- Arthur Souza, 52, was arrested this week for attempting to steal books from the Brooks Free Library in Harwich, MA. Souza is believed to have also stolen books from libraries in Hyannis, Brewster, Barnstable, and Yarmouth. Souza was discovered when a tipster spotted books with library markings being sold on eBay.
- From Jennifer Howard, a thorough and well-written piece on library offsite storage.
- A good reminder from Bookriot: "You Are Not Your Bookshelf."
- Over at Interview, John D'Agata talks about his new book (with Jim Fingal), Lifespan of a Fact.
- The Folger Shakespeare Library announced this week that it has acquired the theatrical archive of Lynn Redgrave.
- Skinner, Inc.'s new Director of Fine Books and Manuscripts, Devon Gray, talks about her background and her plans for Skinner in a short "meet the expert" interview.
- Alexis Madrigal points out a recent interview with Yale Librarian Susan Gibbons about open-access policies. [via Dan Cohen]
- I had the great pleasure to speak at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) this week, as part of their Digital Dialogues series. You can download a video or the Keynote version of my talk here, should you be so inclined. I discussed the Legacy Libraries project at LibraryThing, in particular the Libraries of Early America element of it. It was a real treat to see all the neat things the good folks at MITH are working on, as well!
- Nicholas Carr writes about the DPLA in Technology Review, as "The Library of Utopia."
- From BibliOdyssey, bookplates!
- Jason Epstein's "How Books Will Survive Amazon" is well worth a read.
- Last week's link to Mike Widener's post about including dealer descriptions in catalog records ended up prompting quite an interesting conversation on Twitter and elsewhere. Sarah Werner captured the discussion here, and Laura Massey weighed in over at The Cataloguer's Desk as well. I was pleased to see this take off, and I think it's led in some very interesting directions!
- Big news (and good news) from Harvard this week, with the release of open metadata for 12 million works from across its libraries. More.
- Over at Public Domain Review, Benjamin Breen discusses John White's sketches of the New World.
- Ian Kahn posted a wrapup (with some videos) from this year's NYC book fair. Another good post about the fair to add to your reading list is "Love is a Doing Word," from Bibliodeviancy.
- From Rick Gekoski, in The Guardian, "Book dealers court the press at their peril."
- From the OUP blog this week, a quiz on Shakespeare in America.
Reviews
- The new issue of WMQ features a critical forum on Pauline Maier's Ratification. [h/t Joe Adelman]
- Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy's The President's Club; review by David Greenberg in the WaPo.
- Joy Kiser's America's Other Audubon; review by Liesl Bradner in the LATimes.
- Robert Caro's The Passage of Power; review by Robert Draper in the WSJ.
