Last summer when I taught IRLS573 IT in Libraries, I had the students listen to the audio of a Science Friday episode, called Digital Libraries, from May 2007. The topic involved a discussion of three different e-books projects: Michael S. Hart's Project Guttenburg, Brewster Kahle for the Internet Archive, and Stanford's Michael Keller who spoke about Google's e-books project.
I was reminded of it today was I listened to TWIT 144: The FBI vs. The Internet in which host Leo Laporte and panelists listened to Brewster Kahle discussing his experience dealing with a National Security Letter from the FBI "asking for records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity on the site." Kahle's part of TWIT 144 is about 30 minutes long and you can easily listen to it while working on other things.
Here are three articles about it. Any one of these provides a good review. 1) Zdnet's "Brewster Kahle offers a cookbook for fighting security letters" 2) Wired's "FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses" 3) EFF's "FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional National Security Letter After ACLU and EFF Challenge"
There continues to be a number of book digitization projects outside of libraries and archives. After reportedly digitizing 750,000 book and indexing 80M journal articles I read today that MS is bowing out. See "Microsoft Shuttering Book Digitization Efforts"
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