The Invisible Library

Fantagraphics, purveyors of the greatest comics in all theUuniverse, has a trailer up for the Drinky Crow Show, set to debut on Comedy Central’s Adult Swim, May 13.
Theme song by They Might Be Giants!
Link via Boing Boing.

Today, April 1st, Google introduces their newest feature, The Print Archive:

Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Well, you asked for it, and it’s here. We’re bringing it back.

A New Button
Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we’ll send it to you in the mail.

Simplicity Squared
Google will print all messages instantly and prepare them for delivery. Allow 2-4 business days for a parcel to arrive via post.

Total Control
A stack of Gmail Paper arrives in a box at your doorstep, and it’s yours to keep forever. You can read it, sort it, search it, touch it. Or even move it to the trash—the real trash. (Recycling is encouraged.)

Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe
Google takes privacy very seriously. But once your email is physically in your hands, it’s as secure as you want to make it.

[…] Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment.

Update: also: Google TiSP

An interesting article from the NY Times on digitization of library collections:

“There’s an illusion being created that all the world’s knowledge is on the Web, but we haven’t begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries,” said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. “Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users.”

To be sure, digitization efforts over the last 10 years have been ambitious and far-reaching. For many institutions, putting collections online, for both preservation and accessibility, is a priority. Yet for every letter from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward that can be found online, millions of documents bearing fine-grained witness to the Civil War will never be digitized. And for every CD re-release of Bessie Smith singing “Gimme a Pigfoot,” the work of hundreds of lesser-known musicians from the early 20th century are unlikely to be converted to digital form. Money, technology and copyright complications are huge impediments.

The largest impediment to getting most everything on line is money. We’re talking millions of dollars to get this far, which is just a drop in the proverbial bucket. That’s not saying it couldn’t be done. The Library of Congress and NARA could be made top priorities, if only they didn’t have their budgets routinely slashed and staff cut. And it isn’t just an argument of there not being money, either. For what we spend in Iraq in one hour, we could pay for everything at the LoC to be digitized and hire the people to do it. But the money isn’t spent in making the nation’s archives available to everyone everywhere, it’s spent blowing the arms off Iraqi children.

As I said, this is only part of the problem. Another is simply advertising. No one thinks to brag about what their collections have. In order to attract researchers who don’t know that you have the Steinbeck papers or Spanish Colonial records, why not have a blog? Even a weekly feature of of one item from your collection, using the power of the Internet to communicate it’s existence to a wider audience would attract some attention. There are thousands of librarians (OK, hundreds, maybe even dozens) who would be able to pas so the news that your library has genealogical information, if only they knew where to look. Making blogging and social networking acceptable practice in the Library field is another hurdle, but time will solve that one. As younger, technologically savvy librarian bloggers become more influential and the old dinosaurs who fear that Technology is killing the trade rather than revitalizing it (I’m looking at you, Michael Gorman) then the more likely it will be that emerging technology will be put to service in a library near you.

Then of course there’s the dirty secret of the library world: not everything is worth saving. while genealogical information and the history of Scott Joplin’s recording sessions are important, the napkins that Einstein scribbled his equations on are not. Knowing what is valuable and what is trash is always a tough call, as one person’s trash is anther’s dissertation topic, but still, it’s necessary to weed out the Danielle Steele Manuscripts from the Vonnegut first editions.

Thanks to Steve for the link!

For those interested in historical curiosities, cabinets of wonder, eccentric collectors, phantom limbs, ambergris, trap-jaw ants, and the history of natural science, check out the Athanasius Kircher Society Blog.

Daylight Savings Time is three weeks earlier this year and Microsoft doesn’t much care:

For three weeks this March and April, Microsoft Corp. warns that users of its calendar programs “should view any appointments as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees.”Wow, that’s sort of jarring — is something treacherous afoot?

Actually, it’s a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

Software created earlier is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March (that’s March 11 this year).

How simple would it be to coble up a patch for this and offer it for download? Apple fixed it six months ago. I didn’t even know I had already downloaded the fix because they put it in a free security upgrade. And that right there is why Microsoft isn’t doing jack: They can’t find a way to make people pay for a minor computer glitch everyone else fixed for free. So, anyone on a Windows platform will just have to suck it up or run an hour late for most of March.

Everyone out there who got on my case for being a Firefox evangelist, take note. This is why IE7 is a piece of shit. Microsoft is counting on it’s users being too dumb to realize that IEs supposed innovations, like tabs and RSS and a functioning Web 2.0 interface, aren’t actually bonuses you have to pay for. They are free as is every other browser out there, and were available years before Microsoft bothered to throw out some half-assed piece of shit with a wildly inflated price tag on it.

Microsoft wants your money. Once they have it, you’re on your own.

NY Times:

ONE of the hottest books in New York appears on no best-seller list.
“Russian Thinkers,” a 1978 collection of essays on 19th-century Russian intellectuals by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, has virtually disappeared from bookstores across the city, including Barnes & Noble, Labyrinth Books and Shakespeare & Company. The Internet is not much help either: the book is sold out on bn.com, and though it can be ordered from Amazon, the order won’t be shipped for two or three weeks.

The culprit behind this Berlin craze turns out to be none other than Tom Stoppard and his epic three-part play, “The Coast of Utopia,” which opened at Lincoln Center on Nov. 27. Tucked deep inside the show’s playbill is a list titled “For Audience Members Interested in Further Reading,” with “Russian Thinkers” at the top.

“If you were intrigued and wanted to know more, this would be a good place to start,” said Anne Cattaneo, the play’s dramaturge, who compiled the seven-book list. “I tried to keep it to a little George Sand, a little Turgenev.”

As a result, Mr. Berlin’s book is not only all but impossible to find in New York, it is also completely out of stock with its publisher, Penguin, which earlier this month quickly ordered two reprintings totaling 3,500 copies, the first time in 12 years the book has been printed, to satisfy more than 2,000 suddenly unfilled orders.

As my wife pointed out, these days, everyone wants a little more information. That extra aside or note or pointer to something related. A tangent for the inquisitive. This list of further reading– what we librarians used to call a bibliography (it’s a term from the late nineteenth century, basically the Victorian equivalent of a hyperlink)– is a clear example of this growing acceptance of the interconnectivity of all knowledge and information. Sure, this sort of thing existed before but it was nerdy stuff, practiced by academics. The internet, that wild and woolly system of tubes, has just democratized the concept and made it mainstream. Hell, it’s even gone Broadway.