Google to put Iraqi artifacts online

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, at the National Museum on Tuesday. Most of the collection is in secret storage.



Amira Edan, the director of Iraq’s National Museum, says that soon she will no longer have to worry so much that the famous institution remains closed to the public for fear of violence.

People will just be able to Google it. “It’s really wonderful,” she said Tuesday.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, had just made a presentation inside the museum, announcing that his company would create a virtual copy of the museum’s collections at its own expense, and make images of four millenniums of archaeological treasures available online, free, by early next year.

For free.

The museum, badly looted during the American invasion, has been declared reopened three times: in 2003, by the American occupation authorities, again in 2007 by Iraqi officials and most recently in February by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

None of those openings, however, involved letting the public back in. A few invited scholars, journalists and the occasional school group have been allowed to visit. Only 8 of the museum’s 26 galleries have been restored; most of the collection’s treasures are in secret storage.

Part of the Bush-Cheney legacy: no planning whatsoever was done, leaving the museum, and more, open to looting and destruction.

What no one at the event mentioned was that the National Museum’s collections had already been digitized, at least in part, by Italy’s National Research Center, under a 1 million euro grant from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The collections went online last June as the Virtual Museum of Iraq.

Pop-up king sprung books to life

Waldo Hunt, shown in 2002, holds up a copy of a pop-up book he produced, 'The Haunted House' by Jan Pienkowski.

Remembrances
November 24, 2009

Waldo Hunt: 1920-2009
The 'King of the Pop-Ups' Made Books Spring to Life

By Stephen Miller

An impresario of printed extravaganzas, Waldo Hunt led a renaissance of pop-up books.

Mr. Hunt, who died Nov. 7 at age 88, was a one-time advertising executive who developed a specialty in creating pop-up magazine inserts. But what started as eye-catching marketing for Wrigley's gum and Dodge pickup trucks grew into a literary subgenre.

Fascinated by what had become a lost art in the U.S. by the 1960s, Mr. Hunt built on his experience developing pop-up marketing materials into a focus on books. While not an artist himself, Mr. Hunt was adept at coordinating the complex process of assembling the books, from design to production and assembly. Leading publishing houses including Random House hired him to package pop-up titles for adults and children.

The companies he founded, Graphics International and Intervisual Books, produced hundreds of books, including some that were translated into more than a dozen languages. "King of the pop-ups" became Mr. Hunt's moniker in professional circles.

Mr. Hunt produced dozens of books for Walt Disney; a series based on Babar; and popular titles including "Haunted House" and "The Human Body." A 1967 pop-up published by Random House, "Andy Warhol's Index," came about at the suggestion of the artist. It combined celebrity photos with pop-up versions of signature Warhol touches like a cardboard can of tomato paste.

Babar. I read Babar to my kids.

"He single-handedly kept the torch of pop-up books alive from the 1960s through the 1990s," says Robert Sabuda, the best-selling creator of elaborate children's pop-up books. "Those of us who are in the newer generation of pop-up books would have no career without Wally Hunt."

Though pop-ups had flourished in Germany and Britain in the 19th century, and gained a following in the U.S. in the 1930s, they were little known in the post-World War II era.

"No one was doing pop-ups in this country," Mr. Hunt told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. "No one could afford to make them here."

Pop-up books allowed Mr. Hunt to combine his love of exuberant design with his overseas production contacts cultivated from his work in advertising. To save on labor costs, he had his early books assembled in Japan; production later moved to Singapore and to Latin America. Design was handled by a coterie of independent artists whom Mr. Hunt called "paper engineers" for their skill at unfurling three-dimensional figures from flat paper.

The son of a Unitarian minister and a music teacher, Mr. Hunt grew up in Salt Lake City and southern California, and served in the infantry during World War II.

After the war, he opened an advertising agency in Los Angeles, specializing in high-quality printed materials. He sold his first agency in 1956, and founded Graphics International Inc., to serve as a broker between Japanese printers and U.S. clients.

Mr. Hunt described his infatuation with pop-up books as a bolt from the blue. One day in the early 1960s while walking down New York's Fifth Avenue, he spotted a pop-up book in a shop window.

"I could look at that children's book from Czechoslovakia and see in it my answer," Mr. Hunt told the Los Angeles Times. "I knew I'd found the magic key."

