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May 13, 2008

Comrade Rockstar from the Rogg Collection is Featured Book for May/June 2008

Dean Reed was one of the strangest superstars in the history of popular cluture. Failing to gain recognition in his native United States, he gained celebrity in South America in the early 1960s; following this, unbelievably, he became the biggest star in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Lenin Prize and his icons were sold alongside those of Joseph Stalin. His Albums went gold from Bulgaria to Berlin. He made highly successful movies and, naively earnest, was also an unwitting acolyte for socialism; everywhere he went, he was mobbed by his fans. And then, in 1986, at the height of his fame, right after 60 Minutes had devoted a segment to him finally giving him the recognition he had never attained at home, he drowned in mysterious circumstances in East Berlin.

Drawn magnetically to his story, Reggie Nadelson pursued the mystery of Dean Reed's life and death across America and Eastern Europe, her own journey mirroring his. As she traveled, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union crumbled, and Reed became an increasingly alluring figure, his life an unrepeatable tale of the Cold War world. Encountering the characters - musicians and DJs, politicians and public figures, lovers and wives - who peopled Reed's life, Nadelson was drawn further and further into a seedy, often hilarious, subculture of sex, politics, and rock 'n' roll. Part biography, part memoir and personal journey, Comrade Rockstar is an unforgettable chronicle of an utterly improbable man, who retains a cult following to this day.

Comrade rockstar : the life and mystery of Dean Reed, the all-American boy who brought rock ’n’ roll to the Soviet Union / Reggie Nadelson. Edition: Rev. ed. New York : Walker & Co. : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006. Gift of Allan Rogg.

Special Collections Rogg Collection ML 420 .R298 N33 2006

Posted by jgreen at 02:59 PM

Summer Hours to begin May 19

Summer hours for Binghamton University Libraries' Special Collections and University Archives will begin on May 19, 2008. Summer hours will be Monday - Friday, 9:00am- 4:00pm. We will be closed weekends.

If you have any questions or need further information, please call the Special Collections Reference Desk at (607) 777-4844.

Posted by jgreen at 02:00 PM

May 12, 2008

Internet Archive challenges FBI's secret records demand

Internet Archive founder breaks gag order, detailing FBI's secret demand for user's personal information and the resulting lawsuit challenging the subpoena

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has withdrawn a secret demand that the Internet Archive, an online library, provide the agency with a user's personal information after the Web site challenged the records request in court.

The FBI sent a national security letter, or NSL, to the Internet Archive in November and included a gag order barring site founder Brewster Kahle from talking to anyone other than his lawyers about the request. Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit to challenge the subpoena, arguing that the NSL program is unconstitutional, and the FBI withdrew the NSL on April 22.

The settlement between the FBI and the Internet Archive allowed Kahle to break the gag order, a standard part of an NSL request. The Internet Archive's challenge of the NSL is only the third case that the ACLU is aware of in which an NSL has been challenged in court, said Melissa Goodman an attorney for the civil liberties group's National Security Project.

"The NSLs basically allow the FBI to demand extremely sensitive personal information about innocent people without any prior court approval, often in total secrecy," Goodman said Wednesday.

The NSL program, expanded when Congress passed the antiterrorism Patriot Act shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., allows the FBI and other U.S. government agencies to issue administrative subpoenas to U.S. businesses for customer and other personal information.

FBI assistant director John Miller issued a statement about the case Wednesday. "The information requested in the national security letter was relevant to an ongoing, authorized national security investigation," he said. "National security letters remain indispensable tools for national security investigations and permit the FBI to gather the basic building blocks for our counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations."

Although the settlement keeps parts of the FBI request secret, Kahle applauded the lawsuit and settlement, saying it will show other businesses how to challenge NSLs. The FBI issued nearly 200,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006, according to a U.S. Department of Justice inspector general's report.

"We see this as an unqualified success," Kahle said during a news conference. "The goal here was to help other recipients of NSLs ... understand that you can push back on these."

The gag order prevented Kahle from discussing the case with the library's board of directors, staff, and even his wife, he said. "Gags don't seem to be necessary," he said. "Gagging librarians is horrendous."

Kahle's lawyers declined to talk about the nature of the FBI investigation or reveal the identity of the targeted user.

The NSL sent to the Internet Archive asked for a user's name, address, length of service, e-mail header information, and activity logs. The FBI investigation was "relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities," according to the FBI letter.

