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Administration Day

All Southeastern Public Libraries will be closed on Thursday October 20th for In-Service day.  They will be open on Friday for their usual hours.  Sorry for your inconvenience.

The Little Library That Could | Parade.com

The Little Library That Could | Parade.com.

Internet archivist seeks one of every book written

This is a very interesting article found in the Tulsa World.

Tulsa World (OK) - Monday, August 1, 2011

Author: MARCUS WOHLSEN Associated Press

RICHMOND, Calif. – Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”

So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about 1 million titles, each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides.

“The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever published. We’re not going to get there, but that’s our goal,” he said.

At this early stage in the book collection process, specific titles aren’t being sought out so much as large collections. Duplicate copies of books already in the archive are re-donated elsewhere. If someone does need to see an actual physical copy of a book, Kahle said it should take no more than an hour to fetch it from its dark, dry home.

“The dedicated idea is to have the physical safety for these physical materials for the long haul and then have the digital versions accessible to the world,” Kahle said.

Along with keeping books cool and dry, which Kahle plans to accomplish using the modified shipping cointainers, book preservation experts say he’ll have to contend with vermin and about a century’s worth of books printed on wood pulp paper that decays over time because of its own acidity.

Peter Hanff, acting director of the Bancroft Library, the special collections and rare books library at the University of California, Berkeley, says that just keeping the books on the West Coast will save them from the climate fluctuations that are the norm in other parts of the country.

He praises digitization as a way to make books, manuscripts and other materials more accessible. But he, too, believes that the digital does not render the physical object obsolete.

People feel an “intimate connection” with artifacts, such as a letter written by Albert Einstein or a papyrus dating back millennia.

Since Kahle’s undergraduate years in the early 1980s, he has devoted his intellectual energy to figuring out how to create what he calls a digital version of ancient Egypt’s legendary Library of Alexandria. He currently leads an initiative called Open Library, which has scanned an estimated 3 million books now available for free on the Web.

Many of these books for scanning were borrowed from libraries. But Kahle said he began noticing that when the books were returned, the libraries were sometimes getting rid of them to make more room on their shelves. Once a book was digitized, the rationale went, the book itself was no longer needed.

Even as an ardent believer in the promise of the Internet to make knowledge more accessible to more people than ever, Kahle feared the rise of an overconfident digital utopianism about electronic books.

“Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time,” Kahle said. “First it was in people’s memories, then it was in manuscripts, then printed books, then microfilm, CD-ROMS, now on the digital Internet. Each one of these generations is very important.”

Each new format as it emerges tends to be hailed as the end-all way to package information. But Kahle points out that even digital books have a physical home on a hard drive somewhere. He sees saving the physical artifacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future.

The books are not meant to be loaned out on a regular basis but protected as authoritative reference copies if the digital version somehow disappears into the cloud or a question ever arises about an e-book’s faithfulness to the original printed edition.

“The thing that I’m worried about is that people will think this is disrespectful to books. They think we’re just burying them all in the basement,” Kahle said. But he says it’s his commitment to the survival of books that drives this project.

Edition: Final
Section: News
Page: A14
Index Terms: News
Record Number: 20110801_13_A14_CUTLIN950042
Copyright 2011 Tulsa World. World Publishing Co.

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Internet archivist seeks one of every book written

E-Books

  E-books have finally come to Southeast Oklahoma.  A system library card is your key to the thousands of e-books available for check out.  After clicking on the e-book icon or visiting eplace.oklibrary.net you  browse and add your choice of books to ‘your picks’.  You are able to check out 3 books at a time.  You also have a choice of 7 or 14 day checkout periods which is set in your settings.  There is a link to see the  many compatible devices.  Depending on your device you will need to download either the Overdrive App or Adobe Digital Editions.   I know that this will be heavily used so if your book is checked out you can put a hold on it and be notified by email when it becomes available.  If you just want to be reminded that you want to read a book there is a ‘wish list‘.  If anyone needs help they can access the help on the website or ask their local librarian.  Happy Reading!!

Launch of New Website

Southestern Public Library system of Oklahoma is proud to  announce the launch of a new website.  Please take a look at it.  I hope that everyone is pleased.  https://www.oklibrary.net

Kindle Users to Be Able to Borrow Library E-Books

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: April 20, 2011

 

Library books are finally going to be compatible with the Kindle.

Enlarge This Image

Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Amazon’s Kindle. In a reversal, Amazon said e-book lending would begin later this year.

Amazon said on Wednesday that it would allow Kindle users to read e-books from more than 11,000 public libraries on the devices beginning later this year, a reversal of the company’s previous policy.

“We’re excited that millions of Kindle customers will be able to borrow Kindle books from their local libraries,” Jay Marine, director of Kindle at Amazon, said in a statement.

Until now, library users who borrowed e-books could read them on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, the Kobo reader, and on laptops and smartphones.

Librarians, who have grown accustomed to telling disappointed Kindle owners that they cannot be used for free library e-books, said they were relieved that Amazon was opening its device and its Kindle app to libraries.

“That’s always the question we get — you lend out e-books? How can I get them on my Kindle?” said Ingvild Herfindahl, the children’s librarian at the Kasson Public Library in Kasson, Minn. “People will be thrilled.”

Bobbi L. Newman, who writes the blog Librarian by Day and is a manager at the Richland County Public Library in Columbia, S.C., said Amazon’s decision proved that libraries were “a key player” in the e-book business.

“We’ve been waiting for Amazon to play ball with libraries since they came out with the Kindle,” Ms. Newman said. “Even Amazon can’t overlook us anymore.”

E-book use in libraries has been growing at a rapid pace, particularly in the last year as more consumers have bought e-readers. The New York Public Library said last month that e-book use in its system was 36 percent higher than it was one year ago.

Some publishers have remained uneasy about allowing their e-books to be borrowed from libraries at all. Borrowers can download the books easily from home, so there is less incentive to buy. Two major publishers, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, have still not allowed their e-books to be available in libraries.

HarperCollins, which has allowed its e-books to be lent by libraries, angered librarians last month when it announced a new policy requiring that e-books be checked out only 26 times before they expire, forcing libraries to buy them again.

Roberta A. Stevens, the president of the American Library Association, said that considering the growth of e-books in libraries, Amazon’s decision was all but inevitable.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” she said. “They were just shutting off a whole part of the market place. It’s just logical that this would happen.”

Amazon said it would work with OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries and schools.

Barnes & Noble introduced its first e-reader, the Nook, in 2009 and opened it up to library e-books.

“This is not news for Nook customers who have always had access to library services on their Nook Color, Nook and Nook Wi-Fi devices given Barnes & Noble’s open platform and Adobe technology partnership,” Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, said in an e-mail.

Publisher’s Weekly article on e-books

We’re for You, Not Against You

ALA | ALA Press Releases

Restrictions on library e-book lending threaten access to information
ALA | ALA Press Releases.

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