Link Love: 9/17/2010

• The International Center of Photography celebrated the end of the US Open Finals this week with a series of classy early 20th c. tennis photos from their collections.

• Oh-oh . . . Dusty tourists may be damaging the Sistine Chapel [via C-MONSTER].

• Blogger Mia Ridge reports on the BBC’s Bill Thompson’s presentation at Open Tech 2010: To remember is to understand, to resist . . . [and] Remembering comes along with digitising; our experience of the world is so mediated by bits that unless we makes archives digital in some form, there's a real danger that they will be forgotten, inaccessible.”

• Wow, I recently read about the popularity DIY book digitization in Japan. Well now, Japanese researchers have made it worlds easier by coming up with technology that scans a book as fast as a person can flip through it [via Resource Shelf].

• Clearly, I’ve got some reading to do. The new iPhone app—MegaReader—taps into book catalogues across the net, including Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, to provide users with access to over 1.8 million free e-books.

• Fun use of Twitter and museum collections! Flickr Commons user extraordinaire, lifeasdaddy, tipped me off to the Museum Victoria’s #collectionfishing game on Twitter with his reference to our Commons photo of author Rachel Carson.

• Sounds like Walter Benjamin talking about mechanical reproduction and photographs . . .  An audio feature from The Voice of Russia debates the pros and cons of e-books versus paper books and observes that perhaps paper books will be “elitist” luxury goods in the not so distant future:

The Voice of Russia, Will paper books become luxury objects In the future?.