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Tag: Library

  • Malala Yousafzai: Books Are Anti-Terrorism “Weapons”

    Tuesday, at the opening of the largest public library in Europe, 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai praised pens and books as, “the weapons that defeat terrorism.” The Pakistani teen, who gained attention when she was shot by the Taliban for advocating education for girls, is now one of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize nominees. Take that, Taliban!

    “Let us not forget that even one book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world,” said Yousafzai. The last book to enter the library was her copy of Paulo Coelho’s, The Alchemist, which tells the story of an Andalusian shepherd boy with lessons about listening to our hearts and ultimately following our dreams.

    The new library (pictured below) is located in the town where Yousafzai attends school, Birmingham, England. The building now houses over a million books and the opening drew a crowd 1,000-strong.

    (image)

    Yousafzai has given herself a challenge, “I will read thousands of books, and I will empower myself with knowledge.” She said further, “I truly believe the only way we can create global peace is through educating not only our minds, but our hearts and our souls.”

    Yousafzai used this opportunity to call for peace and to, “speak up for the children of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan who are suffering from terrorism, poverty, child labor and child trafficking.”

    Last October, after a Taliban gunman shot Yousafzai in the head on her school bus, she was flown from Pakistan to the UK for emergency treatment. Tuesday, she thanked the medical staff, teachers and townspeople for supporting her in, “my second home,” of Birmingham.

    The teen inspiration is due to receive the International Children’s Peace Prize later this week. On her birthday in July, she experienced a different sort of present, addressing the UN’s youth assembly; the day was declared Malala Day. She has also garnered a place as one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” and though not apparently directly affiliated, her story has sparked new age heroines of all sorts.

    [Images via Facebook Fan Page and Wikimedia Commons.]

  • Internet Archive Turns To Books

    Internet Archive Turns To Books

    Keeping track of the history of the Internet is a task that has fallen at the feet of Archive.org, and they do an fantastic job of preserving where the Internet has been and how many of the popular sites we visit started out. For example, check out the history of Google. You’ll immediately notice the original version of the search engine looks absolutely nothing like it does in 2011, and that also provides a good example of why the service provided by Archive.org is an important one.

    With that in mind, you can understand the excitement when Archive.org announced they would begin archiving books, as well. Termed the “Physical Archive,” the goal of Archive.org is, to put it simply, “preserve one copy of every published work.” Part of the preservation process includes digitizing the content within the books, with the following goals going forward:

    Because we expect day-to-day access to these materials to occur through digital means, the our physical archive is designed for long-term preservation of materials with only occasional, collection-scale retrieval. Because of this, we can create optimized environments for physical preservation and organizational structures that facilitate appropriate access. A seed bank might be conceptually closest to what we have in mind: storing important objects in safe ways to be used for redundancy, authority, and in case of catastrophe.

    The blog entry discussing the project indicates not all written works will make into their physical archive, and in fact, they indicate the number of unique titles in literature is estimated to be around 100 million. Archive.org’s goal is preserve over 10 million of these individual works. To facilitate this process, Archive.org needed a physical containment unit capable of keeping these printed works protected, and, well, dry. So they turned to the shipping industry for ideas:

    Based on this technical literature and specifications from depositories around the world, Tom McCarty, the engineer who designed the Internet Archive’s Scribe book-scanning system, began to design, build, and test a modular storage system in Oakland California. This system uses the infrastructure developed around the most used storage design of the 20th century, the shipping container. Rows of stacked shipping containers are used like 40′ deep shelving units. In this configuration, a single shipping container can hold around 40,000 books, about the same as a standard branch library, and a small building can hold millions of books.

    An example of the storage facility in question:

    Storage

    Storage takes place like so:

  • Books are cataloged, and have acid free paper inserts with information about the book and its location,
  • Boxes store approximately 40 books with labeling on the outside,
  • Pallets hold 24 boxes each,
  • Modified 40′ shipping containers are used as secure and individually controllable environments of 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit and 30% relative humidity,
  • Buildings contain shipping containers and environmental systems,
  • Non-profit organizations own and protect the property and its contents.

    • While such a task should be commended, is Archive.org’s goal any different than Google’s Library Project? Aside from the fact that Archive.org has shown no indication of monetary gain with their physical archive project — perhaps the biggest difference between the two; something Google has had to address in legal venues — making their approach a little more altruistic than Google’s.

    Being the non-profit that they are, Archive.org is also soliciting donations to assist in the project’s undertaking. Considering their goal, it’s actually a cause worthy of donation.