After his bid to import a large number books by the book's Czech artist, Vojtech Kubasta, was thwarted by Communist authorities, Mr. Hunt turned to producing them himself. The first was a promotional volume produced in conjunction with Random House for Maxwell House Coffee, "Bennett Cerf's Pop-Up Riddle Book," which customers could receive by sending in two can labels and $1.

Bennett Cerf, Random House's top editor, put his son Christopher in charge of the project.

"You'd pull a tab and something funny would happen, and the answer to the riddle would be revealed," Christopher Cerf recalled in an interview. The younger Mr. Cerf and Mr. Hunt went on to produce about 30 more children's pop-up books for Random House, including volumes featuring Sesame Street characters. In his memoir "At Random," Bennett Cerf described the pop-up books as big money makers.

Mr. Hunt "was a joyful man," says Christopher Cerf. "Sometimes to his own detriment, he took on huge, crazy projects. Nothing was impossible."

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Business Apps Offer Social Tools

Microsoft, Salesforce.com Take Networking-Site Cues
By Nick Wingfield And Ben Worthen (WSJ)

An unlikely software sector wants to get in on the social-networking act: business applications.

On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. became two of the most high-profile companies yet to retool business-oriented offerings to emulate Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn—Web services that help consumers track each other using posted photos, information feeds, status updates and other features.

Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., said the next version of its Outlook e-mail program will automatically display personal information from social-networking sites for people in Outlook’s address book.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com, a San Francisco-based company known for software it offers as a Web service, announced a set of enhancements called Chatter that mimic some of the functions of sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Smaller start-ups like Xobni Corp. also have found significant audiences by forming connections between social sites and business applications. The moves are the latest sign of how consumer-oriented technologies—from instant messaging to Apple Inc.’s iPhone—are invading the workplace and forcing companies to adapt to advances that boost productivity.

For example, social-networking sites help users track the identities and activities of others, which can come in handy in a big company. A lot of businesses have started to ask, “Why is it easier to follow strangers on Facebook than employees in my own company?” said Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s chief executive.

Salesforce.com says Chatter will allow employees to create profiles similar to the ones found on Facebook, albeit with an emphasis on connecting colleagues with relevant skills or projects. It is also designed to let users receive updates about data stored in the system. Mr. Benioff said Chatter, which should be available in early 2010, will be available for free to all Salesforce.com customers.

Microsoft says the next version of its e-mail software, Outlook 2010, will allow someone who receives an e-mail to quickly view a dossier of sorts on the sender by seeing a photo they have posted of themselves on social-networking sites and short messages about what they’re doing on Twitter and Facebook. The information will appear in a window within Outlook 2010, which went into public testing this week and will be released in final form during the first half of next year.

“It gives you a really nice, holistic view of things that you have in common with people on e-mail,” said Chris Capossela, a Microsoft senior vice president. “It gets you out of the e-mail-only silo and gives you a much more 360-degree view.”

Ellen Levy, vice president of corporate development and strategy at LinkedIn, said blending information from its service—such as employment and education history—with Outlook could help people form stronger professional bonds with people they’re communicating with through e-mail.

Yet there’s also the potential for complicating business relationships too. People who express overtly political opinions on Facebook or Twitter or share stories of personal traumas might find those details coloring their dealings with business associates.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Altimeter Group who follows social media, doesn’t believe that there’s a privacy dilemma created by business applications tapping into social-networking sites since, in most cases, people have already made a calculation about what information—and with whom—they’re comfortable sharing online.

e-Wired

Article in today's Journal

Condé Preparing E-Reader Version of Wired
by Russell Adams

Condé Nast Publications Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. are building a digital version of Condé Nast’s Wired magazine for electronic reading devices.

Makes logical sense that people reading the magazine would like it to be electronic.

The Wired e-reader application will be available by the middle of next year and will kick off similar efforts across Condé Nast’s magazines, which include Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Condé Nast declined to say how much money it was spending on the effort.

Publishers have struggled to render magazines on mobile devices. That is partly because most existing e-readers don’t allow for color or many of the design elements deemed necessary to sell ads and incorporate key features of the magazine-reading experience. Condé Nast executives said they expect that by the time the Wired product is ready, e-readers will have access to a new generation of hardware capable of supporting it.

Magazine reading experience. I always thought it was simply reading.