The Internet Archive provided the FBI some information that was publicly available on the site, but could not comply with the FBI request because the site does not track user activity or record IP addresses, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the EFF. The site asks only for an unverified e-mail address when users register.

Opsahl responded to the NSL in December. In addition to telling the FBI that the Internet Archive does not collect most of the personal information it sought, Opsahl also told the agency the Internet Archive was challenging the NSL on constitutional grounds. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found the NSL program unconstitutional in September 2004, with the gag orders a violation of the First Amendment rights to free speech, Opsahl noted. The judge in the case has delayed his order pending government appeal.

Congress also gave some protections from NSLs to libraries in 2006, Opsahl told the FBI.

In each of the three court challenges to the NSL program, the FBI has withdrawn the information demands, ACLU's Goodman said. "I think that calls into question how much the FBI needed the information in the first place and, frankly, whether the FBI needs this kind of sweeping and unchecked surveillance power," she said.

Posted by jgreen at 09:52 AM

May 08, 2008

National Archives Creates Plan for Online Access to Founding Fathers Papers

On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein submitted a report, entitled The Founders Online, to the Committees on Appropriations of the U.S. Congress. This report is the National Archives response to concerns raised by the Committees that the complete papers of America's Founding Fathers are not available online. The Founders Online is a plan for providing online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to researchers, students and the general public. The report is available electronically at the National Archives website: http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/publications.

In announcing the completion of the report, Professor Weinstein said, "We feel this plan would provide scholars and the public access to the best available versions of the complete papers; it would also protect the longstanding interests of the publishers and host organizations which along with the Federal government have invested great resources in the past four decades. Most importantly, it would build a monument to the Founders of our nation in their own words."

The National Archives received suggestions from the editors of the papers of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, university publishers, and others in crafting a blueprint for providing access to the already completed print editions and the raw materials for the editions to come. If carried out, the plan ensures that interested readers worldwide can see the work in progress with the already complete editions accompanied by transcriptions of the papers yet to be published. To hasten the transition process, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission plans to invest $250,000 as a demonstration pilot project.

The plan outlines three remaining basic steps toward completion:

. Digitizing the existing 217 volumes and publishing the Papers on a single website to allow for research and inquiry across America's Founding Era collections;
. Transcribing and otherwise preparing for publishing on the web the remaining papers (approximately 90,000 documents) and replacing these raw materials with authoritative annotated versions as these are completed; and
. Creating an independent oversight process to ensure that rigorous performance goals are established and met by the parties carrying out all aspects of the work.

Posted by jgreen at 11:29 AM

Publishers Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books

In September 2003, The University of Alabama, University Libraries, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, received an IMLS National Leadership grant to create the digital resource, Publishers' Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books (PBO).

All academic libraries have within their holdings books bound in 19th century decorative bindings. These materials are significant in their place within the fabric of American history and culture, but efforts to present these bindings in a collection that is representative of the era as a whole and to make them available virtually, via the World Wide Web have been limited.

PBO, a significant digital collection of decorative bindings, along with a comprehensive glossary and guide to the elements of these objects, will strengthen the growing interest in and create broader awareness for this “common” object called the book.

Decorative bindings cover many of the books that people have in their homes today, but their owners are often unaware of their cultural and historical significance. These bindings reflect not only social and cultural history, but bibliographic history as well.

PBO expands awareness of the book as artifact and of the role decorative bindings play in providing a window into historical, cultural, and industrial period of 1815-1930. This project increases the awareness of the general public about the importance of publishers' bindings as reflections of historical events, art movements, and the evolution of commercial binderies.

The project will also afford students, teachers, binders, and scholars in many different areas the opportunity to study up to 5,000 decorative bindings from two different physical collections in a single, virtual location.

One can look upon this project as developing a model that other repositories can use with their own collections. PBO greatly broadens a relatively unexplored scholarly field. This resource will encourage interested parties to look at their own collections, and to gain an understanding of design movements and trends both within the United States as well as abroad, comparable to Jugendstil in Germany, Art Nouveau in France, Arts and Crafts in England, and Glasgow School in Scotland.

The additional resources and scholarship that are developed through the PBO project will serve a myriad of users.

[Taken from About the Project, Publisher's Bindings Online]

Access PBO http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/index.html

Posted by jgreen at 10:17 AM