Neil Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web

Neil Gaiman talks to the Open Rights Group about how the internet affects the books and publishing industry.

February 2014 Friends of the Albany Public Library calendar

Albany Public Library Executive Director Announces Retirement Later this Year

Albany Public Library Executive Director Carol Nersinger has announced that she will retire from APL after close to five years.

Nersinger will stay on at APL until a replacement is selected in order to sustain momentum of strategic initiatives and ensure a smooth transition. The library’s Board of Trustees will conduct a national search for a new executive director.

During Nersinger’s tenure at APL, she oversaw the opening of five new and renovated branch libraries in the Arbor Hill/West Hill, New Scotland, Delaware, South End, and Pine Hills neighborhoods. Several of the buildings won design awards and the whole project was lauded as a valuable community resource. She spearheaded a project to make collections in the branches more usable and accessible to patrons by instituting a Dewey-free classification system, a move that is considered cutting-edge in the library industry. Nersinger embraced technology by expanding the collection of digital books and materials, hiring the area’s first eLibrarian, creating a mobile app giving users 24/7 access to APL, as well as green-lighting a complete website overhaul to better meet library users where they are. She also led a comprehensive project to develop a new strategic plan that will guide the library as it embarks on initiatives to provide children with the knowledge to become lifelong learners, deliver employability resources and skills development to adults, and connect people with information and experiences that enrich their lives.

Who reads books in America, and how?

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a new report on reading, called E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps. It surveys American book-reading habits, looking at both print books and electronic books, as well as audiobooks. They report that ebook readership is increasing, and also produced a "snapshot" (above) showing readership breakdown by gender, race, and age.

More from BoingBoing.

Our schools in fiscal peril: meeting January 30

Albany City School District of Albany Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, Ph.D., and Albany High School senior Zilpa Oduor will be among the panelists next Thursday, Jan. 30, when people who value public education gather at Colonie High School to call on the state to adequately fund our schools and end the fiscal crisis threatening education statewide.

The event picks up where last year’s heavily attended regional advocacy effort at Columbia High School left off. More than 1,000 people from throughout the Capital Region attended last year's forum.

The event begins at 6:30 p.m. All are welcome and guests are encouraged to arrive at least 30 minutes early to be able to park and find a seat in time for the start of the program. Please visit the Albany District News section of the website to read more.

Meetings tonight: Overturn Citizens United; 2020 VISION for Albany schools

January 21, 2014 represents the fourth anniversary since the disastrous Citizens United ruling was handed down. Please consider attending a special non-partisan grass-roots event to learn more about the exciting momentum that is building across our country for a constitutional amendment—and how we, as citizens of the capital of New York State, can contribute to that goal. The meeting will be held at the First Presbyterian Church, 362 State Street, Albany at 7:00 p.m., Jan. 21, 2013.
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Community Conversation -- 2020 VISION -- provide input on efforts to improve student learning in the City School District of Albany
Pine Hills Branch of the Albany Public Library
Tuesday, January 21, 2014 -- 6:30- 8:30 p.m.

Click HERE for more information.

Open Call for Art Submissions for Underground Railroad Conference

Display your artwork at the 13th annual Underground Railroad History Project Public History Conference - "Slavery and the Underground Railroad: the Larger Context, the Lingering Legacy"

When - Saturday, April 12, 2014

Where - Russell Sage College and St. John's Episcopal Church, Troy, New York

Contact - Cliff Oliver, Photographer - 518-692-9559

Simon & Schuster and OverDrive in Pilot to Bring eBooks to Public Libraries

Simon & Schuster ...ng, and OverDrive, the premier eBook distributor for libraries, today announced a pilot launch of the Simon & Schuster eBook catalog for select OverDrive partner public libraries in the United States. Simon & Schuster's full catalog of eBook titles are available for pilot libraries to purchase for lending to their readers, or for readers to purchase through their library's website with the new Library BIN (Buy It Now) option.

In an expansion of its existing eBook library pilot program, Simon & Schuster has selected 31 public libraries in the OverDrive network to participate. The pilot program provides access to Simon & Schuster titles such as Dr. Sleep by Stephen King, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman and many more. Other notable authors now available to library patrons include Glenn Beck, Cassandra Clare, Kresley Cole, Rachel Renée Russell and Brad Thor.