As with many existing Web and mobile editions of magazines, the Wired application will let readers “flip” through the pages of the magazine as it appears in print. Readers will be able to zoom and pan on images, launch videos and link to the Web, as well as sync the application to their smart phones.

Unlike with existing products, Wired editor Chris Anderson said, the next wave of e-readers and platforms like Adobe’s will incorporate the rich design and “lean-back elements” that are among magazines’ chief strengths.

Condé Nast, a unit of Advance Publications Inc., has moved more slowly than some of its peers in pushing its magazines beyond print. Now it is putting a heavy emphasis on its digital business at a time when its print business has come under great strain. The publisher this year has laid off hundreds of employees and closed a handful of magazines.

Apps challenge rise of E-Readers

Travis Bryant, with his daughter, Ivey, reading “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril” on his iPhone at their home in Alabama.




With Amazon’s Kindle, readers can squeeze hundreds of books into a device that is smaller than most hardcovers. For some, that’s not small enough.

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget.

“These e-readers that cost a lot of money only do one thing,” said Keishon Tutt, a 37-year-old pharmacist in Texas who buys 10 to 12 books a month to read on her iPhone, from Apple. “I like to have a multifunctional device. I watch movies and listen to my songs.”

True enough. It just seems rather small for watching or reading; but, that's just me.

Does the future of book reading lie in dedicated devices like the Kindle, or in more versatile gadgets like mobile phones? So far, e-book software for phones does not appear to have cut into demand for single-function e-readers.

A Library’s Century

The Seward Park branch library was refurbished in 2004.



November 18, 2009, 11:56 am
A Library’s Century of ‘Hungering Imagination’
By SEWELL CHAN

The Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library opened 100 years ago this month, on Nov. 11, 1909, and the library will mark the centennial with a program of public events starting at 2 p.m. Thursday. Perhaps what is most remarkable about the branch, which was most recently renovated in 2004, is the continuity of the immigrant aspirations — then largely Jewish, now mostly Asian and Hispanic — it embodies.

“East Side Leads in Book Reading,” proclaimed the headline of a March 9, 1913, article in The New York Times Magazine. The article found that the Seward Park branch library, on East Broadway, reported a circulation of 425,571 — the highest of any branch — in the New York Public Library’s most recent report. The Times described the yearning in a rather dramatic fashion:

Centuries of famine and dearth of knowledge, and of cringing subservience to those who have had it, have taught the east side immigrant two important things about books: that what they contain can feed a starving mind and a hungering imagination with such royal richness as their lives could never afford them; and that their contents can lead him, step by step, along the journey to success and power and dominance. It is not far-fetched to say that many of the statesmen of the future are now in the making at Seward Park library.

The article proceeded to describe a typical day in the life of the library. The day started slow, with only a few patrons. “Now and again a lean and scholarly rabbi will pass up the white stone steps, bent upon inspecting the Talmudic treasures of the Jacob Schiff collection,” the article noted. “A few of the younger men and women trip in more briskly to pursue the necessary studies for civil service examinations.”

Immigrants pored over books in Russian, German, Yiddish and elementary English. But it was after 3 p.m., when school let out, that the library burst into life with the voices and cries of pupils.

The fortunate ones who come first file up the stairs and cluster around the circulating desks. Those who are returning books form in one line; those who are applying for cards in another. As fast as the librarians — and there are eight assistants required for this afternoon rush — can receive and record the returned books the youngsters surge to the “open shelves” and begin the search for their next selection.

And even when the children were sent home, at 6 p.m., the library remained in life, its downstairs reference room filling up into the early evening.

The article ended its account this way:

It is extraordinary, all things considered, how deeply the east side respects the trust the library imposes in it. It is no wonder they grasp after the benefactions of the library. Nothing could be more natural. But it deserves a special commendation that every east side reader brings his book back clean and intact, in spite of the fact, well known to the librarian, that many of them use their bathtubs and their ice chests as library shelves.

