It was easy to miss Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace by Rachel Donadio in the Times on September 4, 2005.

Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today’s richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that’s increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace. This year alone Farrar, Straus & Giroux published ‘’The Letters of Robert Lowell'’ and a biography of the critic Edmund Wilson that draws on his letters. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the company is saving its own communication with writers. ‘’I try to save substantive correspondence about issues concerning books we’re working on, or about our relations with authors, but I’m sure I don’t always keep the good stuff — particularly the personal interchanges, which is probably what biographers would relish,'’ Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said (via e-mail, of course, like most of the editors and writers interviewed for this story). ‘’I don’t think we’ve addressed in any systematic way what the long-term future of these communications is, but I think we ought to.'’

I present a draft syllabus for Projects in Digital Archives for comment and consideration. The fall semester at Pratt starts next week. We are shifting our attention from digitization to digital preservation this time. Students will work on a real-world website preservation project. Most of the readings are specs and standards, but we are reading The Social Life of Information to ground our thinking.

A few blogs focusing on digital preservation:

• The Ten Thousand Year Blog
• Digitization Blog
• UCSD Digital Library Planning Working Group (DLPWG)
• The Digital Archives

Last week, someone asked me why I thought libraries are important. My answer normally runs along the lines of a successful democracy depending on an informed public, and public libraries being instrumental in keeping the public informed.

After seven years in the filed, that platitude only raises more questions. What about libraries that function in a setting other than a democratic one? Are they not valuable? Are libraries doing a good job of keeping people informed?

One of the functions of a research library is to collect for future generations. Who knows (or cares in a way) what kind of society or government our future readers will live in? We will still collect for the unborn. That seems important.

In my first stab at finding a better answer the question about the importance of libraries, I came upon Library Staff are Unsung Heroes by Greg Hill.

Democratic institutions depend on citizens being able to inform themselves on the issues. Societies that renew themselves through life-long learning are much healthier. There’s a thousand other reasons why libraries are important.

Reason number four for a year of silence: the NYPL Digital Gallery. Under the direction of Barbara Taranto, we have been working like mad to digitize 500,000 images from the collections of The New York Public Library, create metadata for each item, and build a Digital Asset Management System and publishing system. The first 275,000 images are now live. The remaining images will be published at regular intervals over the coming months, so it will pay to visit the site again and again.

A fine review by Sarah Boxer in The New York Times and our press release describe the intellectual piece. I’ll not write about what they cover so well, but I will share a few of my favorite searches: Manet, library, and Yiddish.

What you will not find covered in the literature for a spell is how we did it, but I’ll be speaking about the process at SXSW in a few days.

An FYI for geeks: the Digital Asset Management System is a homegrown labor of love with an Oracle back-end and ColdFusion web-based front-end. The publishing system is based on an extract from Oracle that is delivered via XML. This allowed us to have a heavily normalized repository database and a rather flat and fast public delivery. More on the use of XML later.