January 2016

Libraries across the country are holding adult coloring programs more and more in response to the spike in interest, according to the American Library Association, including New York City, Denver and Milwaukee. There are also groups popping up through Meetup.com.

“People just love this. . I think they feel successful, like they’ve finished something,” said Jane Henze, the adult-programming director at DeForest Public Library near Madison, Wisconsin. “The neat thing about it, as far as stress goes, you’re concentrating on something, you’re not thinking about what’s going on at home or at work.”

From Libraries, Meetup Groups Get Into Adult Coloring Craze « CBS Denver

More schools are transforming their traditional libraries into innovative makerspaces, giving students the chance to experiment and grow in new and exciting ways.

From How Libraries Fit in the Future of Learning | EdTech Magazine

If you want to study medieval scripts, handwriting, and manuscripts or simply want to get acquainted with some of the finest medieval codices here is an app to get you started

The origins of the app – Medieval Handwriting – lie in online exercises in palaeography developed for postgraduate students in the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, U.K.

The aim is to provide practice in the transcription of a wide range of medieval hands, from the twelfth to the late fifteenth century. Please note that it is not a tutorial on the development of handwriting in medieval Western Europe. Users can examine 26 selected manuscripts, zoom in on individual words, attempt transcription and receive immediate feedback. They can optionally compare their transcription with a full transcript. The user’s transcripts can be saved and reopened. The saved transcripts are accessible via File Manager apps.

From Medieval Handwriting App – Medieval Histories

Curious and tragic, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could transcend the limits of space and time. No, my time travel theory concerns the author’s creative output, which you’ll soon see, is so flukishly prophetic as to make my outlandish claim seem plausible—nay, probable!

The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-eating floaters, crunched skull-survivors, and primordial particles. OK, here we go…

From Edgar Allan Poe Had a Time Machine and I Can Prove It | HistoryBuff | The Future of History

So get used to these five. Based on their stock prices this month, the giants are among the top 10 most valuable American companies of any kind. Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft are the top three; Facebook is No. 7, and Amazon is No. 9. Wall Street gives each high marks for management; and three of them — Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook — are controlled by founders who don’t have to bow to the whims of potential activist investors.

From Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future – The New York Times

Researchers at the University of Michigan recently unveiled a new Braille-enabled prototype tablet that makes it possible for those with vision problems to read text on a full display . The tablet itself features fully refreshable pages containing raised bumps, a marked improvement from current devices that can only display one line of Braille text at a time.

From Braille Tablet prototype can help blind people read full pages of text | BGR

You look suspicious. How strange. It’s almost as if you think that because those numbers come from the Association of American Publishers, they might indicate something rather different from the death of the e-book; they might be a signifier of the rise of smaller publishers not tracked by the AAP, and/or, the growth of online reading via eg Wattpad or Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. Author Earnings argues that what we’re really seeing is that AAP publishers “have seen their collective share of the US ebook market collapse.” Mathew Ingram in Fortune adds, rhetorically, “Isn’t a drop in sales just a natural outcome of the publishers’ move to keep e-book prices high?”

From Book It, Baby | TechCrunch

Orson Welles once described his relationship with Ernest Hemingway as “very strange”. The two men were friends, rivals and sometimes prickly antagonists. Now a previously unpublished manuscript has revealed just what the director thought about the novelist’s take on a common passion: Spain.

The manuscript, presented in a new study on Welles, reflects his disdain for a type of macho tourist frequently spotted in Spain when mass travel to the country took off in the 1960s. Intended to form the basis of of a love-triangle drama, the script features an American bullfighting aficionado, clearly inspired by Hemingway, as the lead character.

From Lost script reveals what Orson Welles really thought about Ernest Hemingway | Film | The Guardian

After a torrent of criticism, Scholastic has decided to stop distributing A Birthday Cake for George Washington, a picture book about one of George Washington’s slaves.

The historical book tells the story of Hercules, a slave used by the president as his chef. It shows Hercules and his daughter Delia happy and taking pride in making Washington a birthday cake.

Almost as soon as the book was released, it received withering criticism for whitewashing the history of slavery.

The review in Kirkus noted that the book contained images of smiling slaves in almost every page. But it cautioned that this was not the same kind of story that had played out just months before when A Fine Dessert, another story about happy slaves making sweet treats, was eviscerated by critics.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/18/463488364/amid-controversy-scholastic-pulls-picture-book-about-washingtons-slave

Lucia is overseeing the creation of what he hopes will be the library of the future. The building, budgeted for $170 million, is now little more than a hole in the ground across the street, but by 2017, the new library will hold the same number of books in roughly the same square footage, but do it completely differently. 

From Will BookBots be the revolution libraries are looking for? — NewsWorks