Part of this new agreement has been to promote a traveling exhibit with the pieces, which will eventually find a permanent home at a local museum in Cuzco, Peru, scheduled to coincide with the centenary of Bingham’s “finding” of the site. It will also allow a few selected pieces to remain at Yale a while longer for further scientific research.

In the past a many other countries, and native people the world over have struggled to recover items that were taken during periods of colonization and dominance by foreign groups. During the 1990s the USA passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring museums to inventory their collections and consider returning certain items, although this only applies to federally recognized indigenous groups.

The British Museum has had to deal with a number of cases concerning repatriation, but their response has usually been non-compliance with request from countries such as Egypt and Greece.

You can read more about this issue from an article in the BBC concerning the Yale-Machu Pichu case, or from an article in Suite 101 discussing whether repatriation is a passing fad or not. Wikipedia also has an entire index dedicated to repatriation, divided by cultures.

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Yale is returning Inca artifacts originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on September 20, 2007.

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A standard list of 150 titles for each from 20 religious groups, ranging from Baha’ism to Yoruba, has been established, with a promise of being expanded in October. Still religious experts who have seen the list are baffled about the choices on it, commenting that there are inclusions by C.S. Lewis, but none by theologians such as Reinhold Neibuhr, Karl Barth, and Cardinal Avery Dulles, nor Robert H. Schuller.

Then there is also the issue that regardless of who is on those lists, this is an affront to the First Amendment, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons was quoted in a NYT article arguing that a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department recommended that books in prisons should be taken a closer look at after the events of September 11, 2001. This argument feels more like an excuse for further censuring, since material entering prisons all over the country is already highly controlled. Besides, it is interesting that a government that has been so vocal in promoting their personal religious beliefs as a way to become a better human being, is now removing the very tools that will aid this process.

I visited a medium security prison while taking a class on library services for under serve- populations, and got to see and learn first-hand how prison libraries function. While laws vary from state to state, it is standard procedure to evaluate the intellectual content of library material before adding it to the collection. Some states further restrict books depending on whether they are hardbound or paperback; none allow material containing violent or sexual material. The only material that is federally required to be housed in every prison library are legal books, short of this, your local prison library looks very much like your local public library; hardly a breeding ground for violence and chaos.

10.04.07 – After much outcry from civil libertarians and religious groups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has agreed to return to prison chapel libraries all the material that had been previously removed. You can read more about this new development from an article in American Libraries. Or from an article in the New York Times.

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Standardized Library Chapel Project originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on September 16, 2007.

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Species added to the list are labeled as extinct (EX), extinct in the wild (EW), critically endangered (CR), endangered (EN), vulnerable (VU), lower risk/ conservation dependent (LR/CD), near threatened (NT), least concern (LC), or DD for data deficient.

All this information is housed in a major database with the World Conservation Union and can be accessed here. When searching the database you can type in the common name for a species and will get results including the species scientific name, and level of endangerment. Clicking on a specific species will provide more information on taxonomy, and citation information relating to how the species was evaluated for inclusion in the Red List. In the photo gallery you can find photographs of a few of the endangered species along with a brief explanation of its current situation.

This new list should make us all aware that while there are efforts out there to preserve wildlife, they are not providing the desired results, and further action should be taken to correct the situation.

You can read more about this from an article in The Hindu. There is another article in Practical Fishkeeping about discussing fish on the Red List.

Image info; Golden Lion Tamarin, (Leontopithecus rosalia), EN. Image from the World Conservation Union.

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The Red List originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on September 13, 2007.

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For some years now more and more initiatives are being created to help out poor women develop industries and help communities pull themselves out of poverty. The main belief behind this approach is that lending money to women will be spread out more evenly throughout the community; in general women tend to invest in three areas, health, their children, and their home, all areas that in the long term will benefit the community at large.

A lot of the business that poor women want to develop require relatively small amounts of money to get started, which usually means that banks are not likely to consider them for regular loans, or will do so with conditions that are very unfavorable to them.

