Frequent disturbances, rowdy behavior and even reports of sex in the stairwell spurred Omaha police to ask library officials Wednesday to clean up the downtown library.
Police Chief Todd Schmaderer and Capt. Katherine Belcastro-Gonzalez told the Omaha Public Library Board that the branch is draining police resources.
Full article:
http://www.omaha.com/news/metro/police-officials-say-downtown-library-branch-is-draining-resources-culture/article_5e9424d8-5cdb-11e5-a6c3-87784c9c1c52.html
Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.
A memo from Harvard Library to the university’s 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year.
From Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices | Science | The Guardian
The El Pueblo library evolved from a partnership that includes Reading Advantage, a Brentwood-based nonprofit, the Housing Authority of Contra Costa County, the county library and its Pittsburg branch, and the Grace Worship Center.
“They love being able to go home with books,” said Terris Allen, a volunteer with Grace Worship Center, which also runs after-school and tutoring programs at the learning center that opened in June. “They can start their own personal library. This is something they can keep with them, and pass it down to a little brother or sister as they grow older so there is always a book in the house.”
From Two East Contra Costa nonprofits set up libraries at public housing – ContraCostaTimes.com
Researchers at the Dissent Project are building a new kind of anonymity tool that, when used in conjunction with the Tor anonymity network, could significantly improve online anonymity.
Unlike Tor’s onion routing architecture, which routes internet traffic through a series of “onion layers” to obscure your identity, Dissent implements a dining cryptographers network, or DC-net, which makes possible cryptographically-provable anonymity.
From ‘Dissent,’ a New Type of Security Tool, Could Markedly Improve Online Anonymity | Motherboard
The Kilton Public Library in West Lebanon had decided to use its spare bandwidth to serve as a relay for the network. New Hampshire Public Radio reports the library had turned off the relay node after police and Homeland Security warned the library that, among other bad things, the network could allow criminals to move child pornography anonymously.
From N.H. Public Library Resumes Support Of ‘Tor’ Internet Anonymizer : The Two-Way : NPR
Half of the titles on this year’s National Book Awards longlist for Nonfiction can be classified as memoirs. But within that flexible category is immense variety: there’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s open letter to his son, about how to “live free in this black body”; Sally Mann’s photo-filled account of her familial and artistic life in the American South; Carla Power’s story of friendship with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi and their joint study of the Koran; Tracy K. Smith’s chronicle of “growing up in a bookish family and the dawning of her poetic vocation”; and Michael White’s record of travelling through Europe and the U.S. to see the paintings of Vermeer while going through a painful divorce.
From The National Book Awards Longlist: Nonfiction – The New Yorker
Nicola, who lives in the south of England, said her daughter was looking for free books to download for a new Kindle which she was to be given as a present.
“I’m trying to protect my teenager in every way possible,” she said.
“I’m doing all the things that I ought to do and a company like Amazon is not only allowing her to access it but is actually offering it to her when she’s not even looking for it.
From Girl, 12, finds porn on Amazon search for teenage books – BBC News
Libraries aren’t just for books, or even e-books, anymore. They are for checking out cake pans (North Haven, Conn.), snowshoes (Biddeford, Maine), telescopes and microscopes (Ann Arbor, Mich.), American Girl dolls (Lewiston, Maine), fishing rods (Grand Rapids, Minn.), Frisbees and Wiffle balls (Mesa, Ariz.), and mobile hot-spot devices (New York and Chicago).
Anyone working at the forefront of technology knows just how difficult it is to keep up with the evolving digital world, and perhaps no one is better positioned to understand this than Bernard (Bud) Barton, Jr., who was just hired as the Library of Congress’s new chief information officer. Last week, Barton started his job as the person responsible for taking the keeper of America’s most prized documents and records into the digital age. The details of how he will achieve this are still in the making, but a lot is riding on his appointment as the Library of Congress struggles to modernize.
Popular Mechanics has been making predictions of technological innovations since it first started publishing in 1903. Greg Benford, a science fiction author, has collated some of them in a short book called The Wonderful Future that Never Was. They’re predictions on the future of cities, of transportation, of home life, and more, presented in short blurbs set with hand-drawn futurist art.
Recent Comments