January 2016

What Davis is describing is one of the most energizing concepts in library evolution today, dovetailing with the messages of the Libraries Transform campaign. The BiblioBoard team envisions the library not simply as a place to go for information retrieval, but also as an enabling hub, an engine of its users’ own creativity—supporting, leveraging, even producing, promoting and distributing library patrons’ own ideas and capacities.

This is The Library as a driver-into-reality of makers’ dreams.

From At ALA’s Midwinter Meeting: BiblioBoard Pivots As ‘Libraries Transform’ | Thought Catalog

Interlibrary loans, said Alison Macrina, founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, form an ad-hoc record of departures from regular patterns of lending – the kind of thing that often interests intelligence and law enforcement analysts.

“It seems like it’s a more interesting data trail,” said Macrina. “It’s a book you wanted so bad that you went to special lengths to get it, and we know how intelligence agencies pay attention to breaks in patterns.” Macrina hadn’t heard about the CUNY Graduate Center initiative, but said it was a relief to her. “It’s taken a little too long but I’m really glad to see it’s happening somewhere.”

From You are not what you read: librarians purge user data to protect privacy | US news | The Guardian

How to Participate: Five Basic Steps
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Filling a “Citation Needed”
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From The Wikipedia Library/1Lib1Ref – Meta

Comprehension matters, but so does pleasure. In Proust and the Squid, Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, observes that the brain’s limbic system, the seat of our emotions, comes into play as we learn to read fluently; our feelings of pleasure, disgust, horror and excitement guide our attention to the stories we can’t put down. Novelists have known this for a long time, and digital writers know it, too. It’s no coincidence that many of the best early digital narratives took the form of games, in which the reader traverses an imaginary world while solving puzzles, sometimes fiendishly difficult ones. Considered in terms of cognitive load, these texts are head-bangingly difficult; considered in terms of pleasure, they’re hard to beat.

From Do You Read Differently Online and in Print?

The Omaha Public Library started 2016 with a nice surprise: a check for $1 million.
The estate of the late Virginia C. Schmid gave the donation to the Omaha Public Library Foundation last week.

It’s the biggest gift ever received by the foundation, which was established in 1985.

Full article:
http://www.omaha.com/news/goodnews/omaha-public-library-foundation-gets-its-biggest-gift-ever-million/article_866a8640-b966-11e5-8907-d75fed6d1aaa.html

In the summer, they cycle the streets of Toronto with 18 kilograms of books in tow. The titles find their way from their bike to the hands of readers in city parks. In the winter, the volumes live in the cosy confines of a neighbourhood bar, where the pair leaves a small library and hosts a monthly reading series.

From Pedalling books, Toronto friends share their love of reading with a mobile library | Toronto Star

I have spent many pleasant nights imagining ghost books, those phantom texts of possibility and wonder. Their unprintable Dewey Decimal classifications divide them into (at the very least) three basic categories: books that can only be read once, books that cannot be read in one life time and the largest, aforementioned group, books that don’t exist.

From A Brief History of Books That Do Not Exist | Literary Hub

The Geisler Library at Central College in Pella, Iowa added the book “The life and secrets of Almina Carnarvon : a candid biography of the 5th Countess of Carnarvon of Tutankhamun” fame to their collection in August 2012. It has checked out via interlibrary loan 11 times in 3 years. The book has a subject connection with the popular television show Downton Abbey and that is likely the cause of some of the demand for the book.

One of the librarians made a map showing the travels of the book:
http://www.travellerspoint.com/member_map.cfm?user=GeislerILL&tripid=738041

The librarian that made the map passed on this additional comment – We joke that this book is out of Iowa more than it is in it.

WorldCat record for the copy held by the Geisler Library – http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/800850742

CollectionSpace is pleased to announce a mini-grant opportunity for new adopters, implementers, and community leaders.

Are you ready to implement and need some assistance? Would an additional set of hands help to guide you through the planning process?  Is there a project you have in mind that would build capacity in your community around CollectionSpace?  Are you looking to use CollectionSpace but don’t have access to a technical team?

Mini-grants of up to $7,500 for single institutions/collections and up to $25,000 for collaborations among organizations and/or collections are now available.

Questions? Email [email protected] or attend our November walkthrough, where we’ll answer any and all questions about the grant. More information about the walkthroughs can be found on our community calendar.

From Grant Opportunities | CollectionSpace

Most items in the public-domain release have already been visible at the library’s digital collections portal. The difference is that the highest-quality files will now be available for free and immediate download, along with the programming interfaces, known as APIs, that allow developers to use them more easily.

Crucially — if wonkily — users will also have access to information from the library’s internal rights database, letting them know which items are free of what the library is carefully calling “known United States copyright restrictions.”

From New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive – The New York Times