June 2015

Join Blake Carver from LYRASIS and Alison Macrina from the Library Freedom Project to learn strategies for security from digital surveillance. We’ll teach tools that keep data safe inside the library and out — securing your network, website, and PCs, and tools you can teach to patrons in computer classes. We’ll tackle security myths, passwords, tracking, malware, and more, covering a range of tools from basic to advanced, making this session ideal for any library staff.

From Digital Privacy and Security: Keeping You And Your Library Safe and Secure In A Post-Snowden World | 2015 ALA Annual Conference

I’ve also learned that the real story is not at all the one you commonly hear—the tale of a gigantic space below our usual web, where hard-to-find vices are traded among sordid individuals totally beyond the grasp of the authorities. That is not what the dark web is.

From The Dark Web as You Know It Is a Myth | WIRED

From the CCPL website: Charleston County Public Library is devastated by the senseless shootings Wednesday night at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston that took the lives of nine members of our community, including one of our own – St. Andrews Regional Library Manager Cynthia Hurd. Cynthia was a tireless servant of the community who spent her life helping residents, making sure they had every opportunity for an education and personal growth.

To honor our co-worker and all those lost, Charleston County Public Library’s 16 locations are closed today, Thursday, June 18, 2015.

Cynthia worked with Charleston County Public Library 31 years, serving as branch manager of the John L. Dart Branch from 1990-2011 before becoming manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library.

Her loss is incomprehensible, and we ask for prayers for her family, her co-workers, her church and this entire community as we come together to face this tragic loss.

The New York Public Library is the proud home of the REAL Winnie-the-Pooh, the actual toy teddy bear that once belonged to Christopher Robin Milne, son of A. A. Milne, and the basis for the character Christopher Robin in the beloved Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

From Stuffed Animal Husbandry: Caring for Winnie-the-Pooh and Friends | The New York Public Library

Unsurprisingly one can see the concentration of pre-1600 European manuscript holdings along the east coast. In a league table of manuscript holders New York, Washington, and Philadelphia(!) come out on top by volume but in terms of individual institutions the Huntington and Folger with their extensive holdings of pre-1600 documents come out on top.

From Mapping Books: Mapping pre-1600 European manuscripts in the U.S. and Canada

A project in utilitarian data visualization…or an absurdist poetic gesture?

From The New York Times:

IT is a mammoth undertaking by College of Staten Island teacher Michael Mandiberg.to convert the online encyclopedia Wikipedia onto the printed page possibly in hundreds of volumes.

“When I started, I wondered, ‘What if I took this new thing and made it into that old thing?’ ” he said in a recent interview in his studio in Downtown Brooklyn. “ ‘What would it look like?’ ”

On Thursday, he and the rest of the world will find out, when the exhibition “From Aaaaa! To ZZZap!” based on his larger project “Print Wikipedia,” opens at the Denny Gallery on the Lower East Side. There, Mr. Mandiberg will hit “start” and a computer program will begin uploading the 11 gigabytes of very compressed data from a Mac Mini to the print-on-demand website Lulu.com.

Via Publishers Weekly:

The American Library Association is joining a chorus of Internet and tech businesses in questioning a proposal to remove the U.S. Copyright Office from the purview of the Library of Congress, and to establish it as its own independent agency.

Next year will mark the centenary of James’s death. Given that armies of academics, during these hundred years, have eagerly picked over his literary remains, it’s rather surprising how many very arresting items here have never been published or even cited before. One reason for this, we’re told at the outset, is that “the James family . . . held an interest in preserving a certain public image of their ancestor.”

From A sufferable snob by Bruce Bawer – The New Criterion

Here at home, we can’t pay for Babar. Or the Count of Monte Cristo. We can’t pay for those palaces of human art, history, science and intelligence that we call libraries. We can’t pay for those books and services (including librarians) that gave so many of us our American lives.

It’s time we stop the drift toward stupidity. It’s time to give libraries the money they need. To show our new Americans that Shakespeare belongs to them, too. And Montaigne. And Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Here is Garcia Marquez, baby.

From America needs to give libraries the money they need – NY Daily News

Library rooms are still a popular addition to homes, interior designers say. Though they are mostly considered a high-end project, middle-class homeowners want them too, when they have the space and the funds.

From At-home libraries still popular for homeowners – Towns – NorthJersey.com