Yesterday I ran into a number of things worth looking at, so just in case you don't have enough to read, here's some more.
I spent some of the weekend at Access 2006 in Ottawa and heard Clifford Lynch's talk about what he's tracking and influencing. He mentioned a speech by Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan which she gave in February 2006 to the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers defending her library's decision to participate in the Google Book project. Clifford pointed out that one of the consequences of this is that for the first time in its history the university has a backup plan for the library. Ms. Coleman's speech is worth reading. My guess is that the courts are going to stop the digitizing of the still-in-copyright material, and that it may be a tragedy. When you think in terms of decades or centuries there is a reasonable chance one or more of these libraries will disappear and a digital surrogate is better than nothing, not to mention the better disclosure of it in the meantime.
Two items touching on non-Latin authority control: The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Task Force on Non-English Access report (noticed in Catalogablog). Sorry if by the time you read this the link is stale--library reports really should have cooler URLs. Also a paper by Heidi Lerner in Library Resources & Technical Services v. 50 #4, October 2006, pp. 252-261, an extensive review entitled 'Anticipating the Use of Hebrew Script in the LC/NACO Authority File' (no problem with a link to LRTS going stale--you can't make them). Someday we'll have non-Latin in NACO. Maybe the VIAF project can help with this.
And finally an hilarious pamphlet lent me by Eric Childress: Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books by Terry Belanger, which I recommend for all bibliophiles, would-be bibliophiles, and classification enthusiasts.
--Th
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