Getty Images / Lonely Planet - Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania














University of Pennsylvania





























* The Wall Street Journal

* MASTERPIECE
* NOVEMBER 14, 2009

This Library Speaks Volumes
Frank Furness treated reading as an active enterprise
By MICHAEL J. LEWIS

The cornerstones of two great American libraries were laid just a month apart in the fall of 1888, one in Philadelphia and one in Boston. The buildings could not be more dissimilar. The Boston Public Library was the first of its kind, a decorous marble palazzo of the highest quality, and its classical-revival descendants can be found in most large American cities. The library of the University of Pennsylvania, however, would be the last of its kind, a Victorian leviathan of red brick and riveted iron beams, looking from one end like a French cathedral and from the other like an elaborate greenhouse. If the Boston library was a lesson in good manners, the Philadelphia structure seemed a cheeky act of architectural impertinence.

Today the University of Pennsylvania building, now known as the Fisher Fine Arts Library, is widely acknowledged as one of the great creations of 19th-century American culture, and the principal work of its architect, Frank Furness (1839-1912). And at a moment when both the practice and technology of reading are radically changing, its lessons seem more urgent than ever.

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Getty Images / Lonely Planet

Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania
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It is hard to imagine an architect of libraries (of which he designed half a dozen) less bookish than Furness. His entire life seems a sustained effort to evade books altogether, no easy feat in his extraordinarily literary family. His father was the Rev. William Henry Furness, Philadelphia's celebrated Unitarian minister, who wrote a score of books and seemed unable to go from breakfast to dinner without writing at least a small pamphlet. Frank's brother Horace Howard Furness spent his life producing the mighty Shakespeare Variorum, a guide to every variant edition of Shakespeare's plays. Even his sister Annis translated German poetry into English, evidently for relaxation.

But young Frank shunned reading for more physical pursuits, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War for his battlefield exploits. When he began to practice architecture after the war, he had no patience for designers who took their inspiration from books. An awestruck Louis Sullivan, who began his own career as a draftsman for Furness, noted how he made his buildings "out of his head." Another draftsman observed that the only book Furness ever praised was Viollet-le-Duc's richly illustrated Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'Architecture. (With characteristic perversity, Furness—who had no French—cited the one book he was unable to read.)

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Because books were such a familiar and natural component of Furness's upbringing, he did not sentimentalize them. When his contemporaries set about designing libraries, they tended to treat them reverently, as if they were a shrine for sacred objects. But Furness knew that books were active, useful, even incendiary things—the antebellum abolitionist tracts that his father wrote had brought repeated death threats.

Frank Furness's building, then, was perhaps the only library to treat the act of reading as an active and dynamic enterprise. The building is an engine of active thought, divided into four separate volumes, each serving a different function and assuming a different shape. Most dominant is the stairhall, rising to 95 feet and isolated from the library proper so that the sound of footsteps would not penetrate the main reading room (a problem that classical libraries, with their central stair, never quite resolve).

Behind the stair tower Furness placed the main reading room with its circulation desk. Instead of creating a serene repose similar to that of the Boston library, he surrounded the room with low-slung arches that look as if they might have been filched from a Roman aqueduct, carrying walls of vivid red brick and yellow terra cotta. These rise four stories to a massive skylighted roof, and one sits beneath it to read as if at the bottom of a vast and brilliantly lighted well.

Beyond beckons the second reading room, which terminates in a sweeping semicircle given over to a series of private study rooms, the library counterpart to the radiating corona of chapels in a French Gothic cathedral. But while a cathedral is oriented to the east and the rising sun, Furness turned his reading room north to ensure steady, even light. Lest the space seem too sacral, he capped it with a mighty array of iron beams, each of which comes to rest on a delicate terra cotta leaf, a kind of whimsical architectural fig leaf to cover the groin where metal limb meets masonry body.

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Weirdest of all were the stacks, placed to the south at the opposite end of the building. Designed in consultation with Melvil Dewey (the library was one of the first to use the Dewey decimal system), these were of translucent glass and iron, three stories in height, so that sunlight would filter through them. Not only did they have the character of an industrial plant, but they could be extended as a piece of machinery: Furness mounted the rear wall on jackscrews so that, as he told his clients, "the book stack admits of infinite extension." Here was perhaps the only library in the world that solved the problem of new acquisitions—and which treated the book as a component in an industrial process, rather than a ornament to be encased in a jewel box.

The stacks, alas, were replaced with concrete floors for reasons of fire safety during the 1980s, in the course of a superlative restoration by Robert Venturi. Oddly enough, Venturi first met his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown nearly 50 years ago—at a meeting of professors to protest the planned demolition of the library.

