Who Owned This? – THE MOVIE

Provenance Meets Big Data – Do they have a future together? by Jim Hinck from The Grolier Club on Vimeo.

If you regret having missed last month’s “Who Owned This?” symposium  at the Grolier Club you can now see the video version that has just been published to Vimeo.

A link to my own contribution is shown above while the full program can be accessed here:

Who Owned This?

I was pleased to be asked to present a paper at the recent symposium “Who Owned This,” sponsored by the ILAB, ABAA and Grolier Club on 5 March, 2019.  The event took place at the Grolier Club with 120 registrants in the audience and, I am told, an early and lengthy waiting list.

The 8 speakers spoke on various subjects relating to the difficult but timely problems faced by booksellers and librarians in connection with provenance, theft and forgery.  I was honored by being assigned the closing position and used it to consider these subjects with a particular regard to the use of databases to protect from theft, recover stolen books and establish provenance. At the end I ventured a few general speculations about how the database technologies of the future may be even more useful for these purposes, including a preview of some of the things that viaLibri will be doing to make use of these technologies. The title of my paper was: “Provenance Meets Big Data – Do they have a future together?

The full symposium was videotaped by the Grolier Club and will, in the future, be available on their website.  I will make an announcement of that here when it happens.

In the meantime, a few colleagues who had not been able to attend the symposium have asked me to send them a printed version of my paper.  On the chance that there might be one or two others who remain curious about what I had to say I have posted the full text of my presentation elsewhere on my blog.  You can read it here:

Provenance Meets Big Data: Will they have a future together?

Comments have been enabled for that page and will be very welcome.

 

Charges filed in Carnegie library theft

Charges were filed today in the theft of rare books at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  So far the most extensive public information about the crime and indictments has appeared int the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette under a headline reading:

Two men charged with stealing more than $8 million in rare books from Carnegie Library

Unfortunately, the Post-Gazette website is completely blocked to visitors in the European Union, making access to these latest details difficult for  anyone on this side of the Atlantic to obtain.   We have, however, been sent a PDF copy of the online version of the newspaper story and are thus able to provide it here.

PDF Version of Post-Gazette report on Carnegie Library thefts

Clicking the link above will open up a printer screen that will allow you to print the full story (14 pages).  Click Cancel if you prefer to display a scrollable version of the same story.