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 | At Bennington College, the Library Becomes a Work of Art
Art is usually part of any good library, but at Bennington College’s Crossett Library, students, faculty, and librarians have turned the library itself into a work of art. Bennington Bookmarks, billed as “an interactive art installation” was unveiled at Crossett in May, 2008, inviting students to attach gently-glowing “bookmarks” to library materials—books, DVDs, and VHS tapes, for example; each indicates a message has been left about the item. Patrons can then access messages at one of three touch-enabled “Bookmark Stations” installed on each of the library’s three floors. The stations connect to a library database, which displays the messages in hexagons on the screen.
The physical bookmarks, 27 in all, come in nine different forms—ranging from an Apollo lunar lander, to a yeast cell, to a statuette of American dance innovator Martha Graham. Each one contains a microcontroller and an LED light. They attach to items by hand-sewn, embroidered wool inserts, and students can set the gentle glowing lights within the bookmarks to a range of colors to further personalize their messages. Already, library officials say, the messages are creating “a dynamic, evolving portrait of the Bennington community.”
Oceana Wilson, director of library and information services, told the LJ Academic Newswire that one of the project’s great elements is that it encourages physical interaction with the library—students must be logged in to leave messages; anonymous messages are not permitted. And in an age when so many of the library’s resources can be accessed remotely, students must be at the library to leave a bookmarked message—messages cannot be left via the library web site, or, for example, emailed. So far, the installation has been a hit. “Throughout the summer we have seen people leaving bookmarks and having fun with it,” Wilson said. “I’m interested to see what it’s like in the fall when we have the whole population on campus.”
The project is the result of a year-long collaboration between visual arts faculty member Robert Ransick, computing faculty member Joe Holt, and nine Bennington students enrolled in a course entitled “The Augmented Library: A Site Specific Installation.” The idea for the installation grew out of the class’s inquiry into how technology “enhances, augments, or changes people’s interaction with information, space, and one another” within a library setting. “We wanted to make something that would encourage visitors to explore areas of the library they may have overlooked,” Rasnick explained, “and to share their ideas about what they’ve read and seen.”
Art has always been an important component of great libraries, but, Wilson said, the Bennington community is benefiting from students’ desire to make the library itself a work of art. “This is definitely an art project,” she explained. “We but its purpose is to have people engage with the library, books, and the collection in new, fun, and interesting ways and to discover new and interesting things.” One of the “pleasant” surprises: “students really wanted to focus on was something that related to books,” Wilson said. “These are students that take computing classes and art classes—definitely high-tech students. But they were really interested in working with physical books and getting people into the stacks to experience the pleasure of browsing. I thought that was terrific.”
The project, and course that spawned it, are the first initiatives of the Crossett Library Fellows Program, which launched in 2007 with a $275,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to create “dialogues and projects that expand the role of the library within the Bennington College community, as well as highlight the importance of libraries in contemporary society.” Next year, the Fellows Program will support a project related to commercial publishing. The following year, it will address copyright.
Wilson says the artists and librarians at Bennington would love to see their project expand to other libraries—in the spirit of both libraries and artistic exchange, the “Bookmarks” artwork is all completely open-source and available for anyone to adopt under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. The artists are “definitely interested in what variations people might come up with,” Wilson said. “That just seems so in the spirit of this project.”
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So Long, Scrabulous; Later, Red Lasso: Copyright Actions Stop Popular Apps
Recently, I crushed a National Book Award finalist in a game of Scrabble via our Facebook accounts (he’s since returned the favor). And just last month, I shared with friends a link to a clip of my next door neighbor’s band after it played on Saturday Night Live. Only, it wasn’t Scrabble, it was Scrabulous, and the clip wasn’t on NBC.com, it was hosted on a popular music blog, made possible by an online video aggregator called Red Lasso. This week, both services were shut down in copyright/trademark actions, offering stark examples of the pressures facing owners, users and would-be innovators in a digital, networked world.
Since their closures, few have defended either application as non-infringing uses. Millions, however, have complained loudly about their loss. Scrabulous is a robust digital version of the traditional board game Scrabble—but with significant upgrades, such as an embedded dictionary, automatic scoring, and of course the ability to play with—and message with—users online. However, make no mistake: the game is Scrabble, and Hasbro lawyers’ have made repeated assertions over the past year that the game was blatant “theft.” But, as popular blog Techdirt.com noted this week, if Scrabulous was so clearly theft, why wait so long to sue?
