An intriguing post on the Freakonomics blog, asking whether or not Public Libraries could be built today or if the publishing houses have become powerful enough to block such profitless enterprise in their domain.

This is very detailed accounting of where the Google Book Search effort is at with regards to their library scanning endeavors. There are many helpful links and a good overview of all the major issues.

Quoted: Like Harvard and the NYPL, Oxford continues to explore how best to use its digital copies. When asked to describe how his library currently uses and/or plans to use digital copies received from Google, Popham replied, “At the moment, we are simply planning to archive and preserve our copy of the data generated by our joint project with Google.” Popham went on to say that Oxford will link from its catalog record to the images hosted at Google [http://books.google.com]. Finally, Popham explained, “The scale and scope of this project is such that we are only just beginning to consider some of the possibilities that this work may enable.”

This is great (and something I've wanted for a while). You can now manage multiple music libraries on your Mac. Now I can buy some external storage and rip all my CDs uncompressed.

Quoted: Switching libraries is simple; hold down the option key on your Mac (or shift key on Windows) when you launch iTunes et voilà, you'll get the option to create a new library or choose the library you want to load. For iPhoto users, this is the same shortcut you would use if you wanted to manage multiple libraries in iPhoto. Shareware app Libra iTunes library manager used to give users a way to do this, but it's nice to see Apple add this feature directly to iTunes (and yes, free is always better).