More than 200 Los Angeles Unified School District elementary school libraries have reopened in just two months, according to district officials.
Recession-era budget cuts had left many libraries without staffing. The cuts persisted even when the economy began to improve: a year ago half of the district’s 650,000 students were still without a librarian or library aide
From LAUSD reopening libraries after recession closings | 89.3 KPCC
Book of legal and philosophical advice on king’s efforts to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled helped change the course of English history
So there are still some far-flung outposts of garbledom left on Wikipedia, in case you were wondering. Even here, we can find that strange and salutary feeling lumbering into view from the primeval past: when we go looking for references with a semblance of authority, only to find ourselves more perplexed than ever.
From Pimps & Nazi Cattle: A Translator’s Adventures in the Dictionary
The Rosetta Disk, for example, is one of its attempts to create a permanent archive: it’s a wafer of nickel containing all the world’s languages in raised microscopic text. “We aren’t creating the Rosetta Disk specifically with an apocalypse in mind, or for a society that’s undergoing major upheaval,” Long Now Director Laura Welcher told Hopes&Fears, “but over the span of millennia, I think you have to expect that to happen occasionally.”
Let us now turn to the human experts for answers.
From The near and far future of libraries — Hopes&Fears — flow “Technology”
In between the rare maps and historical stacks, fishing out fornicators and nixing narcotics transactions are all in a day’s work for one of Portland’s finest.
From The Secret Life of a Public Library Security Guard | Narratively | Human stories, boldly told.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Jeffery Bailey spends nearly every day at his public library. It’s not just that he loves books. For the 43-year-old who sleeps in a tent outside a local church, the library is pretty much the only place he can go that won’t charge him to provide safety, warmth, useful services and entertainment.
Many public libraries discourage homeless people from hanging around all day. “It could be the way you dress, the way your hair is,” says Bailey, whose scruffy denim jacket could use a good wash.
But just as Bailey needs his library, the library needs him: In this digital age, many people who used to depend on libraries can find what they need online without leaving home. Menaced by budget cuts, many public libraries are effectively failing to justify their relevance, reducing their hours year after year.
We already put legal limits on financial, medical, military, transportation, telecommunications and agriculture technology. Why not online tracking? With digital technology making its way into more parts of our lives, and with our data quickly becoming more and more valuable, of course there should be some limits on online tracking!
With that said: should a library director be paid $7.25/hr? No, of course not. But in this part of Kentucky, believe it or not, that is a decent salary. Not because it is objectively an amount of money that someone deserves for doing their job, but only because the area around it has been forgotten. This part of the world has been given up on by the former industries that sustained it, by the clay and the tobacco and the lumber that were the only reasons money ever flowed into the economy of the area in the first place.
Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group’s proclivity to consume most other content digitally. A University of Washington pilot study of digital textbooks found that a quarter of students still bought print versions of e-textbooks that they were given for free.
From Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right. – The Washington Post
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