June 2016

Expensive to maintain, many of Ohio’s are now gone. In Coshocton and Middletown, in Butler County, Carnegie buildings are crumbling and condemned.

“It’s very sad for me,” said Armentrout, a librarian at OhioHealth. “Unfortunately, in many cases there’s nothing that can be done other than condemn the building and wait for it to collapse. It seems that both of these communities could have saved these buildings long ago had they been organized enough to do it.”

Sometimes the old buildings are purchased as a way to prevent their destruction.

From Carnegie’s huge library investment still felt in Ohio | The Columbus Dispatch

The director of the Houston County system said she took the action after the system’s internet service provider issued cease and desist notices, the Telegraph of Macon reported. An online movie distributor had demanded that the provider stop materials from being illegally downloaded.

“We have safeguards in place but someone, a hacker, with the ability to get beyond our safeguards did this, and now everyone will suffer for it,” said Sara Paulk, director of the library system.

From Libraries halt Wi-Fi service after porn downloads | www.ajc.com

A public poll for the Library of Congress to choose 65 books by US authors that had a profound effect on American life has thrown up some surprises.

Herbert’s Dune, a 1965 science-fiction novel adapted into a film starring Sting, Pirsing’s cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and children’s favourite The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss – real name Theodore Geisel – all make the cut. So too does the prolific and popular Stephen King with The Stand.

But literary giants such as William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Updike and Tom Wolfe do not. The library, the biggest in the world with more than 162m items, does not claim the list is a definitive rank of greatness.

From Library of Congress asks for profound books, gets Dune and The Cat in the Hat | Books | The Guardian

Hark is part of the Anthropodermic Book Project, a group of researchers that analyzes books rumored to be bound in human skin. He was first pulled into it when librarians at his own college asked him to investigate whether a book in the school’s collection might fall into that category. Scrawled on the inside cover of Biblioteca Politica, a Spanish political tract dating from the 17th century, was a note indicating that the binding was human in origin. The inscription became a well-known piece of campus lore, turning the title into a nuisance for Juniata’s librarians. They found themselves spending an inordinate amount of time fielding questions from students about the book’s provenance, especially around Halloween.

From The True Story of Medical Books Bound in Human Skin – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus

Text is surprisingly resilient. It’s cheap, it’s flexible, it’s discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there’s nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it’s endlessly computable — you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things.

From Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

W14 – IT Security 101
1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Tracy Z Maleeff, Principal, Sherpa Intelligence LLC
Blake Carver, Senior Systems Administrator, LYRASIS
We all know we should use good passwords, keep everything updated, and follow other basic precautions online. Understanding the reasons behind these rules is critical to help us convince ourselves and others that the extra work is indeed worth it. Who are the bad guys? What tools are they using? What are they after? Where are they working? How are they doing it? Why are we all targets? Experienced workshop leaders discuss how to stay safe at the library and at home. They share ways to keep precious data safe inside the library and out—securing your network, website, and PCs—and tools you can teach to patrons in computer classes. They tackle security myths, passwords, tracking, malware, and more. They share a range of tools and techniques, making this session ideal for any library staff.

From Internet Librarian Program for Sunday, October 16, 2016

Archivists are borrowing and adapting techniques used in criminal investigations to access data and files created in now-obsolete systems.

From Digital forensics: from the crime lab to the library : Nature News & Comment

I could fill a book with the number of bizarre and/or frustratingly persistent questions I’ve been asked in my nearly 5 years of working in a public library, ranging from “Should I have a doctor look at this rash?” to “Do you work here?” when I’m clearly sitting behind a service desk with a name tag. But the question that irks me the most is an extremely common one: “Wow, you work at a library.  Do you just spend all your time reading?”

This question is a close relative to “Working in a library must be so relaxing!” and it usually comes from casual library users or acquaintances who haven’t been in a library in at least a decade. And my reaction is always the same: “Yeah, right.”

From Librarians Don’t Read All Day

His subjects are as diverse as the places they serve. There is a one-room “free library” shack in California’s San Joaquin Valley, then the polished marble floors of Chicago’s hangar-sized central branch. There are stately Carnegie Libraries, glassy modern edifices by Koolhaas and Safdie, strip-mall outposts, and steel-sided bookmobiles. The photographs are mainly architectural, but there are moving interior shots as well. In San Francisco, a grown woman learns to read. Visitors browse Chinese-language books in Queens. “Tool librarians” lend out hammers and clamps in Berkeley. And in towns large and small, oil-painted heroes of U.S. history peer over readers’ shoulders.

From Robert Dawson’s Photographs of America’s Public Libraries – CityLab

Electronic books should be treated just like physical books for the purposes of lending, an advisor to Europe’s top court has said.

Maciej Szpunar, advocate general to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), said in an opinion published (PDF) Thursday morning that public libraries should be allowed to lend e-books so long as the author is fairly compensated.

A 2006 EU directive says that the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit rentals and loans belongs to the author of the work. However, countries may opt out of this rule for the purposes of “public lending,” provided that authors obtain fair remuneration.

From E-books fair game for public libraries, says advisor to top Europe court | Ars Technica