"New library weblog: Wilton Library Weblog in Wilton, CT, USA" [Library News Daily]

Welcome aboard, Wilton! I immediately found a great link to an interview with Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth. I remember loving this book when I was a kid, so much so that I made sure to add The Phantom Tollbooth Interactive Story to one of our circulating Rocketbooks to show what interactive fiction could look like on an ebook reader. Hmmm... I wonder if that's a copyright violation. Whoops.

From the interview:

"Dave: I was excited to hear that the Everpresent Wordsnatcher is one of your favorite characters. Last night I was describing him to friends, how he tells Milo, "I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context….It's such an unpleasant place that I spend almost all my time out of it."

I love that. It's so clever. Like so much else in the book, it shows entirely mundane ideas in such a fresh light. And of course the wordplay, which is relentless from beginning to end.

Juster: It's the literary equivalent of drawing outside of the lines, thinking outside of the box: follow an idea wherever it goes, play with it. I really do think that's important. We tend to be so directive of the way children think."

Public Access to the Public Domain

"Brewster Kahle, the man behind The Internet Archive and Alexa, wants to digitize all the out-of-copyright (and thus Public Domain) books and put them on the Web. Read more for his email describing his plans and co-conspirators for the project....

If we want to help people put a pile of books online here is a strategy:

1. take a large catalog of books in libraries,
2. tag each entry with its US copyright status,
3. prioritize those that are out of copyright,
4. try to inspire the world to digitize the out-of-copyright books,
5. format the books for online distribution,
6. organize the resulting digitized books,
7. cause enlightenment in all corners of the globe.

Status:

1. Get catalog:  Research Library Group (rlg.org) is up for it and will have their catalog ready in July.    Maybe OCLC would be up for it too....
    
2. Format:  archival and access formats are a problem.  there is no "MP3" of online books yet. Of course keep the high rez scans (IA will provide free storage for any needers) and then have some meetings where we try to get the list of supported access standards down to a manageable number.  I suggest a gritty meeting in August in San Francisco that, again, the IA can sponsor." [via Aaron Swartz]

A very interesting idea that is certainly doable. I wanted to make sure that Ernest and James see this so that we can move forward with out own idea and maybe even work with Brewster on this.