Movie rental businesses in Montréal are denouncing la Grande Bibliothèque (Québec’s newly constructed National Library) for (god forbid) lending audiovisual material. The owner of a Super-Club Vidéotron close to the library is crying unfair competition and is asking the library to remove all DVDs from its collection. (more here.) On a similar note, some music producers in Québec are asking the library to remove the CD burners from the library computers so that the CDs in the library’s collection can’t be copied. The library has flately refused, saying that the burners are essential for patrons to make copies of Québec’s heritage collection. (more here.) In the meantime, the library has seen over 664,000 visitors in the first 3 months alone. Perhaps private interests in Montréal would rather we all return to the good old days of libraries.
Archive for August, 2005
Library Lends Minority People
In the department of quirky stories, a library in Sweden is allowing «townsfolk to borrow any of nine different minority people.» The idea is to break down barriers and prejudices. (Some libraries in Florida could use this idea.) Among the minority people you can find are:
a lesbian, a gay, an imam, a Muslim woman, a journalist, an animal rights advocate, a Dane, and a Romany or Gypsy and one other to announced later.
The Future of LibrarianActivist
I apologize for the limited amount of posts there have been here lately. Although I am back from vacation, I am in the midst of some pretty big changes. I am preparing to leave for Argentina for an undetermined amount of time. For this reason (and a couple of others), the future of LibrarianActivist is a little uncertain at this point. However, my hope is that I will be able to keep reporting on some political and social justice issues, but maybe also on the reality of libraries and librarianship in South America. However, this remains uncertain, since I am still unsure as to how this trip will unfold. In the meantime, thanks for your patience…
“Accoustical Liberation of Books”
Hugh from Dose has got a great idea! Check out LibriVox: accoustical liberation of books in the public domain.
LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast
Spread the word!
Free as in Free Beer
This is not really library related, but it was too funny and original to pass up. A group of students in Copenhagen have created the world’s first open source beer: a beer whose recipe is published under a Creative Commons license. The beer is called «Our Beer» (or Voresoel). The beer is
an experiment in applying modern open source ideas and methods on a traditional real-world product (beer).
[article in french here. Source: BiblioAcid]