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Just got this in my inbox this morning and figured I’d share. I edited a little bit and added some hyperlinks, also suggested that BPL needs an announcement blog along the lines of the nifty one at NYPL Labs.

Hi Jessamyn and Alison,

Thanks for blogging about our Flickr presence last week… your influence was greatly felt (to the tune of 2,500 hits on the day of your post, with virtually no other publicity at all).

I wanted to let you know about a couple of this week’s developments:

• In response to comments on Jessamyn’s blog, we’ve gone ahead and opened up all of our items to tags and comments from any Flickr user; we welcome/encourage/request any and all submissions. We’ve made the photo titles more meaningful as well, instead of simply using our digital accession numbers.
• In addition to the 1,227 items posted last week, we’ve added 4,523 really cool vintage postcards of New England, geotagged by the location pictured (and therefore viewable on our map). It’s so cool that I’d probably lose a lot of productive time playing with this stuff if it weren’t my actual job to play with this stuff.
• We’ve got two or three more collections identified for uploading in the very near future, with plenty more to come after that.
• We’re still waiting to see if Flickr will let us use the “No known copyright restrictions” license that they created for the Flickr Commons pilot project.

If you feel like any of this is newsworthy enough to treat your readers to a followup, we can always use a little pre-launch publicity. :-) Either way, I’ll be sure to keep you both posted as the project continues to grow.

Thanks!
Michael

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Michael B. Klein
Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian

Yesterday, Mark V. Tushnet author of Out Of Range: Why the Constitution Can’t End the Battle Over Guns, introduced us to the gun-rights argument. Today Tushnet takes a closer look at the gun-control position. Be sure to check back tomorrow for part three in this series.

Gun-control proponents support their position with several arguments. First, the text: The Second Amendment does refer to the militia, and the gun-rights position deprives the Amendment’s preamble of any operative significance, which is unusual in constitutional interpretation. But there’s more to the textual argument. The Constitution refers to the Militia in two additional places. It gives Congress the right to laws providing for the calling forth of the Militia, and it reserves to states the right to appoint the officers of the Militia. These references clearly deal with the state-organized Militia, and we ought to interpret the Second Amendment to use the term in the same way. The Second Amendment would then prohibit Congress from disarming the state-organized militia – and would thereby preserve the ability of those militias to resist an oppressive national government. (more…)

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Mark V. Tushnet is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is the author of fifteen books, most recently Out Of Range: Why the Constitution Can’t End the Battle Over Guns. Out Of Range is honest guide to both sides of the 2nd amendment debate and an insightful analysis of how our view of the 2nd amendment reflects our sense of ourselves as a people. Part of Oxford’s Inalienable Rights Series, Tushnet’s book challenges our views of one of our most controversial freedoms, the right to bear arms. In the post below Tushnet lays out the argument. Be sure to check back tomorrow for part two.

With Constitution Day today, it seems like a good time to talk about a constitutional issue that’s likely to get to the Supreme Court’s attention pretty soon: the Second Amendment. Shortly after it opens its term in October the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear an appeal from the District of Columbia challenging a court of appeals decision striking down the city’s ban on handgun possession as a violation of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the “right to keep and bear arms.” (more…)

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