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	<title>Au Courant</title>
	<link>http://paulcourant.net</link>
	<description>Paul Courant's blog about libraries, economics, public policy, and other stuff</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:30:27 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Finding Books in the 21st Century</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I was in Powell&#8217;s Books in Portland Oregon today, basking in the warmth of all of those books and all of the people basking in the warmth of all of those books and bookish people.  I couldn&#8217;t remember the author of the book that I was looking for, but I knew the title.  [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2010/04/24/finding-books-in-the-21st-century/</link>
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		<title>The Card Catalog and Biblical Plagues</title>
		<description><![CDATA[After extended deliberation and over twenty years after its official retirement, the University of Michigan Library decided recently to divest itself of the old card catalog &#8212; 108 cases containing over 12 million cards.  The story was fairly widely covered, with a piece in the official University Record and another in the local digital [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2010/03/12/the-card-catalog-and-biblical-plagues/</link>
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		<title>Digitization and accessibility</title>
		<description><![CDATA[From the very beginning, one of the most exciting possibilities of the Google Digitization Project was its potential to open up vast stores of text to a group of users to whom it had previously been inaccessible: people with visual impairments and print disabilities. Before Google (B.G.), students and scholars who wanted access to the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2009/11/02/digitization-and-accessibility/</link>
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		<title>The Economist and the librarian-economist on the Google settlement</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The current issue of The Economist has a leader supporting the Google settlement and an article in the business section that quotes me in the course of discussing the issue.  I am described, with my enthusiastic consent, as running an orphanage.  The more I think of it the better the orphan metaphor works. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2009/09/07/the-economist-and-the-librarian-economist-on-the-google-settlement/</link>
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		<title>Orphan Works Legislation and the Google Settlement</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I spent Friday at a fascinating conference  at the Columbia University Law School, on the subject of (what else?) the Google settlement.  Lead counsel from all three parties, lots of other lawyers, several princpals, publishers, authors and librarians were there.
I learned something important that at some level I already knew.
The most important single [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2009/03/15/orphan-works-legislation-and-the-google-settlement/</link>
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		<title>The Stimulus Package (and now for something completely different)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Suppose that there were a major fire, and that in order to put out the fire you would need, say, a trillion gallons of water.  Can you imagine a city council that would say, &#8220;oh no, we can only afford 734 billion gallons of water, so let&#8217;s leave out about a quarter of the neighborhoods.  [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2009/02/07/the-stimulus-package-and-now-for-something-completely-different/</link>
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		<title>Google, Robert Darnton, and the Digital Republic of Letters</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Robert Darnton recently published an essay in the New York Review of Books on the Google settlement.  There has been much commentary in blogs, listserves, and print media.  Below I reproduce a letter that I sent to the New York Review of Books, that they found to be far too long to publish. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2009/02/04/google-robert-darnton-and-the-digital-republic-of-letters/</link>
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		<title>The Google Settlement &#8211; From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you think about it, a universal bookstore is a pretty cool idea.  Bookstores are wonderful things. Anyone can walk into bookstore, take a book off a shelf, read in it, decide whether to buy it or forget about it, or get it from the library.  The settlement announced today by Google, the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2008/10/28/the-google-settlement-from-the-universal-library-to-the-universal-bookstore/</link>
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		<title>&#8220;Less than perfect&#8221; is not always bad</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In a recent paper prepared for the Boston Library Consortium, Richard Johnson decries the fact that some mass digitization arrangements between libraries and corporations have been &#8220;less than perfect.&#8221;
The choices that we face are indeed less than perfect.  We can choose purity and perfection, and not permit any restrictions on the use of scans [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2008/10/21/less-than-perfect-is-not-always-bad/</link>
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		<title>On the Meaning and Importance of Peer Review</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In my previous post I briefly discussed peer review, which has been raised by many in the publishing industry as a justification for opposing the NIH mandate for deposit of articles into PubMed Central, and, more broadly, as a justification for the vigorous protection of publisher-held copyright in scholarly publications.  In this post I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://paulcourant.net/2008/10/12/on-the-meaning-and-importance-of-peer-review/</link>
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