Hasbro, which claims the U.S. rights (Mattel owns Scrabble overseas), said it waited to sue in deference to the game’s millions of fans (or, more accurately, potential customers). But this week, unable—or unwilling—to come to an agreement with Scrabulous and claiming that the game’s design and rules were its intellectual property, Hasbro dropped the hammer. Notably, just as it shut down Scrabulous, Hasbro launched its own version of Scrabble on Facebook. That, say critics, shows the perilous route facing many would-be innovators seeking to bring languishing analog leftovers into the digital age. “There was no indication that Hasbro had any interest in Scrabble for Facebook” prior to Scrabulous, Techdirt observed. “It’s rather telling that Hasbro waited until its own version was online to file the lawsuit,” adding that Hasbro is “basically admitting is that Scrabulous was a great promotional vehicle.”
During its short life, Red Lasso filled a much-needed void by aggregating and indexing short television and film clips and allowing bloggers to embed them in their posts. At a recent Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) copyright seminar in New York, Kevin O’Kane, Red Lasso’s founder, carefully acknowledged that his service may have taken a few liberties with traditional copyright law. But, O’Kane suggested, there was a necessary innovate-first-ask-copyright-questions later aspect to Red Lasso, noting that such innovative digital services would simply be impossible to launch otherwise—a claim Google has also made regarding its “opt-put” policy for its library book scanning plan.
With this week’s actions, however, a broader message was clearly delivered: From Viacom’s $1 billion suit against YouTube to the Recording Industry’s litigious efforts to crush file-sharing on college campuses and publisher’s suit against Google’s library scan plan, traditional media companies’ have run out of patience with web-based start-ups building businesses with unlicensed content.
“The era of companies following in YouTube’s shoes is over,” wrote Greg Sandoval, commenting on Red Lasso at CNET News. “No more are the studios going to sit back and allow tech start-ups to use their content to grab eyeballs, and then negotiate terms later.” PC Magazine’s Lance Ulanoff expressed little sympathy for the defenders of Scrabulous. “Particularly galling to me are the Pollyannas who decry the big corporate giant going after the little, helpless developer guy,” he opined. [Scrabulous] knew what they were doing and they obviously understand that small ideas can become very big business online.”
Content owners, for their part, say the law is clear. Nevertheless, users logging on to their Facebook accounts this week were rudely reminded that the foundation of intellectual property in the digital age is shifting. Do developers deserve a lawsuit for revitalizing a moribund board game—or a cut of the profits? Will Google similarly face ruin for aggressively taking books online? Intellectual property lawyers will sort out the details, for now, but this week’s developments demonstrate that, whether books or board games, users will increasingly be caught in the middle of an uneasy digital shift.
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| Gamer Generation: University of Texas IMLS Grant To Study Videogame Preservation
Scrabulous may not be savable, but saving videogames is very much on the mind of preservationists at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information, who recently landed an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) grant of $255,040 to study the collection and preservation of “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) games, which often involve interactive role-playing. Library Journal media editor Raya Kuzyk checked in with Assistant Professor Megan Winget about her history with gaming, the goal and scope of her project, games as they relate to art, and which institutions she feels are best suited to collecting and preserving videogame materials.
LJ: How and when did you first become interested in videogames?
MW: My interest dates back to the late 1990s, to my experience as a master's student at the University of North Carolina. A number of my friends would take over the networked computers in the lab after it closed and play games all night long, and sometimes through the weekend…I was always struck by the devotion of the players, what fun they seemed to have, the amount of time and energy it took to get all of the computers working correctly, and—most interestingly, for me—the way they talked about their experiences afterwards.
The rest of the Q&A is here, on Library Journal.com.
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| Liblime Acquires CARE Associates; Publishers Launch Webcast Series; Canadian Consortium in $47 Million Deal
The big news this week: open source solutions outfit Liblime announced on July 29 announced the acquisition of CARE Affiliates. The sale, said LibLime, includes “select products, related services and domain names along with associated service contracts.”
CARE Affiliates President Carl Grant, meanwhile, will return to his former position as president of Ex Libris, North America. “I’ve experienced the power of collaboration and community through my company, CARE Affiliates,” Grant told LJ. “When Ex Libris announced their Open Platform Strategy and asked me to return and bring that understanding to bear on their new strategy, it was a perfect fit. I obviously know a lot about the company, its products, and a good number of its customers.” Final closing is scheduled for this August…
With the fall publishing season almost upon us, the Association of American Publishers announced the launch of a pilot program entitled Book Editors Online and Unscripted, a series of webcasts that will feature “the top editors in the business presenting and previewing their winter 2009 book picks for an online audience of booksellers and members of the media.”
During two-weeks in September, Book Editors Online and Unscripted will feature two editors each day presenting upcoming titles that have inspired them, followed by a Q&A moderated by Sara Nelson, Editor-in-Chief of LJ sister publication Publishers Weekly. The 30 minute presentations will be webcast live, in real time, and will allow those watching to call in, and ask or type questions to participating editors immediately following the interview.
