July 2016

Libraries are timeless treasures.

Even as pulpy paperbacks get swapped out for electronic ink, we still crave a physical space where we can surround ourselves with knowledge. When done right, those spaces can be works of art.

To find the most beautiful libraries in each state, Tech Insider looked at past and current award-winners as judged by the American Institute of Architects and the American Library Association awards, and relied on our own judgment for states who have never won.

Make sure to give these a look on your next road trip.

From Beautiful libraries in all 50 states – Tech Insider

Story via Mental Floss.

Writers from all over the world are donating books to the Greenville Junior/Senior High School Library, which is located 90 miles North East of Chico. Students have been unable to check out books there for over 10 years because budget cuts and staffing issues left the book shelves out dated.

Local writer Margaret Garcia had a dream of re-opening the library, so she posted the school’s situation on her blog. Once the post went viral, writers from all over the world started mailing books to the school.

From Internet post leads to truck loads of library books | ABC10.com

Reassuringly professional on the whole

Not all the answers fit—my favorite outside-the-rules response to the hypothetical patrons was, “Webster’s Dictionary. Dropped from a great height”—and I would have welcomed more mention of ebooks and audiobooks.

Still, most of the answers were reassuringly professional in the opinion of this nonlibrarian. My favorite was from D.W., a retired librarian and prolific commenter within the LinkedIn group:

From Donald Trump walks into your local library. What next? Librarians speak out

Over the past two years, 18 cities have reported how many bookstores they have, and 20 have reported on their public libraries.
Hong Kong leads the pack with 21 bookshops per 100,000 people, though last time Buenos Aires sent in its count, in 2013, it was the leader, with 25. New York does OK, with around 840 bookstores for 8.4 million people, but London, whose population is only slightly bigger than New York, counts only 360 stores.

From The world’s cities with the most bookstores and libraries per capita — Quartz

From the 15th century onward, everyday English people passed broadsides around, sang their songs, and gossiped about the news contained within. Unlike books or early newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets were not curated nor intended for a specific, upper-class audience. This early form of journalism and storytelling was sold on the cheap, and many took no time at all to read.

From The Scandalous Zines of Renaissance England | Atlas Obscura

While our original goal was to modernize our digital archive, the migration project has led to opportunities for future projects to engage our readers in our treasure trove of historical news data.

From The Future of the Past: Modernizing the New York Times Archive – The New York Times

Spamferences are conferences with no academic value that accept every paper offered and charge high enough fees to make serious commercial profit provided at least some people turn up to present their papers. You book a block of space in a huge hotel in a pleasant place, send out a few million invitation-to-submit emails to scholars in a slew of popular fields, automate the business of accepting and listing all papers submitted, and charge the credit cards of the vain, gullible, deluded, or corrupt academics who decide to attend.

From Language Log » Spamferences thrive; junk journals prosper

But that staple of society is changing. The Los Angeles County Public Library has a lot of physical books, but it’s shifting a lot of its book budget to more of the hybrid model with ebooks and audio.”I know I sound like a cheerleader for libraries, and it’s not just because my wife is a librarian. But I really believe that that’s one of the staples of our society, is libraries.”

So, another question to consider is how authors get compensated for every time people click on a title to check it out from the library and read it on their tablet or phone.

From How do authors make money from library books?

Researcher uses Microsoft’s Bing Knowledge Graph to query content from the internet and then pull it straight into Word. Microsoft has a curated list of trusted sources and reference materials which the company plans to expand upon over time. If you add source material, it will even automatically create the citation in your bibliography as part of your research paper. If you’re a student using Office 365 then Researcher is available immediately, and Microsoft is planning to bring the feature to mobile variants of Office in the future.

From Microsoft just made it way easier to write a research paper with Word | The Verge