Category: book Nook
I confess, I am addicted. It is driving me crazy that it has been down for the better part of a week and a half with no specific date being projected when it will be up again.
Well, hallelujah! It is back up. Hope it stays.
Strange. I went to the homepage and was already logged in without entering my e-mail and password.
Yes, it is back. The most recent date for new books is September 1, but hopefully now there will be a lot more books in the next several days. And it wasn't just BARD. It was apparently the entire Library of Congress Library computer system that was down.
Yep, the whole thing. And, that's after the LOC director lost their job, for failure to do some stuff. I forgot what he/she was supposed to do. But, when the whole country's LOC is down, there's serious problems. I read in an email, that it cost over $650000,, to fix the problem. That's when someone's failed to get the job done, and we're all stuck.
I hated having BARD, Zone, and almost every site I wanted on down, when I wasn't up to going anywhere. So, I understand. I wondered for a minute, if there was something wrong with the net. But, just 2 different things happening at the same time.
That's what I call a bad week! LOL
Blessings,
Me
Hmmm, interesting. Here is an article regarding Dr. Billingswhatever although he isn't stepping down until January 2016.
I recall reading about mishandling of money that was designated for the digital transition for our audiobooks a few years back but don't remember any of the details.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/us/library-of-congress-chief-james-hadley-billington-leaving-after-nearly-3-decades.html?_r=0
Can someone please post the text of the article? Thank you.
Blessings,
Me
WASHINGTON —
James H. Billington,
a leading Russia scholar in 1987 when President Ronald Reagan nominated him to be the 13th librarian of Congress, will step down from his post on Jan.
1 after nearly three decades leading the world’s largest library, officials announced Wednesday.
The move comes after Dr. Billington, who turned 86 on June 1, presided over a series of management and technology failures at the library that were documented
in more than a dozen reports by government watchdog agencies.
In a statement,
Dr. Billington said he had informed President Obama and members of Congress of his intention to leave one of the central repositories of American cultural
history.
“Over the years, I have been asked if I have been thinking about retiring, and the answer has always been ‘not really,’ because this library has always
been not just my job, but my life,” Dr. Billington said in the statement. “However, I have never had more faith in the leadership and staff of the
Library of Congress
.”
In a 2013 audit, the library’s inspector general warned that millions of items, some from as far back as the 1980s, remained piled in overflowing buildings
and warehouses, virtually lost to the world. In addition, just a small fraction of its 24 million books are available to read online, 200 years after Thomas
Jefferson laid the foundation for a vast national library by selling Congress his personal collection of books after the War of 1812.
The latest government investigation, delivered in March, accused the library of “widespread weaknesses” in managing its technology resources and cited
a “lack of strong, consistent leadership” in that area. That report, and other recent complaints about Dr. Billington’s leadership, had caught the attention
of the library’s congressional patrons.
“I am aware of the concerns that have been raised,” Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said in a statement before Dr. Billington’s retirement was
announced. “We will be looking into this and other aspects of the library operations in the coming months.”
In addition, there has been mounting criticism from former staff members and other libraries that the
Library of Congress,
which has long been the premier institution responsible for collecting and cataloging the world’s intellectual and cultural knowledge, is becoming increasingly
irrelevant in the digital age.
“All librarians sense is a vacuum, a lack of leadership that concerns the whole world of learning,” said Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University
Library and a former colleague of Dr. Billington’s at Princeton.
Continue reading the main story
Document: Billington’s Letter to President Obama
Before Wednesday’s announcement, Mr. Darnton said: “I think that James Billington should resign. We should have a new librarian of Congress.”
In interviews, current and former library employees and others who have worked with Dr. Billington over the decades say they no longer recognize the charismatic,
energetic librarian they once knew. They say he has slowed down so much that he rarely comes in before noon or works a full week in his majestic office
overlooking Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court. Co-workers say that he does not use email and that they often communicate with him through a fax machine
at his house.
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But Dr. Billington’s supporters say he has continued to carry out the library’s missions with vigor. David McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
and longtime friend, called him a “man of infinite interests and extraordinary ideas.”
Responding to questions about the library in an interview last week with a reporter for The New York Times, Dr. Billington said that he had no intention
of retiring and that the criticism of him came from rivals and disgruntled former employees. “Let me emphatically say that I am still involved in every
major decision at the library,” Dr. Billington said. “I don’t know where you are getting this kind of gossip.”
In the statement announcing his departure, the library noted that Dr. Billington had created two online portals for the library, including the World Digital
Library, with about 11,000 items. The statement noted that collections grew to more than 160 million items today from 85.5 million items in 1987.
The statement said Dr. Billington was “recognized for having brought the world’s largest library into the digital age.”
But Mr. Darnton and other university librarians insist that Dr. Billington is stuck in a past era and that he has resisted their entreaties to cooperate
on a large-scale digitization of the library’s collection. They say the vast majority of the library’s archives remain largely closed off from digital
information seekers, stored on physical shelves the way they have been for decades.
“One expects the Library of Congress to be a leader,” said Paul Courant, the former librarian and former provost at the University of Michigan. “But with
regard to digitization and the use of digital technologies, the library has basically been a bust.”
Dr. Billington was already a seasoned Washington figure when he arrived at the library after serving for more than a decade as the director of the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars, a leading policy think tank.
A Rhodes scholar, Dr. Billington joined Reagan at the 1988 Moscow summit meeting with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, and he quickly
became an imposing figure on Capitol Hill and a powerful fund-raiser. He reached out to some of the wealthiest Americans to help collect books and manuscripts
from around the world.