“Book Editors Online and Unscripted is a way to engage the nation’s book media from coast to coast on new upcoming titles digitally, and without leaving their desks,” noted Bob Miller, AAP’s Trade Executive Committee Chair. Miller said the webcasts were not intended “to replace organic and person-to-person meetings,” but with review pages being slashed at major newspapers and media outlets, publishers hope the program will act as “a catalyst for further discussion on new books.”
The schedule of presentations is available on the AAP site. You can register for any of the above webcasts here….
Thanks to a hefty joint $47 million investment by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), eight provinces and 67 universities serving nearly 900,000 researchers, scholars, and students in Canadian universities will have desktop access to “an extensive body of national and international material,” ranging from books, letters, and historical documents to music scores, maps, artworks, and visual materials.
This investment comes from Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), a consortium of universities dedicated to expanding digital content. More information and a full list of resources is available on the CRKN web site…
Project MUSE has announced a deal with Innodata Isogen Inc. to place journal titles into an XML repository. Under terms of the deal, Project MUSE, a leading collection of online scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, has hired Innodata Isogen to provide “data conversion services, including XML encoding and enrichment,” for most of Project MUSE’s journals, and will convert both “current and legacy journal issues” into XML. Project MUSE began in 1993 as a pioneering joint project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at JHU…
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| Submissions Sought for Library Journal’s Annual Architectural Issue
If you have an academic building project completed between July 1, 2007, and June 30, 2008, make sure it is included in Library Journal’s annual December Architectural Issue. Projects can be submitted online or on paper. Academic project forms can be submitted or downloaded at www.libraryjournal.com/AcademicArch2008. The deadline is October 14, 2008. If you need more information, email Bette-Lee Fox at bl.fox@reedbusiness.com or call 646-746-6802.
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Best Sellers in History of Science, November 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs in brackets)
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In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA
Schwartz, James
Harvard University Press
2008. ISBN 0674026705 [9780674026704]. $29.95
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Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors
Appignanesi, Lisa
W.W. Norton
2008. ISBN 0393066630 [9780393066630]. $29.95
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Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History
Crawford, Dorothy H.
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0192807196 [9780192807199]. $45.00
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Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine
Harrington, Anne
W. W. Norton
2008. ISBN 0393065634 [9780393065633]. $25.95
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Simian Tongue: The Long Debate About Animal Language
Radick, Gregory
University of Chicago Press
2007. ISBN 0226702243 [9780226702247]. $45.00
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Void
Close, Frank
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0199225907 [9780199225903]. $19.50
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Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius
Schweber, S. S.
Harvard University Press
2008. ISBN 0674028287 [9780674028289]. $29.95
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Daring To Care: American Nursing and Second-Wave Feminism
Malka, Susan Gelfand
University of Illinois Press
2007. ISBN 0252032470 [9780252032479]. $65.00
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Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
Johnson, George
Alfred A Knopf
2008. ISBN 1400041015 [9781400041015]. $22.95
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Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them
Pickover, Clifford A.
Oxford University Press
2008. ISBN 0195336119 [9780195336115]. $27.95
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Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began
Repcheck, Jack
Simon & Schuster
2007. ISBN 074328951x [9780743289511]. $25.00
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Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy
Hayes, Bill
Ballantine
2008. ISBN 0345456890 [9780345456892]. $24.95
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Universal Force
Girifalco, Louis A.
Oxford University Press
2008. ISBN 0199228965 [9780199228966]. $49.95
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Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance
Capra, Fritjof
Doubleday
2007. ISBN 0385513909 [9780385513906]. $26.00
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Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, & Information in American Biological Science, 1870-1920
Thurtle, Phillip
University of Washington Press
2007. ISBN 0295987561 [9780295987569]. $80.00
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Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900
Kazloff, Max
Phaidon
2007. ISBN 0714843725 [9780714843728]. $69.95
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Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences
Lightman, Bernard V.
University of Chicago Press
2007. ISBN 0226481182 [9780226481180]. $45.00
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Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450
Lindberg, David C.
University of Chicago Press
2007. ISBN 0226482057 [9780226482057]. $25.00
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Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America
Thomson, Keith Stewart
Yale University Press
2008. ISBN 0300117043 [9780300117042]. $35.00
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Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975
Moore, Kelly Editor
Princeton University Press
2008. ISBN 0691113521 [9780691113524]. $35.00
Library Journal Academic Newswire
Contributing Editor: Andrew R. Albanese
Phone: 646-746-6852 E-mail: aalbanese@reedbusiness.com
Editor: Francine Fialkoff
Phone: 646-746-6807 E-mail: fialkoff@reedbusiness.com
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