The Library Of National Information And Popular Knowledge

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An incisive history of the controversial Google Books project and the ongoing quest for a universal digital library Libraries have long talked about providing comprehensive access to information for everyone. But when Google announced in 2004 that it planned to digitize books to make the world's knowledge accessible to all, questions were raised about the roles and responsibilities of libraries, the rights of authors and publishers, and whether a powerful corporation should be the conveyor of such a fundamental public good. Along Came Google traces the history of Google's book digitization project and its implications for us today. Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld draw on in-depth interviews with those who both embraced and resisted Google's plans, from librarians and technologists to university leaders, tech executives, and the heads of leading publishing houses. They look at earlier digital initiatives to provide open access to knowledge, and describe how Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made the case for a universal digital library and drew on their company's considerable financial resources to make it a reality. Marcum and Schonfeld examine how librarians and scholars organized a legal response to Google, and reveal the missed opportunities when a settlement with the tech giant failed. Along Came Google sheds light on the transformational effects of the Google Books project on scholarship and discusses how we can continue to think imaginatively and collaboratively about expanding the digital availability of knowledge.

"Although blasphemy is as old as religion itself, its history has begun a new chapter in recent years. Slanders of the sacred are everywhere, as in the highly visible Charlie Hebdo case, with "religion" sometimes appearing as little more than a membrane for giving and receiving offense. Where some explain the contemporary preoccupation with blasphemy by pointing to the interconnectedness of twenty-first-century media, J. Barton Scott argues that we need to look deeper into the past at the colonial-era infrastructures that continue to shape our globalized world. Slandering the Sacred examines one such powerful and widely influential legal infrastructure: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code. What would it look like to take Section 295A as a text in, of, and for religion-a connective tissue interlinking multiple religious worlds? To answer this question, Scott explores the cultural, intellectual, and legal pre-history of this law, moving between colonial India and imperial Britain as well as between secular law and modern religion. Section 295A reveals a set of problems with no easy solution. It places a chill on free speech, extends the power of the state over civil society, and exacerbates the culture of religious controversy that it was designed to fix. The legislators who enacted the law foresaw the damage it could do and they enacted it anyway, as a half-despairing measure to curb injurious speech. Their problems are still our problems. The twenty-first century has compounded modernity's free-speech headache. Section 295A opens a useful window onto these problems precisely because it is a problem, too. Its history is a tale about the afterlives of the holy dead, the legal definition of the anglophone category "religion," and the transmissibility of outrage as bureaucratized affect"--

A revitalized version of the popular classic, the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Second Edition targets new and dynamic movements in the distribution, acquisition, and development of print and online media-compiling articles from more than 450 information specialists on topics including program planning in the digital era, recruitment, information management, advances in digital technology and encoding, intellectual property, and hardware, software, database selection and design, competitive intelligence, electronic records preservation, decision support systems, ethical issues in information, online library instruction, telecommuting, and digital library projects.