A World Digital Library Is Coming True by Robert Darnton  Information comes filtered through expensive technologies and financed by powerful corporations.  Consider the cost of scientific periodicals, most of which are published exclusively online.  It has increased at four times the rate of inflation since 1986. All over the country research libraries are canceling subscriptions to academic journals, because they are caught between decreasing budgets and increasing costs.  The logic of the bottom line is inescapable, but there is a higher logic that deserves consideration—namely, that the public should have access to knowledge produced with public funds.  Congress acted on that principle in 2008, when it required that articles based on grants from the National Institutes of Health be made available, free of charge, from an open-access repository, PubMed Central.  But lobbyists blunted that requirement by getting the NIH to accept a twelve-month embargo, which would prevent public accessibility long enough for the publishers to profit from the immediate demand.  Not content with that victory, the lobbyists tried to abolish the NIH mandate in the so-called Research Works Act, a bill introduced in Congress in November 2011 and championed by Elsevier.  The bill was withdrawn two months later following a wave of public protest, but the lobbyists are still at work, trying to block the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), which would give the public free access to all research, the data as well as the results, funded by federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or more.  FASTR is a successor to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which remained bottled up in Congress after being introduced in three earlier sessions.  But the basic provisions of both bills were adopted by a White House directive issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy on February 22, 2013, and due to take effect at the end of this year.  In principle, therefore, the results of research funded by taxpayers will be available to taxpayers, at least in the short term. What is the prospect over the long term?  No one knows, but there are signs of hope.  The entire system of communicating research could be made less expensive and more beneficial for the public by a process known as “flipping.” Instead of subsisting on subscriptions, a flipped journal covers its costs by charging processing fees before publication and making its articles freely available, as “open access,” afterward.  That will sound strange to many academic authors.  Why, they may ask, should we pay to get published?  But they may not understand the dysfunctions of the present system, in which they furnish the research, writing, and refereeing free of charge to the subscription journals and then buy back the product of their work—not personally, of course, but through their libraries—at an exorbitant price.  The public pays twice—first as taxpayers who subsidize the research, then as taxpayers or tuition payers who support public or private university libraries.  By creating open-access journals, a flipped system directly benefits the public.  Anyone can consult the research free of charge online, and libraries are liberated from the spiraling costs of subscriptions.  Of course, the publication expenses do not evaporate miraculously, but they are greatly reduced, especially for nonprofit journals, which do not need to satisfy shareholders.  The processing fees, which can run to a thousand dollars or more, depending on the complexities of the text and the process of peer review, can be covered in various ways.  They are often included in research grants to scientists, and they are increasingly financed by the author’s university or a group of universities.  Read about programs such as HOPE (Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity), COPE (Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity), DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard and the Digital Public Library of America at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/22/world-digital-library-coming-true/

John Dunning is the Nero Wolfe Award-winning author of Booked to Die; The Bookman's Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of 1995; and The Bookman's Promise.  An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for many years, and now does his bookselling online.  He is also an expert on American radio history and the author of a novel about old-time radio, Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime, and a nonfiction book, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio.  He was for many years host of the weekly Denver radio show Old-Time Radio.   Link to interview at http://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm/author_number/552/john-dunning#biography

PARAPHRASES AND QUOTES from Sign of the Book by John Dunning

I guess I've always been attracted to book people.  I couldn't imagine I'd wind up with Tarzan of the Bookmen, swinging from one bookstore to another on vines attached to telephone poles. 

People who worry about scattered snow are afraid of everything.  Books and coffee don't mix.  What's obvious isn't always what's true--that's why we have courts, to sift what people think happened from what really did happen.

Meet Cliff Janeway, book cop, in Sign of the Book--and find mention of the book Laura.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_(novel)

Vera Caspary was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter best known for her films ''Laura,'' ''Letter to Three Wives'' and ''Les Girls.''  In her 18 published novels, 10 screen plays and 4 stage plays, Miss Caspary's main theme, whether in a murder mystery, drama or musical comedy, was the working woman and her right to lead her own life, to be independent.  In her autobiography, ''The Secrets of Grown-Ups,'' published in 1979 by McGraw Hill, Miss Caspary wrote, ''This has been the century of the woman, and I know myself to have been a part of the revolution.''  Her first novel, ''The White Girl,'' published in 1929, was about a black woman who leaves the South for Chicago and poses as a white.  Her second and perhaps her favorite novel, ''Thicker Than Water,'' was a study of Portuguese-Jewish family life in Chicago.  Her most famous work was ''Laura,'' her first mystery story, published in 1943 by Houghton Mifflin, followed by ''Bedelia'' and ''Murder at the Stork Club.''  She rewrote ''Laura'' for the now-classic 1944 movie, which starred Gene Tierney as an enigmatic and ambitious career girl and Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker, her malicious mentor.  In 1946, with the help of George Sklar, ''Laura'' was adapted to the stage.  Another mystery story, ''The Weeping and the Laughter,'' published in 1950 by Little Brown, became a national best seller.  In 1958, ''Les Girls'' was chosen as best-written American musical by the screen writers branch of the Writers Guild of America.  http://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/17/obituaries/vera-caspary-screenwriter-and-novelist.html

The Triple Crown comprises the Kentucky Derby, The Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, and is contested each year beginning with the Kentucky Derby run on the first Saturday in May, and concluding five weeks later with the Belmont Stakes.  The races are restricted to 3-year-olds, so a horse only gets one chance to win.  Eleven horses have swept the Triple Crown, and none have done it since 1978.  Pimlico Racecourse in Baltimore is home to the Preakness Stakes, the middle jewel of the Triple Crown.  It is traditionally run two weeks after the Kentucky Derby.  The race is named in honor of the colt Preakness, who won the opening day feature at Pimlico when the track first opened in 1870.  

https://www.tvg.com/major-horse-races/triple-crown-races

FIRST RUNNING OF THE KENTUCKY DERBY (1875)
FIRST RUNNING OF THE PREAKNESS (1873)
FIRST RUNNING OF THE BELMONT STAKES (1867)  http://mitchellarchives.com/the-first-running-of-the-triple-crown-complete-set-of-three-newspapers.htm

California Chrome won the 139th Preakness Stakes on May 17, 2014.  Watch the 2:16 video replay at http://www.sbnation.com/2014/5/17/5727114/preakness-stakes-video-replay-2014  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1150  May 19, 2014  On this date in 1828, John Quincy Adams signed the Tariff of 1828 into law, protecting wool manufacturers in the United States.  On this date in 1848, Mexico ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo thus ending the Mexican-American war and ceding California, Nevada, Utah and parts of four other modern-day U.S. states to the United States for US$15 million.  On this date on 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas on immigration.