October 2016

Some have spent decades empty and neglected. “The managers would sort of meekly say to me—do you want to see the apartment?” says Iris Weinshall, the library’s chief operating officer, who at the beginning of her tenure toured all the system’s branches. The first time it happened, she had the same reaction any library lover would: There’s an apartment here? Maybe I could live in the apartment.

“They would say, look, just be careful when you go up there,” she says. “It was wild. You could have this gorgeous Carnegie…”

“And then… surprise!” says Risa Honig, the library’s head of capital planning.

From Inside the New York Public Library’s Last, Secret Apartments | Atlas Obscura

Several House Democrats have put forward legislation that would ban schools and libraries from banning Internet access to LGBT material, which is sometimes blocked by filters aimed at keeping out obscene content.

The “Don’t Block LGBTQ Act,” from Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., is meant to ensure that young LGBT people are able to access material that might help them.

From Dems push to unblock LGBT material at schools, libraries | Washington Examiner

Among the factors that have made Kepler’s a sustainable operation, two stand out. First, Madan and his team have built on the store’s heritage as a place that achieves impact not just as a book retailer but also as a community center. And second, they have explored the potential of using a hybrid structure that combines for-profit and nonprofit elements.

From Turning the Page | Stanford Social Innovation Review

Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others’ cognitive and emotional states. Kidd and Castano (2013) received a great deal of attention by providing support for this claim. Their article reported that reading segments of literary fiction (but not popular fiction or nonfiction) immediately and significantly improved performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), an advanced theory-of-mind test. Here we report a replication attempt by 3 independent research groups, with 792 participants randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions (literary fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction, and no reading). In contrast to Kidd and Castano (2013), we found no significant advantage in RMET scores for literary fiction compared to any of the other conditions. However, as in Kidd and Castano and previous research, the Author Recognition Test, a measure of lifetime exposure to fiction, consistently predicted RMET scores across conditions. We conclude that the most plausible link between reading fiction and theory of mind is either that individuals with strong theory of mind are drawn to fiction and/or that a lifetime of reading gradually strengthens theory of mind, but other variables, such as verbal ability, may also be at play. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

From PsycNET – Display Record

But then. Maybe librarians shouldn’t try to be, maybe the library should be a place where one can focus on the written word, where people can enter the inner conversation instead of the mundane blabber. The library as a place to connect with someone far away (the author) and someone deep inside (the mental model of the reader); the library as a church instead of just another social space.

From The Library and the Church – lib{cache

These issues elicit a lot of crocodile tears, hyperbole, and toxic brinkmanship from those trying to get their way. It’s pointless bickering. We can instead focus only on what’s demonstrably best to alter, making warranted changes at the network level, and leaving the rest alone. To avoid the worst case scenario of a lack of cooperation within a library system, the proactive enactment of best practices and decisive enforcement of consortia-wide settings helps minimize technical errors and redundant efforts; avoids the paradox of choice amongst those with disparate customization philosophies; eliminates unsustainable variations merely based on arbitrary precedents or skeuomorphic design; and ensures our collective installations are as usable, future-proof, and efficiently run as possible, rather than an illustration of how “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

From Don’t Touch That Dial: Standardizing a Consortial Library System – Medium

When librarians and teachers reject works that may be “emotionally inappropriate” for children (a common reason), they’re adhering to the traditional and mostly prevailing view that children’s literature should avoid controversial topics. It’s understandable that adults want to minimize children’s anxiety, and schools are often under intense social and financial pressure to maintain established standards. But it ‘s also important to recognize that this tradition was established in the 19th century to serve the needs of the white, wealthy Protestant producers and consumers who have dominated the field of American children’s literature for much of the past 200 years.

From How Banning Books Marginalizes Children – The Atlantic

In advance of “Do Libraries Have a Future?” a Zócalo Public Square event in partnership with WeHo Reads, we asked eight writers to reflect on the most memorable library they ever visited, what it meant to them, and whether it should exist in 100 years.

From Why Libraries’ Survival Matters | PublicCEO

This experience set me to thinking again about the ephemeral nature of our artifacts and the possibility that the centuries well before ours will be better known than ours will be unless we are persistent about preserving digital content. The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won’t we need to do the same for our modern content?

From ‘We’re Going Backward!’ | October 2016 | Communications of the ACM

Independent bookstores like hers seem to have turned the page on predictions of their economic doom. The American Booksellers Association reports that sales nationally rose by more than 10 percent in 2015 compared to the same period a year earlier and sales in the first two quarters on 2016 remained strong. Blue Willow, too, has seen a 5 percent uptick each of the past couple of years.

From In plot twist, independent bookstores survive forecasted doom – Houston Chronicle