Our friend and older (and wiser) sibling, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has announced it’s going to host an initiative to explore creating a national digital public library. Given the high caliber and big-time Getting It of the awesome steering committee, this could be very, very interesting. (Funding is coming from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.)

A friend of my son at Brown showed him a note tucked inside a book on the history of Russian anarchism:

It turns out to be a hoax played by some activists—all too believably.

Peter Suber (twitter: oatp), who is one of the central nodes of the network of those who work on open access issues, has given us a peek at his list of the top developments in open access [added later that day:] to bibliographic data this year, in chronological order:

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This is an olde post, that I’m coming back to, and adding onto. Two interesting uses of twitter:

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The University of Michigan has made publicly available 684,597 of its bibliographic records. They’re published under a Creative Commons 0 license, which puts them in the public domain.

Why don’t we all do that? In part it’s because for many libraries, the provenance of the information in their bibliographic records cannot be known with certainty and may well include information received under licenses that forbid re-publication. It’s a knotty, irksome problem.

That’s the title of this text-to-video clip:

Savagely cynical. By Derangement and Description, Rebecca Goldman and Amy Schindler.

Doc Searls has a brief post about wandering his way around the world and across the decades thanks to librarians, archivists, and the good folks of New Zealand.

Btw, be sure to click on the link to what Doc calls his “favorite family photo of all time.”

Dan Gillmor has a good post at Salon about archiving the Net, spurred by meetings at the Library of Congress. I’m especially interested in his comments—pointing to a post by Dave Winer—about the role of long-lived institutions, including universities.

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From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester, certain libraries are providing Google Books with anonymized circulation data to feed into their relevance ranking algorithm. I would love to know which libraries are providing this data. Anyone?

I’m not just carelessly using the Royal We when I say that we’re loving Dave Pattern’s blog. He’s the Library Systems Manager at University of Huddersfield, and he’s deep into slicing and dicing library usage metadata. For example, example, and another example. And don’t forget this Library 2.0 idea generator. (Thanks, Jeff, for the links.)