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 | Quick Action May Have Limited Damage in DCPL Georgetown Fire
It's been a month since a massive fire engulfed the Georgetown Branch of the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) and, with disaster recovery under way, it's clear that the destruction could have been much, much worse. Thanks to help from the library's neighbors, including the Library of Congress and Georgetown University (GU), and quick action by DCPL librarians and city firefighters, a far more serious disaster appears been averted.
"Our contractor, Belfor Property Restoration, who is dealing with the majority of our wet things at their facility in Fort Worth, TX, said that in their history they have never had a client act as quickly to retrieve and properly store materials," DCPL spokesperson Monica Lewis told the LJ Academic Newswire. Lewis saluted the sage advice of "friends at the Library of Congress" who advised DCPL to order a freezer truck immediately to the scene of the disaster. The truck was on its way while the building was still engulfed in flames. "This is why [Belfor] can say that all the materials we gave to them were saved from mold."
The Georgetown branch houses a wealth of archival information, including historic maps, and primary collections about the area including its famous Peabody Collection, as well as many priceless works of art, which Lewis noted, firefighters began rescuing as soon as the blaze was under control. "We were also able to take out of the building approximately 600 boxes of dry books from the collection," Lewis noted. Those books are being stored temporarily in the DCPL central library.
With the damage to collections mitigated by quick action, Georgetown University librarians are now pitching in to help DCPL restore service and to replace lost items. "We have thousands of wonderful documents and photographs in our archives and manuscripts collections that contain much about the history of the Georgetown, and our materials may be of use to the Georgetown branch," Georgetown director of libraries Artemis Kirk told the LJ Academic Newswire. Kirk noted that DCPL's interim head of special collections and the Georgetown branch archivist were scheduled to visit the GU library this week. In addition, GU has offered a residency for the archivist, "not only as a place to work, if he needs it, but also for an opportunity to learn about the collections we have that may be of future use" to the DCPL. "It's the right thing to do, and I think it's what 'service' really means," Kirk added, saying that GU is willing to do whatever it can to assist the branch's recovery.
Ironically, just before she learned of the fire at the Georgetown branch, Kirk was meeting with other administrators on campus to review GU's emergency and disaster plans. She said GU's plans are "very thorough," and are reviewed on an ongoing basis—and would be reviewed even further in light of this most recent fire at the neighboring DCPL branch. "Any disaster or tragedy that occurs, unfortunately, to any institution is an immediate prompt to all of us to rethink our own recovery plans," she explained.
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Princeton's Robert Darnton to Succeed Verba as Harvard Library Director
Harvard University this week announced that Robert Darnton, a professor of European History at Princeton University, and a "scholar of the book," will succeed Sidney Verba as Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, effective July 1, 2007. Darnton's appointment follows a six-month search for Verba's successor, which included an advisory committee of 12 individuals, including nine faculty members from a range of disciplines as well as the librarians of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School and the university's Chief Information Officer.
Verba was appointed director of the Harvard University Libraries by President Derek Bok in 1984, and will be recognized by Harvard with a $2.5 million library endowment fund in his name. "Both the duration and the significance of Sidney Verba's tenure are without precedent," noted Frances Fergusson, president-elect of Harvard's Board of Overseers, in a statement announcing the endowment. "His legacy to the Harvard libraries can be characterized by a sustained, expanded tradition of great collection-building, an unwavering concern for the needs of users, and a commitment to opening Harvard's collections to the world." Under the terms that created the fund, Verba can designate the purpose of the new endowment fund.
Darnton, is an accomplished historian and scholar. An alumnus of Harvard College, he is a former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, and Chevalier of France's Légion D'Honneur, France's highest honor. He also is an internationally recognized scholar on the history of the book and has a strong background in library issues, from preservation and access to publishing and technology. As president of the American Historical Society, he pioneered in 1999 the Gutenberg-e Prizes, an effort to blaze a new path for historical publishing on the web, concerns he has eloquently voiced in his writings. Darnton said he was "honored and awed" at taking the helm of Harvard's libraries. "Having, as a historian, studied the world of books in the distant past, I now have an opportunity to do something for the cause of books and book learning in the present," he said. "I want to help find a way in which the new and the old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning."
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| Google Book Search Adds Dutch Library
Another day, another university library joining Google Book Search's library scan plan—this time it's the University of Ghent, which this week announced it would become Google's first Dutch library partner and sixth European scanning partner. Under the agreement, Ghent University and Google will digitize "thousands of public domain works," including not only Dutch language books but out-of-copyright works in German, Latin, Italian, English, and Spanish. The University of Ghent is the 15th library to join the Library Project.