As part of Simon & Schuster's and OverDrive's pilot, each eBook purchased for lending can be checked out an unlimited number of times on a one copy/one user basis for a period of 12 months. Alternately, patrons can purchase the eBook from the library website and support their local libraries.

More from YAHOO! Finance.

Now Anyone Can Write and Publish a Sherlock Holmes Story

At last, the great detective Sherlock Holmes has broken free of the clutches of his captors.

Last month, a Chicago judge ruled that Holmes, a fictional character created in the late 19th century by the British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is in fact out of copyright—meaning that the exclusive copyrights once held by the publishers of the original Sherlock Holmes stories no longer apply. Unless the decision is overturned on appeal, new Holmes adaptations should be just about as legally unregulated as adaptations of Shakespeare or folk tales. Given the success of adaptations like Elementary and BBC’s Sherlock, that means we're likely to see a whole lot more Holmes content in the not-too-distant future. And since a strong public domain benefits art, that's a boon both for Holmes-lovers and for everyone else.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Sherlock Holmes was out of copyright already. The original novel, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887—more than 125 years ago.

More from The Atlantic.

“The Future of Libraries”:topic in webcast by American Libraries Live

Libraries are becoming more pivot friendly as change settles in as the norm. The role of libraries may be that of change facilitators within our communities as libraries are becoming adept at approaching change and adapting. We are already seeing more laboratories in libraries and some libraries as laboratories.
...

What are libraries in 2014? They might be literal change entities that live in and by change and that support local change initiatives in their community with change facilitation.

Libraries are canaries in the coalmine, testing the changing environment in terms of market pressures, tech changes, and content directions. We put our toes in the water and let the rest of the world know what it felt like.

Libraries are also settling in as a filler of gaps. The library will sit less on devices and more in gaps – plugging value into gaps caused by tech/change tensions.

More from Library Future

The Good Wife episode about music copyright infringement, Glee and Jonathan Coulton

The copyright dispute between Jonathan Coulton and the television show Glee about the "Baby Got Back" cover was the blueprint for this week's episode of "The Good Wife", [probably my favorite show] named "Goliath and David". The plot followed the real case in close detail, up to the point where they discovered a section in the audio that sounded like it was lifted from the independent musician's track (a duck's quack in Coulton's case).

Watch it here from CBS.

(Description edited from Christoph Drösser's Facebook page.)

28 Beautiful Quotes About Libraries

The libraries of the world are under threat. Here are some reasons to care.

From BuzzFeed.

The 25 Most Beautiful Public Libraries in the World

We’re suckers for beautiful libraries here at Flavorpill, as you might have noticed from our lists of beautiful college libraries and beautiful private libraries from all over the world. But public libraries are probably even more important to the culture at large than either of these — they’re places where anyone can enter and partake of knowledge they offer, where anyone can engage with history, literature and culture. And while we know it’s the books that are important, everyone likes to read in a beautiful space, so we decided to take a look at the most beautiful public libraries in the world. We excluded some very beautiful libraries that may be open to the public as museums or tourist attractions but with limited function as actual libraries, like the Vatican library (which to use, you must prove your qualifications and research needs) and the library of Dutch Parliament, but we think there are enough public libraries proper to make up for their loss.

See the list.

"Cutting libraries in a recession is like cutting hospitals in a plague."

From Boing Boing:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new report entitled How Americans Value Public Libraries in Their Communities (PDF), that shows a very large majority of Americans value libraries, viewing them as critical to their communities and vital to providing services that ensure equality of opportunity for people who would otherwise be at a terrible disadvantage in life.

This is in contrast to a few privileged blowhards who've opined that the library is an obsolete institution in the age of the Internet -- and worse, an unaffordable luxury in a time of austerity and recession. The mission of libraries is to help the public navigate information and become informed -- a mission that is more important than ever.

Texas library offers glimpse of bookless future

(And I don't much care for it)

Read HERE.

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014?

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1957 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2014, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2053.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in Canada and the EU are different – thousands of works are entering their public domains on January 1.

See the list from Duke Law's Center for the Study of the Public Domain.