“Rarely do you meet one man who can say he’s been a Princeton valedictorian, a Harvard professor, a Rhodes scholar, an expert on the Kremlin and a veteran,
but that’s Dr. Billington,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said in a statement Wednesday morning.
In 2000, Dr. Billington used his star power to persuade John W. Kluge, the chairman of Metromedia, to
donate $60 million
to establish an academic center for scholars. In 2007, David Packard, a founder of Hewlett-Packard, donated $155 million to help preserve audiovisual
materials. Two years later, Dr. Billington announced the World Digital Library, a joint effort with other countries to begin putting some material online.
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The 1802 statute that created the librarian of Congress position does not specify a term of office. It has effectively become a lifetime appointment, vacated
only by retirement or death. During his tenure, Dr. Billington regularly courted lawmakers, for whom the library serves as a kind of in-house consulting
service.
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But in recent years, Dr. Billington clashed with senior staff members at the library, many of whom have left for other jobs. Several co-workers described
what they called “walk-through” sessions in which he asked to see rehearsals of presentations they were scheduled to give to a member of Congress or potential
donors, and then belittled their performances.
“He is a man who has an explosive quality to him,” said Jeremy Adamson, the library’s former director for collections and services, who left in 2014 after
many arguments with Dr. Billington. “You live in fear of the man.”
Karl Schornagel, who for a decade sparred with Dr. Billington as the library’s inspector general, said he increasingly received bitter complaints from
the library’s senior management in the years before he left the oversight position in 2014.
“I got a sense of how frustrated they were,” Mr. Schornagel said in an interview. “How he would lash out at people and yell at them and throw things.”
Dr. Billington dismissed the criticism from his former employees, saying in the interview, “I only have one way to work, and the way I work is very intensive.”
But if Dr. Billington’s behavior has produced anxiety among his staff, it has been his management of the $600 million, 3,100-employee library bureaucracy
that has caught the attention of government oversight agencies.
Investigations in 2002, 2008 and 2012 focused on the library’s hiring of contractors. One inquiry identified “deficiencies and weaknesses” in the library’s
management. Another found a “widespread lack of compliance with library contracting requirements.”
A 2010 report said the library had “no assurance that service and support units are appropriately managing the records in their custody.” A series of investigations
from 1996 to 2015 documented technology issues that a Government Accountability Office report this year said put “the library’s systems and information
at risk of compromise.”
“We definitely believe there’s a leadership issue as it relates to information technology,” said Joel C. Willemssen, the author of the G.A.O. report. “There
wasn’t anybody running the ship with the necessary skills.”
Dr. Billington said he welcomed constructive advice from oversight agencies. He said contracting, storage and technology issues had been fixed or were
being addressed.
Library officials said that Dr. Billington created the library’s office of the inspector general and corrected deficiencies in the library’s financial
management systems early in his tenure.
“We have an entirely new management team,” Dr. Billington said. “We are putting this institution on a great path moving forward to continue our mission.”
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Supporters of Dr. Billington acknowledge that the library has not focused on digitizing its 24 million books. But they insist that the library is properly
working first to digitize rare manuscripts, maps and photographs.
The library was one of the first to put a legislature online with its
Thomas.gov
website in 1995. It has made e-textbooks available, archived websites and digitized the archives of the Public Broadcasting Service. And it has proposed
new worldwide standards for describing material in an online environment.
“What counts to me is that he is still either initiating new ideas or is open to new ideas that come from members of the library,” said Ismail Serageldin,
the director of Egypt’s national library in Alexandria.
But Mr. Courant, Mr. Darnton and others said Dr. Billington had been unwilling to work with university librarians and others to make more of its books
available to researchers and the public.
They said Dr. Billington refused to cooperate with the Digital Public Library of America, a consortium begun by major university libraries. Library of
Congress officials point out that some of its materials are available through one of the consortium’s partner institutions, the Hathi Trust.
But Mr. Darnton said such efforts, and others like the World Digital Library, which hosts only 11,000 items, were more for show than anything else. “The
Library of Congress just sat on the sidelines while this digital revolution took place,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on June 11, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Top Librarian Retires Under Fire .
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BARD is down again, darn it!
Oh good. I thought it was just my computer.
It is? Hmmm, I am browsing the site at this very moment and there does not seem to be any problem. Guess I'm lucky.
I think I have discovered magic...as soon as I post that BARD is down, it pops up again just to make me look stupid, but hey, as long as I can download my books, I'll suffer it!
Raskolnikov
I was trying from about 4:30 this afternoon to 8:30 tonight with no luck.
Most times, people's computer's aren't at fault if BARD is down. It's a problem at their end. Trust me, if something was wrong with your pc, you wouldn't be able to get to any websites, and if you couldn't there are steps you can take to try to fix it. and if you still can't, it's time to call your internet provider, and have them fix things.
It was down for just a few minutes last night but is back. I hope to hell some idiot isn't going to come here and bring up this post again every time it goes down for a couple minutes. Get a life, people!
I'm the idiot who started the thread and I'm the idiot who came back to post that it was down again. For me, it was down for around 4 hours and I verified from a few other sources that it wasn't just me.
Well if you want something to worry about, how about the fact that there might be another government shutdown beginning October 1. This will affect BARD, but it will also affect a much larger percentage of Americans.
Woe is me, it appears to be down again.
All I can think to do is swear, so I won't.
Blessings,
Me