Except for our dwellings, there are few buildings we come to know intimately. A college library is one exception, a building we tend to inhabit fully, day and night. And even if critics did not respect Furness's brooding building, its users have always loved it, as much for its tactile richness as for its generous light and space.

Furness was born 170 years ago this week, on Nov. 12, 1839. He lived to see many of his finest works demolished or mutilated, and even his library at Penn became cluttered with extensions. Yet it remains unbowed, still greeting one from afar with the upraised head of the stair tower, capped with a colossal arch whose components are so deeply scored that it suggests a mighty brow furrowed in concentration. In a country whose libraries have been temples, palaces or warehouses, here is one dedicated to the mystery of active thought.

—Mr. Lewis is Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor at Williams College. His books include "Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind" (W. W. Norton).

Some Choice Book Blogs

Dear Book Lover - WSJ: November 13, 2009

Would you share your thoughts on the best blogs/bloggers who focus on books? Favorites? Ones you respect? Popular ones? —P.G., Berkeley, Calif.

Book bloggers, of whom there seem to be thousands, are strictly a matter of taste. My taste runs to blogs focused on fiction, updated frequently, charitable or spiteful as appropriate, generous with links and bright and clean in appearance. I also insist the writers know the difference between it's and its. Five blogs I like:

A Commonplace Blog: I first read D.G. Myers, an English professor at Texas A&M University, in his blistering critique of the "self-conscious, writerly prose" of "serious fiction" in Atlantic magazine (available online and highly recommended even if you disagree). He's every bit as indifferent to political correctness on his blog, where he recently took a cudgel to Toni Morrison's "Beloved" ("the most overrated novel ever").

Bookdwarf: Megan Sullivan, a buyer at the Harvard Book Store, is a thoughtful reviewer of new fiction. I bookmarked her site even before I saw her praise for a recent and not well-known book I admired, "Blame" by Michelle Huneven. Maybe I only find Ms. Sullivan smart and generous because we agree about so much.

Bookninja: George Murray, a Canadian writer, may be too profane for the faint of heart, but I found his cussing about the publishing industry a bracing antidote to a lot of goody-goodyness in literary blogdom. His headline on a link to a story about the current book-industry price wars: "Today in the most depressing thing to ever hit a depressing industry full of depressing drunks."

Bookslut: Jessa Crispin doesn't think of herself as a critic: "I feel free to ignore the wider culture at large, rather than suffer through a William Vollmann book just because his books contribute to the larger cultural conversation. I, and this Web site, exist outside of all of that, and happily so." Fine by me. I have no problem with a reader who, when her computer goes rogue, consoles herself with Mavis Gallant short stories and a bottle of vodka.

So Many Books: Stefanie (she doesn't give her last name) lives in Minneapolis and works at a university law library. She's been blogging for six years, which makes her a grizzled veteran. The lists of books she has read in the past three years are impressively eclectic—this year from Niccolo Machiavelli to Christopher Moore. And she loves libraries, as I do.

Close encounters

Two interesting incidents, while working in Reference:

* a man walks down the steps talking loudly, his cellphone ringing loudly; I notice he is wearing a white labcoat. He comes over to the Reference Desk, begins to ask a question, and his cellphone rings again. I ask him to turn it down, he turns it off. He asked for material on the history of anatomy, but went on so long and loud that I lost track of everything he said. It was not for him, he assured me, insisting he was a surgeon, but for his son. He had consulted Wikipedia, and had found the article well written, but his son could not use Wiki as a source for his assignment. I showed him electronic databases, using Galenet, but he had trouble using the mouse (I can perform reconstructive surgery, but can't use a computer, he declared). I turned to books, and found several reference sources that were useful: Dictionary of Scientific Biography, The drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Milestones in health and medicine, Companion encyclopedia of the history of medicine, and Milestones in Health and Medicine. He did his work at a table, and left, all the materials, including pieces of scratch paper I had given him, left at the table.

Among the names he mentioned, aside from Leonardo, were Vesalius, and Galen.

* a bi later a woman approached the Reference Desk and asked for help, saying she was working at a PC and was having "printer issues". Turned out she was printing coupons from J.C. Penney, and they were coming out very small. I showed her how to use the printer properties to change the size of the printouts.