August 2018

“168:01,” as the project by Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal is titled, is a stark white display featuring bookshelves filled with 1,000 blank books. Visitors are encouraged to replenish the volumes with titles from an Amazon wish list compiled by the college’s students and faculty; donations can be made by sending the books on the wish list to the museum, or by gifting funds to the project through Bilal’s website.

In exchange for their donations, visitors are able to take home one of the exhibition’s white volumes that represent a rich cultural heritage stripped bare by years of conflict. In turn, the colorful books they contributed to the project will ultimately be sent to the College of Fine Arts.

From How an Artist Is Rebuilding a Baghdad Library Destroyed During the Iraq War | Smart News | Smithsonian

There’s an asymmetry of passion at work. Which is to say, there’s very little counter-content to surface because it simply doesn’t occur to regular people (or, in this case, actual medical experts) that there’s a need to produce counter-content. Instead, engaging blogs by real moms with adorable children living authentic natural lives rise to the top, stating that doctors are bought by pharma, or simply misinformed, and that the shot is risky and unnecessary. The persuasive writing sounds reasonable, worthy of a second look. And since so much of the information on the first few pages of search results repeats these claims, the message looks like it represents a widely-held point of view. But it doesn’t. It’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and it’s potentially deadly.

From The Complexity of Simply Searching For Medical Advice | WIRED

In this article I’m going to tell you about five places to ask questions on the Internet. And hopefully you’ll get better answers than I did! I do think these are great places to ask questions, but I don’t know if I ask terrible questions, or since I’m asking at the beginning of the summer my timing is bad, or something else.

From An Experiment In Asking Questions That Mostly Failed. Twice. – ResearchBuzz

A young girl and her family who took on Northamptonshire county council over its plans to close 21 libraries have claimed a win in the high court, after a judge ruled that the cash-strapped council would have to revisit its plans while “paying attention to its legal obligations”.

From Family claims win in high court challenge to Northants library cuts | Books | The Guardian

Fast forward thirty years. The magic of the bookmobile remains. But the magic has evolved. Whereas the bookmobile of my youth was a place for my imagination to run amok (and today’s bookmobiles still provide this outlet for all), bookmobiles today have changed the way a library connects to the people it serves. Bookmobiles today serve a more effectual purpose than before—but that is not to say bookmobiles of my youth were ineffectual. As a valued part of any library’s arsenal, bookmobiles today help to disseminate information, erase barriers, and equalize opportunity for all patrons—much like in the past, only in different guises today. Bookmobiles today have spawned other mobile outreach vehicles: vans, buses, campers, bicycles, and scooters; and it is within all these different vehicles that a new type of outreach has developed.

From The Relevance of Bookmobiles and Mobile Libraries in 2018 » Public Libraries Online

Certified Tattoo Studios partnered with the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation to offer library- and literary-themed tattoos at the Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales Branch Library on Sunday to raise money for the non-profit.

From PHOTOS: Book enthusiasts get literary-themed tattoos at the Denver Public Library — The Know

Through this consciousness-changing dimension of the act of reading, we learn to feel what it means to be despairing and hopeless or ecstatic and consumed with unspoken feelings. I no longer remember how many times I have read what each of Jane Austen’s heroines felt—Emma, Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice or in her newest incarnation in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice. What I know is that each of those characters experienced emotions that helped me understand the range of the often contradictory feelings each of us possesses; doing so leaves us feeling less alone with our particular complex mix of emotions, whatever our life’s circumstances. As expressed in the play Shadowlands, about the life of C. S. Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.”

From What Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Do To Your Brain? | Literary Hub

Several writers and inventors in the last century tried to introduce new marks of punctuation into the English language – but they all failed. Keith Houston tells their story.

From BBC – Culture – Punctuation that failed to make its mark

Equality Utah met with Washington County Library officials for the roundtable discussion.

There, the library director confirmed that LGBTQ displays have been banned at every one of Washington County’s libraries.

“If you put up a display that says LGBTQ, you’re pushing away a segment of our society,” said Joel Tucker, Washington County Library Director.

“Have there every been displays on like, Black History Month, or something like that?” asked  Stephen Lambert, with Equality Utah. 

From LGBTQ displays not allowed at any Washington County libraries

And, in fact, a number of female librarians did experience breakdowns, requesting long leaves of absence to recover. In 1900, the Brooklyn Public Library Association proposed “to build a seaside rest home for those who had broken down in library service,” McReynolds writes. One speaker at the American Library Association’s 1910 conference claimed he knew fifty librarians who had become incapacitated by the work, including some who died before their time.

From Being a Victorian Librarian Was Oh-So-Dangerous | JSTOR Daily