art based on classic volumes from the Heralds of Science collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, a part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' Special Collections. The resulting artist's books, each inspired by the subject, theories or illustrations of the landmark works of science with which they are paired, offer a number of witty, imaginative, and even poignant insights into the creative side of scientific research. [read more]

Libraries, bookstores and the USA Patirot Act  

Big John Wants Your Reading List by Nat Hentoff

During the congressional debate on John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act, an American Civil Liberties Union fact sheet on the bill's assaults on the Bill of Rights revealed that Section 215 of the act "would grant FBI agents across the country breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . . . requiring any person or business to produce any books, records, documents, or items."

This is now the law, and as I wrote last week, the FBI, armed with a warrant or subpoena from the FISA court, can demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities."

Once that information is requested by the FBI, a gag order is automatically imposed, prohibiting the bookstore owners or librarians from disclosing to any other person the fact that they have received an order to produce documents. [read more]

Turn out the lights 

Nasa's Earthlights