Back from my trip, and now have some links and things to pass along:
- There is some updated information on the state of things in Cologne, where the municipal archives building collapsed on 3 March. It seems that a "substantial part" of the records have been recovered through various emergency conservation measures.
- The Avicenna text stolen from a museum in Hamadan, Iran, has been recovered on Sunday. "No details about the robbery or the perpetrators was released."
- Finally reading the writing on the wall (as Tim notes), OCLC has officially withdrawn their proposed records use policy.
- Word last week that Google has capitulated and will allow "some libraries a degree of oversight over the prices Google could charge for its vast digital library ... Only the institutions that lend books to Google for scanning - now 21 libraries in the United States - would be allowed to object to pricing." The ALA says this doesn't go far enough, arguing that any library should be able to protest the fees.
- A fascinating story from England, where a marine chronometer assigned to HMS Erebus, one of the ill-fated ships sent to the far north of Canada with Sir John Franklin (the other was HMS Terror), has been discovered. The chronometer somehow made its way back to Britain, but horologists and officials at the National Maritime Museum are at a complete loss to explain how.
- Travis McDade is back, with an excellent article in Maine Antique Digest about the Augsburger Geschlechterbuch, which a federal judge recently ruled should be returned to Germany. It has been in the U.S. since the end of WWII.
Reviews
- Iain Pears' Stone's Fall is reviewed by Jack Kerridge in the Telegraph.
- In the Boston Globe, Michael Kenney reviews John Ross' War on the Run, a look at Robert Rogers' military career.
