Open Access Saves

From "Open Access to Scientific Research Can Save Lives":

Every institution of higher learning should ensure that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by its faculty members are made open-access through a designated repository that captures the institution's intellectual output.

Reading List for Orbis Cascade Alliance Council Meeting

A reading list distributed to Orbis Cascade Alliance library directors in preparation for a strategic planning discussion to begin next week:

• Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition
• Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Study
• 2012 top ten trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education
• Redefining the Academic Library
• Think Like A Startup: a white paper to inspire library entrepreneurialism

A Book Only in the Abstract Sense?

One of my companions today has been The Oxford Companion to the Book. While reading the online version, I discovered that I was only reading a book in "the abstract, non-corporeal sense":

book (1): A word that has long been used interchangeably and variously to signify any of the many kinds of text that have been circulated in written or printed forms, and the material objects through which those words and images are transmitted. The ancestor of the modern word ‘book’ is used in both senses in Anglo-Saxon documents. This Oxford Companion is a book in the abstract, non-corporeal sense (and can be thus described in its Internet manifestation), and also in the physical sense of a three-dimensional object in codex format. 

The Paradox of Writing

"The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers." --Walter Ong, "Orality and Literacy: Writing Restructures Consciousness"

The Advent of the Unwritten Book in the New Atlantis

"The Book contained all the canonical books of the Old and New Testament, according as you have them ... and the Apocalypse itself, and some other books of the New Testament, which were not at that time written, were nevertheless in the Book."

The Cyrus Cylinder: Historical Object and Emblem

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, traces 2600 years of Middle Eastern history through the Cyrus Cylinder:

New Form of an Old Icebreaker

At the end of Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man, a story of the future told from ancient Sibylline leaves, the last man sets off in a boat with "scant stores" and "a few books." If you were the last human, what books would you select?