I’m not talking about basic literacy. What has become exceedingly scarce (and therefore, valuable) is the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time.
From The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps — Forte Labs — Medium
The new Polish Copyright Act [link in Polish] enters into force on 20th November 2015 bringing library services in Poland into the twenty-first century.
Major new provisions enabling digitization for socially beneficial purposes, such as education and preservation of cultural heritage, are the centrepiece for libraries of the new law.
The law also implements a European Directive enabling the use of orphan works (in-copyright works where the copyright holder cannot be identified or found to obtain permission), and an EU Memorandum of Understanding on the use of works that are no longer commercially available. In addition, the introduction of public lending right is limited to works in public libraries.
From New copyright law in Poland heralds new era for libraries | EIFL
During the 2014–2015 school year, 9.8 million students from 31,327 US schools read over 334 million books and nonfiction articles, per data captured by Accelerated Reader 360TM. Search for the books kids read most below.
I am still getting daily lessons on what it means to be an advocate for and practitioner of openness. Before I started my professional career I didn’t recognize the perseverance needed, or the political savvy, or the tenacity of trusting your gut when it tells you that what you are doing is worth the worry that you are faced with a Sisyphean task well beyond your abilities. If you take anything away from this, know that you do not have to be a researcher to be an important advocate for openness, nor do you have to be an expert in the many facets of openness.
Welcome to The Hawaii Project
The Hawaii Project brings you books and book news you’d never have found on your own. We track what the web’s leading tastemakers and book reviewers are writing about, uncovering things that match your favorite authors, personal interests and current events, and bring them to you daily.
A map of 1,089,837 scientific papers from the arXiv
Paperscape is a tool to visualise the arXiv, an open, online repository for scientific research papers. The Paperscape map currently includes all (non-withdrawn) papers from the arXiv and is updated daily.
Each paper in the map is represented by a circle, with the area of the circle proportional to the number of citations that paper has. In laying out the map, an N-body algorithm is run to determine positions based on references between the papers. There are two “forces” involved in the N-body calculation: each paper is repelled from all other papers using an anti-gravity inverse-distance force, and each paper is attracted to all of its references using a spring modelled by Hooke’s law. We further demand that there is no overlap of the papers.
From Paperscape
From famous novelists to budding entrepreneurs, an extraordinarily diverse collection of people can be found at work in the British Library. But what are they up to? We asked some of them…
From Quiet, please… In praise of the British Library | Books | The Guardian
At the crossroads. A phrase used often when talking about libraries in America, also true in Nebraska where libraries are facing new directions in serving users and remaining viable. A special NET News reporting project examines this important time for these venerable institutions. It’s called “Nebraska Libraries: The Next Chapter.” To begin, a progress report on the state’s public libraries, and looks at challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
From Nebraska libraries: how they’re doing, challenges and opportunities | netnebraska.org
Among these efforts, one stood out. In 1893, a young Belgian lawyer named Paul Otlet wrote an essay expressing his concern over the rapid proliferation of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. The problem, he argued, should be “alarming to those who are concerned about quality rather than quantity,” and he worried about how anyone would ever make sense of it all. An ardent bibliophile with an entrepreneurial streak, he began working on a solution with his partner, a fellow lawyer named Henri La Fontaine (who would later go on to join the Belgian Senate and win the Nobel Peace Prize): a “Universal Bibliography” (Repertoire bibliographique universel) that would catalog all the world’s published information and make it freely accessible.
From The Future of the Web Is 100 Years Old – Issue 21: Information – Nautilus
So, where and how should we store humanity’s knowledge for posterity? There is one way: use the fundamental code of life itself. Researchers Robert Grass and Reinhard Heckel of ETH Zurich in Switzerland believe you could fit all the data on Facebook and Wikipedia into a few droplets of liquid; all of civilisation’s knowledge could exist within a few cubic metres. Watch the video at the BBC to find out how.
From BBC – Future – This is how to store human knowledge for eternity
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