While watching dozens of teenagers decked out in parrot masks and Bugs Bunny costumes dancing, jumping, and spinning on rolling chairs across the frame, anyone is likely to wonder: This was allowed in a library? And upon entering the space where the clip was filmed, many people do ask: Thisis a library? Aside from a few small shelves of test-prep materials, this 3,000-square-foot room holds no books.
http://theweek.com/article/index/266208/what-is-a-library
io9 looks at the copyright status of James Bond:
“On January 1st, 2015, the works of Ian Fleming entered the public domain in a number of countries. That means that the character of James Bond is no longer copyrighted in those countries, just like Sherlock Holmes has been for a while. But it doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly open season on that character.
But why now and what exactly does it mean?”
To the delight of historians, an x-ray performed last month suggested that the enclosed materials%u2014thought to include paper and coins%u2014were intact.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-found-inside-oldest-american-time-capsule-180953820/?no-ist
via PUB-LIB: SKYPE/ZOOM WITH A 3-TIME IDITAROD MUSHER AND HER IDITAROD LEAD DOG!
Karen Land, writer, oral historian, public speaker, and three-time participant in the 1,150-mile Iditarod Sled Dog Race across Alaska will be Skyping/Zooming with students across the globe this Winter/Spring 2015. E-mail [email protected] for more information and to set up a date! (the Iditarod starts March 7, 2015)
I’m much less optimistic. These recent examples, while egregious, are merely a continuation of a trend publishers themselves started many years ago of stretching the “peer reviewed” brand by proliferating journals. If your role is to act as a gatekeeper for the literature database, you better be good at being a gatekeeper. Opening the gate so wide that anything can get published somewhere is not being a good gatekeeper.
http://blog.dshr.org/2015/01/stretching-peer-reviewed-brand-until-it.html?m=1
Today (December 29), the preprint server clocked its one-millionth upload. In anticipation of this milestone, The Scientist spoke with ArXiv founder Paul Ginsparg of Cornell University about sharing data, peer review, and what%u2019s next for the resource.
In a digital age that has left book publishers reeling, libraries in the world’s major cities seem poised for a comeback, though it’s one that has very little to do with books. The Independent Library Report—published in December by the U.K.’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport—found that libraries across the nation are re-inventing themselves by increasingly becoming “vibrant and attractive community hubs,” focusing on the “need to create digital literacy—and in an ideal world, digital fluency.”
http://magazine.good.is/articles/public-libraries-reimagined
Patrick-Dunleavy-thumb1Academic blogging gets your work and research out to a potentially massive audience at very, very low cost and relative amount of effort. Patrick Dunleavy argues blogging and tweeting from multi-author blogs especially is a great way to build knowledge of your work, to grow readership of useful articles and research reports, to build up citations, and to foster debate across academia, government, civil society and the public in general.
Watership Down, a story Richard Adams made up to scare his kids in the car, was rejected seven times before it became a classic. As a new illustrated edition is published, the author tells Alison Flood why he loves making children wince and weep
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/04/richard-adams-watership-down-interview
http://chronicle.com/article/What-We-Lose-if-We-Lose-the/150991/
On the other hand, once the present began to seem divorced from the past, modern writers felt they knew more than had their ancestors, and to distinguish themselves from both the ancients and their own contemporaries, they had to write works unbeholden to previous efforts. In Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), we find the notion that “the first ancients had no merit in being originals; they could not be imitators. Modern writers have a choice to make and therefore have a merit in their power.”
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