What's in a name? 

ac…me n.
Noun: The highest point, as of achievement or development: reached the acme of her career.

Other ACMEs on the Web

Words 

Omniglot: a guide to writing systems

What is an omniglot?
An omniglot is a rare, possibly mythical, book-eating beastie. The word 'omniglot' comes from the Latin omnis (all) and the Greek glotta (tongue) and means 'proficient in all languages' or 'having knowledge of all languages'.

What is the purpose of this site?

• To provide information about all writing systems and the languages they are used to write.

It currently contains details of over 150 different scripts, including a few you'll find nowhere else.
(link via leuschke.org)

Kids Predict the Future 

Libraries of the Future
(link via Library Juice)

Digital Delivery 

Penguin Classics Inks Deal With Ebrary

ebrary, a provider of information distribution and retrieval services, announced that Penguin Classics will distribute its library to new online markets via ebrary's software, ebrarian. Penguin Books is an imprint of Penguin Putnam Inc. [read more]

DMCA 

Court Decisions Tilt DMCA Balance Away From Libraries, Users by K. Matthew Dames

Critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act will spend part of this holiday season figuring out how to use the lumps of coal a pair of federal courts tossed them in response to lawsuits that challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 law. [read more]

Digital Technology 

A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections

This Framework is intended for two audiences: first, for people who are working in the context of projects and want to develop good digital collections; and second, for funding organizations and agencies that want to encourage the creation of good digital collections. [read more]

Surrogate or the Real Thing 

The Israel Museum and the Electronic Surrogate by Susan Hazan

If the intrinsic experience of a museum is about its material collections, why would a museum even want an electronic surrogate? [read more]

Bibliotheca Alexandria 

Bibliotheca Alexandrina: The revival of the ancient Library of Alexandria

At the meeting point of the three continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, Egypt has been the cradle of civilizations since ancient times.

The ancient city of Alexandria, one of the glories of antiquity, was at the beginning of the third century B.C. the birthplace of the great plan to build a library: the BIBLIOTHECA ALEXANDRINA. But the library, this vast storehouse of learning, was destroyed by a fire which ravaged Alexandria. The Egyptian Government, in close co-operation with UNESCO, has decided to build a new library in Alexandria to endow this part of the world with an important focal point for culture, education and science. [read and see more]

Official website of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

New library 'open to all' by Tariq Hassan-Gordon of the Middle East Times

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina located just a stone's throw from the site of its historical predecessor will be a space for free speech and intellectual debate said the library's director-general, Ismail Serageldin.

"No question is off limits," said Serageldin on December 9 during a speech to the Cairo Foreign Press Association. "We have to have a space of freedom, for free speech. History teaches us that Socrates was given a cup of hemlock but his ideas survived."

Seragaldin, an internationally respected academic who was previously a vice president of the World Bank, may find that his vision for freedom of expression is undermined by the politics of the day. Once the library initiates its cultural programming and book collection, there may be a divergent interpretation of acceptable free speech between the library and the government. [read more]

E-Book News 

Adobe Not Giving Up On E-Book Market by Calvin Reid

Though it has watched a succession of major e-publishing operations go out of business, Adobe , the firm offering Adobe Acrobat and other e-publishing software, remains convinced that e-publishing and e-books will eventually grow into a significant market. [read more]

Newsstand 

The new RLG DigiNews is out.

Feature Article:
Emulation vs. Migration: Do Users Care by Margaret Hedstom and Clifford Lampe

The December D-Lib Magazine is out. As usual, lots of interesting reading. This one caught my eye: A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries by Hussein Suleman and Edward A. Fox

Abstract:
Digital Libraries (DLs) have traditionally been positioned at the intersection of library science, computer science, and networked information systems. The different underlying philosophies of these three fields has had an unsettling influence on the development of DLs. While library science is fairly mature, networked information systems are constantly evolving to keep pace with Internet innovation. DLs are thus expected to demonstrate the careful management of libraries while supporting standards that evolve at an astonishing pace. This architectural moving target is a predicament that all DLs face sooner or later in their lifecycle, and one that few manage to deal with effectively. To exacerbate this problem, there has been a general desire for systems to be interoperable at the levels of data exchange and service collaboration. Such interoperability requirements necessitated the development of standards such as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). These standards have achieved a degree of success in the DL community largely because of their generality and simplicity. Informed by those lessons, this project is an attempt to consistently extend known interoperability standards to form the basis of a framework of components for building extensible DLs. [read more]

Year in Books 

From Publishers Weekly--The Year in Books 2001

This is the debut of PW's "The Year in Books," an annual review examining noteworthy trends in books and publishing. This approach includes highlighting titles that we discern to be of exceptional quality and also citing books that are important for other reasons--because they have spearheaded a wave of similar books, encapsulated a notable point of view, stood apart from the pack or just sent buyers rushing to the checkout counters. We've also included titles that, despite their potential, failed to take off for various reasons. We hope that highlighting them here might give them a second chance. [read more]

The Web--Ten Years Old 

What will the Web be tomorrow?

A Web gadfly points his stinger, Jeffrey Zeldman interview

State of the Web: Glass half full, Tiffany Shlain interview

Charting the Web's next transformation, Tim Berners-Lee interview

Libraries in the Political World 

An axe to the root of our culture

Julia Lewis reveals how the government is forcing libraries to sell -- and sometimes pulp -- great works of literature in the name of vibrancy and multiculturalism. [read more]

Libraries and Archives Online 

Russian Archives Online