March 2013

Work underway in St. Augustine to digitize 1500s records

Inside a Catholic convent deep in St. Augustine’s historic district, stacks of centuries-old, sepia-toned papers offer clues to what life was like for early residents of the nation’s oldest permanently occupied city.

These parish documents date back to 1594, and they record the births, deaths, marriages and baptisms of the people who lived in St. Augustine from that time through the mid-1700s. They’re the earliest written documents from any region of the United States, according to J. Michael Francis, a history professor at the University of South Florida.

For Libraries, MOOCs Bring Uncertainty and Opportunity

Lynne O’Brien, director of academic technology and instructional services at Duke University, said the “rapid uptake” of MOOCs had taken many people by surprise. As she put it, “These courses don’t seem to fit anything of the model that we have for how to do online education well.” She’s been hearing from instructors that “the process of preparing courses for this environment made them rethink” how they teach their on-campus courses. “Faculty have said it’s a huge amount of work but that it’s also a wonderful opportunity,” she said.

A Radical Library for the Hip-Hop Set in the South Bronx

seattlepi.com: Welcome to The Richie Perez Radical Library, a new library created by the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective. The library, which was named for a South Bronx educator and activist who died in 2004, features “works by influential thinker-agitators, such as Angela Davis and Malcolm X, with writings by hip-hop luminaries including KRS-One, the RZA and Jay-Z.”
The collective partnered with Bluestockings, an independent Lower East Side bookstore, to gather 300 mostly donated books to get things started.