This concept of microlending was made popular by Bangladeshi banker and economist Muhammad Yunus (his website), who in 2006, was awarded a Nobel Peace Price with Grameen Bank for helping finance the poor.

Today there are is a growing number of institutions which strive to help promote women headed businesses, some of these are Women’s World Banking, WAM international (Women Advancing Microfinancing), Financial Women’s Association, and the UN’s IFAD (International Fund for Agriculture and Development) among many others.

You can read more about microlending to women from an article in the BBC.

Desde hace algunos años más y más iniciativas se están creando para ayudar a mujeres de bajos ingresos a desarrollar industrias y ayudar a que sus comunidades salgan de la pobreza. La creencia principal detrás de este enfoque es que cualquier dinero que se le presta a estas mujeres se extenderá más uniformemente en toda la comunidad, en general las mujeres tienden a invertir en tres áreas, la salud, sus hijos y su hogar, todas áreas que en el largo plazo beneficiarán la comunidad en general.

Muchas de las empresas que las mujeres pobres quieren desarrollar requieren cantidades relativamente pequeñas de dinero para empezar, cosa que normalmente significa que los bancos no consideran que para los préstamos regulares, o lo harían con condiciones desfavorables

Este concepto de los microcréditos se hizo popular por el banquero y economista de Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus (su página web), que en 2006, fue galardonado con un Precio Nobel de la Paz con el Grameen Bank para ayudar a financiar a los pobres.

Hoy en día hay un creciente número de instituciones que se esfuerzan por ayudar a promover empresas dirigidas por mujeres, algunas de ellas son Women’s World Banking, WAM internacional (Advancing Women microfinanciación), la Asociación Financiera de la Mujer, y el FIDA de las Naciones Unidas (Fondo Internacional de Desarrollo Agrícola) entre muchos otros.

Usted puede leer más acerca de microcréditos a las mujeres de un artículo de la BBC.

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Microfinancing and Women originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on August 25, 2007.

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Earlier this week I was in NYC to witness the auction of a portion of a collection I helped inventory about two years ago. The collection was pieced together by Maury Bromsen, a rare book collector based in Boston, who passed away in 2005, bequeathing the entire collection to the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) in Providence Rhode Island. The Bromsen collection originally included material by and about Simon Bolivar, which had already been donated to the JCB, along with material mostly, but not exclusively, from the 18th, 19th and 20th century spanning the length and width of Latin America. Among the material I inventoried were original proclamations of the Mexican independence, along with entire collection by Andres Bello. There was also material on tourism, politics, novels, memoirs, cookbook, and all kinds of other literary pieces emerging from the region.

The auction, which took place at Swann Auction Galleries, included 68 lots from the original Bromsen collection, all of which were sold in about an hour. This sale was set up as a shelf sale, meaning that everything had to sell, regardless of the price; this would be in contrast to a catalog sale where the seller set a minimum price, and items will be kept if there are no buyers willing to pay this price.

Buyers in this occasion were mainly book dealers who had to buy entire book lots to get a few hidden gems, which they would later resell individually. Someone else that was there buying and whom I got to meet was the director of the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, in Bogotá, Colombia. The fact that she came all the way from Colombia to buy books on Latin America in New York was very telling of how the flow of books works these days.

There are still thousands of book from the Bromsen collection that will be auction off sometime in the future. The next sale will likely be middle prices material, and the last one will be for all the remaining treasures.

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Book Auction originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on August 23, 2007.

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Hopefully these efforts won’t be coming too little too late, as was the case just last week with the less fortunate fresh water dolphin in the Yangtze River whose extinction seems to have been confirmed. The Indus, Ganges and Mekon rivers also have fresh water dolphins, the populations of none of which are in good shape.

I’ve been lucky enough to have seen pink dolphin while drifting down the Orinoco river many years ago, but the memories are as fresh as if it had been just yesterday; they really are an impressive sight, and hopefully this charisma will help preserve them and the larger river ecosystem in which they live.

The International Society for the Preservation of the Tropical Rainforest has some more information on pink river dolphins here, so does Project Boto, here. A good book on the subject is the Journey of the Pink River Dolphin by Sy Montgomery.

