Sunday, March 17, 2013

Links & Reviews

I'm just back from the DH: The Next Generation symposium in Boston, which was invigorating and excellent. I'll working on a writeup of both this and the SEA meeting, and hope to have that up shortly.

You all probably heard the rotten news that Google has decided to phase out Google Reader in a few months. I've used Reader for years as the best way to sift through all the blogs, newspaper book review sections, and other resources I try to keep up with each week (starring items in Reader is one of the many ways I collect things for these weekly links posts, too). So I'm very disappointed that it's going away, and like many others I'll be looking for a suitable replacement. If you find one that you like, I'd love to hear about it, and when I find one I like, I'll let you know.

And now, on to the links:

- Marino Massimo de Caro was sentenced to seven years in prison this week as well as lifetime exclusion from holding any public office for his role in the thefts from the Girolamini Library in Naples. Others involved in the case received lighter sentences: Viktoriya Pavlovsky received a prison term of sixty-four months and permanent exclusion from public office; Alejandro Cabello and Mirko Camuri were sentenced to fifty-six months in person and a five-year exclusion from office; and Lorena Paola Weigandt Federico Roncoletti received sentences of thirty-two months in prison. Preliminary hearings in the next round begin on 26 March, when a judge will set a trial date for de Caro and thirteen others on conspiracy charges.

- Some really fantastic news from the University of Rochester: they're planning to digitize portions of the William Henry Seward and Seward Family Papers, after work by undergraduate and graduate students in what sounds like a great course sequence as well as some fantastic faculty-library collaboration.

- New blog: Medieval Bookbindings, which I certainly recommend adding to your reading list. See also Anthony Tedeschi's post on this one.

- New resource: DevDH.org, a site to collect "lectures, podcasts, and resources to aid humanists in initiating, developing, and sustaining projects." Follow them on Twitter at @DevelopDH, too.

- One of the Old South Church copies of the Bay Psalm Book has been digitized, so you can take a look at it here. I'm updating my Bay Psalm Book census post with some additional information gleaned from this scan.

- Whitney Trettien has a great post up with some really fascinating contextual information about the Little Gidding Harmony (the digitization of which I noted here last week).

- Library Journal covered the Maine Shared Collections Strategy this week, an eight-library consortium  between public, academic, and government libraries.

- Freeman's Auction House in Philadelphia will sell, in several parts, the library of the Mount St. Alphonsus Redemptorist seminary and retreat center in Esopus, NY which closed in 2012. The library includes some 4,000 books which may fetch up to $700,000 total.

- Dan Cohen talked to Library Journal this week about the DPLA and his vision for its future. In other DPLA news this week, the National Archives announced that it will contribute 1.2 million records as part of the pilot launch.

- The ABAA and other biblio-groups weighed in this week on Amazon's attempt to control the .book, .author, and .read top-level domain names, calling it anti-competitive. If you want to weigh in, there are some ways to contribute here.

- Japan's Toppan Printing has created what they're saying is the world's smallest printed book, with pages of .75mm.

Reviews

- Megan Marshall's Margaret Fuller: A New American Life; review by Dwight Garner in the NYTimes.

- Alister McGrath's C.S. Lewis: A Life; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.

- Steve Ferguson highlights a very lovely and curious binding at Notabilia.