August 2016

Great video of the owner of LA’s Last Bookstore (11 & 1/2 minutes but worth it)

This question — whether or not listening to an audiobook is “cheating” — is one University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham gets fairly often, especially ever since he published a book, in 2015, on the science of reading. (That one was about teaching children to read; he’s got another book out next spring about adults and reading.) He is very tired of this question, and so, recently, he wrote a blog post addressing it. (His opening line: “I’ve been asked this question a lot and I hate it.”) If, he argues, you take the question from the perspective of cognitive psychology — that is, the mental processes involved — there is no real difference between listening to a book and reading it. So, according to that understanding of the question: No, audiobooks are not cheating.

From To Your Brain, Audiobooks Are Not ‘Cheating’ — Science of Us

All summer, kids have been hanging out in front of the Morris Park Library in the Bronx, before opening hours and after closing. They bring their computers to pick up the Wi-Fi signal that is leaking out of the building, because they can’t afford internet access at home. They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/opinion/too-poor-to-afford-the-internet.html?_r=0

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a popular choice for book groups around the world. But it turns out that American readers may be enjoying a rather different experience to those in Britain, after an academic uncovered “astonishing” differences between the US and UK editions of the award-winning novel.

Professor Martin Paul Eve of Birkbeck, University of London was writing a paper on Cloud Atlas, working from the UK paperback published by Sceptre, and from a Kindle edition of the novel, when he realised he was unable to find phrases in the ebook that he could distinctly remember from the paperback. He compared the US and UK editions of the book, and realised they were “quite different to one another”.

From Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds | Books | The Guardian

Museums can keep pace with the times and changing attendance rates by adopting a modern and interactive way of presenting the items on display. The AMLABEL Digital Gallery Display is an editable, real-time in-gallery digital label developed on electronic paper to replace existing gallery cards.

From AMLABEL, the electronic paper gallery display

The heroic story of the men who saved thousands of manuscripts from being destroyed by al-Qaeda from the Times Literary Supplement, London.

Librarians, of all groups, may not usually be associated with “bad-ass” fearlessness in the face of extreme violence. Yet in 2012, two of them secretly evacuated about 340,000 early Islamic manuscripts from archives in Timbuktu, when the ancient city was occupied by a coalition of al-Qaeda jihadists and Tuareg separatists. Joshua Hammer, an American journalist, has written a pacy and engaging account of this risky act of cultural salvation. Acting calmly and cannily, the heroes of the story loaded manuscripts into metal trunks and shipped them to safety up the River Niger under the noses of al-Qaeda. It is an inspiring story.

The manuscripts had been gathered from private homes and mosques across the Sahel by an enterprising archivist starting in the 1970s and later by his librarian son, Abdel Kader Haidara. These documents formed a detailed record of a humanistic, West African strand of Islam. Here’s info on the book:

Joshua Hammer
THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS of Timbuktu
And their race to save the world’s most precious manuscripts
288pp. Simon and Schuster. $26.
978 1 4767 774

McCahill told Berners-Lee that he would need to look at the Web more closely. But it wasn’t much to look at when McCahill went back to Minnesota and examined it. There were no graphics yet. It was still only running on NeXT computers. “I wasn’t feeling it,” McCahill says. I told him, ‘Tim, I don’t think so.’ Of course, I look back and say, ‘I might have been wrong.’ ”

From The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol | MinnPost

Michael Kelly checked out ‘So You Want to Be a Doctor’ in 1970. Since then, libraries have changed – dramatically, in some cases – to keep pace with changing reading habits and technology.

From 40-year overdue library book incurs no fee – but gratitude inspires donation – CSMonitor.com

Allen Eskens is a writer from Mankato, Minnesota, and is author of three mysteries, “The Life We Bury,” “The Guise of Another,” and “The Heavens May Fall.”

Library anxiety is real. The phenomenon, which involves feeling intimidated, embarrassed, and overwhelmed by libraries and librarians, was first identified by Constance A. Mellon in 1986. Her paper, “Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development,” reported that college students in particular are prone to library anxiety because they believe their research skills are inadequate, which makes them feel ashamed and unwilling to talk to the very librarians who might be able to ease their worries.

From The Strange Affliction of ‘Library Anxiety’ and What Librarians Do to Help | Atlas Obscura