Boto image by Pasajero on Flickr.

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Bufeos originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on August 12, 2007.

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Candidates have also moved to creating accounts and uploading videos that paint them in a positive light. As of today Hillary Clinton has uploaded 51 videos, while Barack Obama has posted 141 videos. Although as should be expected, satire has followed them here as well. Such is the case the the Obama Girl video, the Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl video, and John Edwards’ Feeling Pretty video.

We’ll have to wait and see how the Republicans do with this medium in a couple of weeks when they participate in in their own Youtube debate, on September 17. You can participate as well by submitting a question here.

Here is CNN’s transcript of the debate.

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Youtube and the 2008 White House election originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on July 25, 2007.

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"Just because I'm a librarian, doesn't mean I have to dress like one." - Belle da Costa Greene

Best known for being J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, lived, and made her mark in the library world between 1883 and 1950. Having great knowledge and passion for illuminated manuscripts and incunabula, Greene became a woman to be recon with in the world of rare manuscripts, books and art, while working at the Morgan Library.

While working for J.P. Morgan she added a number of great treasures to the collection, and in 1924 when the library became public, she became its first director. Having always wanted to make these rare books available to the public, when she became the Morgan library’s director she celebrated by installing a series of exhibits, one of which attracted the record number of 170,000 visitors.

On the personal side, Belle da Costa Greene was the child of Genevieve Ida Fleet and Richard Theodore Greener, an attorney who serves as the Howard Law School, and who was the first African American students and graduate at Harvard. Growing up at a time when race greatly limited her opportunities, Greene eventually changed her last name and adopted “da Costa” as her middle name, using it to create a fictional Portuguese ancestry that would explain her complexion.

Today the NYT has a book review about her life that was written by Heidi Ardizzone, titled “An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey From Prejudice to Privilege.”

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Belle da Costa Greene originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on July 24, 2007.

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Lack of faith in organizations like the IMF and WB started to gather momentum in Latin American during the 1990s, and this perspective was further solidified after Argentina disregarded IMF advice and defaulted on their loans, which lead to economic recovery. Those opposing this regional bank proposal argue that it is only one more ploy by the emerging left in Latin America, still IMF loans have steadily been declining in the region during the last decade; they currently stand at around $3 billion after being at $50 billion just five years ago. Latin American countries have also been turning to other regional initiatives such as the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) for loans.

Some former and current employees of the IMF and WB explain that maybe this is a wakeup call to these institutions to make more of an effort to customize the services they provide throughout the world. Apparently the IMF has been impacted enough about this to have had to sold some of their gold reserves. This also means that the USA treasury is affected as well, since they are the largest IMF shareholders.

I would like see the Banco del Sur actually succeed and create some wealthy competition.

“… there is life after the IMF, and it’s a very good life.” -Nestor Kirchner, Argentine President

You can read more about this from an article in the Christian Science Monitor, and an article in Upside Down World.

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Banco del Sur originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on July 12, 2007.

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Producing such little waste was commons a couple of generations ago, and is probably still common in rural settings, but in the city this is basically unheard of. At my grandmother’s home in Colombia I remember that she was able to produce practically no waste. Paper and other materials that burned were used in the wood oven, vegetarian food scraps went to the cows, and meat scraps were used to feed the dogs. Glass was the only thing she had trouble reusing, but there was an old man who went by a couple of times a month collecting glass for recycling. Me, I have always lived in cities and as much as I try, I still produce much more garbage.

Still there is a push to be more aware of our wastefulness and certain communities in the UK are taking matters seriously. The UK local councils of Bath and North East Somerset promoted “Zero Waste Week“, where people were encouraged to produce as little waste as possible. Some participants were able to reduce their waste by as much as 75%!

If you are still having trouble producing less waste you can use Freecycle, a great website that allows you to connect with other people who may want old things that you are giving away. Freecycle also has local websites where you can connect with people in your community.

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Zero Waste originally appeared on Bilingual Librarian on July 9, 2007.

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