Wednesday, July 14, 2004



Bastille Day: Exactly 215 years ago today the French were revolting. Here's the best of the web on how they celebrated that event...

Torres Strait Week: Half way through their seven-day ordeal, 12-year-old Stephen Nona stood on a waterless, barren outcrop of rocks in Torres Strait and told his two sisters: We have to swim - or we'll die...

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories:
Imagine...all the world's information at your service with just a few clicks of the mouse. It's a dream that Brewster Kahle has held onto for the past 20 years and is now seeing through to reality in his role at the Internet Archive, where he serves as chairman of the board. The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library that will offer permanent access for researchers and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Kahle is the force behind that effort.
BK: A 100-page black-and-white Cold River with current toner and paper costs in the United States is $1, not figuring labor costs, rights costs, or depreciation of capital. That's an interesting number, because at a buck a book, it turns out that for a library, it could be less expensive to give books away than to loan them. In his book, Practical Digital Libraries, Michael Lesk reported that it cost Harvard incrementally $2 to loan a book out and bring it back and put it on the shelf. This is not figuring in the warehousing costs and all the building costs. This is just the incremental cost of loaning a book out.
Even if you put some fee in for the author, it looks cost effective to print and bind many books locally.

The Librarian to be blogged on MEdia Dragon [link first seen at ]
• · See Also Why lessons of the past can help fight terror of the future [Hottest link on Amazon]
• · · See Also Money does seem to seem to buy greater happiness, but it does not buy more sex
• · · · Paul Krugman's crystal ball Paul Krugman has become the West's most quotable public intellectual...
• · · · · See Also Proposal To Postpone U.S. Elections:Joe has all the links you need
• · · · · · See Also French Jews are leaving, but why?