Friday links — February 24

UCSC library sees student visits double after $100 million renovation. With laptop bars, couches for gathering, long study tables and an outdoor reading porch perched high among the redwoods, student use of the 47-year-old campus landmark has more than doubled since before the renovation.  The revamped original building will house the Grateful Dead Archives in a room known as Dead Central.

Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren?

Libraries help researchers save time, says new report – Dr Hazel Woodward, chair of the electronic information resources working group and librarian at Cranfield University: “At this time of economic constraint, it is important for policy makers and Library directors to provide additional evidence of the value of library-provided resources. Whilst in the past these resources have been regarded as implicitly valuable, this research goes some way to making that value more explicit by focusing on specific benefits and outcomes for academics.”

Smaller Servings for Libraries – Decades of Education Department data show universities allocating less money to libraries as overall spending has ballooned.

Striking Finds From a Rare-Book Fair From Audubon’s The Birds of America, a first edition of which sold last month at auction for $7.9 million, to Copernicus’ heliocentric sketch that changed the world, we’ve selected the most remarkable works the fair had to offer.

Is there a method to Google’s madness? An outside observer might conclude that Google has little direction and a surfeit of cash as it lurches from search, to mapping, to mobile, to home audio players, to cloud file sharing.

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