In addition, reports circulating on the Internet are also claiming Google has struck a deal to digitize more than 800,000 books and manuscripts at the University of Mysore, Karnataka, India, including a trove of rare documents like the Arthasastra, "India's first political document." There's just one catch—that agreement is news to Google. Google officials confirmed they were in discussions, but that there was no agreement in place with Mysore.
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| At U. of South Carolina, a $3 Million Gift Supports Hemingway, American Writers Collection
The University of South Carolina has received an approximately $3 million gift that will support the university library's Hemingway and American literature collections. The gift comes from the estate of alumnus Edward S. Hallman, who died in February. In 2001, Hallman funded the purchase of what was considered "the last significant private Hemingway collection," The Speiser and Easterling-Hallman Collection of Ernest Hemingway at the University of South Carolina. That collection contains first editions of Hemingway's books, some with personal inscriptions, as well as advance copies, translations, typescripts, and galley proofs. The collection also contains letters exchanged between Speiser and other prominent people whom he befriended: authors Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck and Edmund Wilson.
Library officials say the latest gift will fund additional purchases of Hemingway books and manuscripts from the same period, as well the purchase of works of other American authors from the same period. It will also help support the housing and preservation of the Hemingway collection, fund grants for research in the collection publications and special programs about the collection. The university also will establish "a named space" that will permanently display some portion of the collection.
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Best Sellers in Technology, October 2006–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs included in brackets)
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George Eastman: A Biography
Brayer, Elizabeth
University of Rochester Press
2006. ISBN 1580462472 [9781580462471]. $39.95
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Writing for Science
Goldbort, Robert
Yale University Press
2006. ISBN 0300117930 [9780300117936]. $20.00
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Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century
Billington, David
Princeton University Press
2006. ISBN 0691102929 [9780691102924]. $29.95
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Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster
Troesken, Werner
MIT Press
2006. ISBN 0262201674 [9780262201674]. $29.95
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Blogosphere: The New Political Arena
Keren, Michael
Lexington Books
2006. ISBN 073911672X [9780739116722]. $26.95
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Machine in America: A Social History of Technology
Pursell, Carroll W.
Johns Hopkins University Press
2007. ISBN 0801885795 [9780801885792]. $22.95
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Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest
DeGroot, Gerard J.
New York University
2006. ISBN 0814719953 [9780814719954]. $29.95
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Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics
Billington, David P.
University of Oklahoma Press
2006. ISBN 0806137959 [9780806137957]. $36.95
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Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium
Friedel, Robert D.
MIT Press
2007. ISBN 0262062623 [9780262062626]. $39.95
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Almost Human: Making Robots Think
Ed. by Lee Gutkind
W.W. Norton
2006. ISBN 0393058670 [9780393058673]. $25.95
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Nanotechnology: Risk, Ethics and Law
Geoffrey Hunt
Earthscan
2006. ISBN 1844073580 [9781844073580]. $39.95
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Coexistence in Wireless Networks: Challenges and System-Level Solutions in the Unlicensed Bands
Golmie, Nada
Cambridge University Press
2006. ISBN 0521857686 [9780521857680]. $70.00
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Online Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization
Van Enteric, Pascal
MIT Press
2006. ISBN 0262220806 [9780262220804]. $35.00
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Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell
Turin, Luca
Ecco
2006. ISBN 0061133833 [9780061133831]. $23.95
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Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions
Suchman, Lucille Alice
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 052167588x [9780521675888]. $29.99
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Spinning Flight: Dynamics of Frisbees, Boomerangs, Samaras, and Skipping Stones
Lorenz, Ralph D.
Springer
2006. ISBN 0387307796. 9780387307794. $49.95
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Ancient Technology
Humphrey, John William
Greenwood
2006. ISBN 0313327637 [9780313327636] $45.00
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World's Water; 2006-2007: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources
Gleick, Peter H.
Island Press
2006. ISBN 1597261068 [9781597261067]. $35.00
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Security for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks
Anjum, Farooq
John Wiley
2007. ISBN 0471756881 [9780471756880]. $74.95
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Robotics: A Reference Guide to the New Technology
Angelo, Joseph A.
Greenwood
2007. ISBN 1573563374 [9781573563376]. $75.00
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