Category: Libraries

Friday Video: British Library Sound Archive

The Wire takes a tour of the British Library’s Sound Archive, deep below its London residences on the Euston Road, to talk about sound conservation and take a tour of its collections with some of its key sound curators.

“The 20th century was about audiovisual material, our memory of the 20th century is heavily audiovisual, but our sense of the 21st century is going to be a different kind of audiovisual… archiving is not going to be so much about what we can bring in, but about what to exclude,” says Will Prentice, British Library Audio Engineer and Conservation Specialist.

Nathan Budzinski interviews Popular Music Curator Andy Linehan, Audio Engineer, Conservation specialist Will Prentice, and Wildlife Sounds Curator Cheryl Tipp.

British Library Fights To Preserve Historic Recordings Archive

TolkienAs part of its vast collection of literary and historic treasures (the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook), the British Library owns some six million sound recordings, including significant theater productions, famous voices (like J.R.R. Tolkien’s), and field recordings of extinct animals. Some of them date back to the earliest and most fragile days of recording technology.

Now, as the Telegraph reports, the library is launching an urgent campaign to digitize and preserve its collection.

Read the full post @ IO9.

MARC records from the publisher?

I read copyright pages. (Don’t ask.) As a result, sometimes I read suprising things. Here’s something I found last night:

A catalog record of this book is available

Well, that’s interesting… A normal wouldn’t need a cataloging record, and I’m guessing a cataloger, even if they noticed this, would already know they can get a record from OCLC. Though, I guess I can see the use for some small libraries. But, I can’t find any such page on the BOOM! Web site. I did find a Librarians page on the Kaboom! Studios site (an imprint of BOOM I believe) but none of the links work.

Why Librarians Are Defending Your Right to Watch Porn at the Library

Library ComputersThe ALA published a rep​ort investigating the use of filters and found they were disproportionately blocking out left-leaning views on issues such as gay marriage and abortion. LGBT community websites were often blocked and identified as “sexual” sites.

They also found that low-income individuals are more impacted by filters. If you’re able to afford internet at home and aren’t finding the information you need at school or the library because it’s blocked out, the easy solution is to head home and Google it there. But for those whose only access point to the internet is at school or the public library, filters can choke out their ability to have the same access to information as their peers. Libraries in lower-income communities are also more likely to have filters because they lean on government funding and can’t afford separate labs.

And of course, there’s the slippery slope argument: if we start with pornography, where do we go from there? What’s appropriate in the eyes of one person might be wildly offensive to someone else.

Read the full article @ Motherboard.

Things That Make the Librarian Angry

Once again, Jessamyn West nails it.The Public Librarian

Having a waiting list for library ebooks is really stupid, on the face of it. As a librarian I’m pretty savvy about digital content—enough to know that patrons want it, lots of it. However, we have a short list of ways that we can offer it in a lendable fashion. At work I keep my game face on. At home I just want to tell people the truth, the frustrating truth: offering digital content in this way has short term benefits but long term negative consequences.

Read the full article @ Medium.com.