August 2024

Record labels forgot these songs existed. One man rescued them

By day, he’s a 41-year-old working in business development for a London law firm. By night, he’s a music industry crusader %u2013 digging up obscure gems and persuading record labels to make them available online.
Over the last six years, he’s been responsible for 725 releases, including tracks by Sting, Cher and Annie Lennox, with a strong bias for late 90s pop acts such as Billie Piper, S Club and A*Teens.
He’ll admit itis a very strange thing to do, but it gives people a lot of happiness so why not?%u201D he tells the BBC.

Record labels forgot these songs existed. One man rescued them

August 29, 2024 by Music

What Books Last and (Mostly) Don’t Last

What Books Last and (Mostly) Don’t Last

“I’ll save the speculation for a science fiction novel, I suppose. But even limiting ourselves to literature, it%u2019s simply the case that what endures has minimal correlation to either contemporaneous popularity or contemporaneous acclaim. Acclaim has a bit better track record%u2014the names of early Pulitzer Prize winners are more familiar than the names of bestselling novels of the 1920s for example%u2014but neither is a guarantee of anything. Here%u2019s the bestseller list of 1924, which includes titles so obscure they have red-ink dead links because no one has bothered to even make a perfunctory Wikipedia page for them…”

August 26, 2024 by Authors Books

British Library reveals £400,000 plan to rebuild after “catastrophic” ransomware attack

World-famous library is still battling to recover from an incident described as one of the worst in British history.

Now, almost one year after the incident, the world-famous library has revealed details of its £400,000 plan to move forward from the disaster – which left it with a website that still doesn’t have a proper Content Management System (CMS) and forced the ongoing closure of both physical and virtual archives.

August 23, 2024 by Computers IT Security in Libraries Technology

Unbundling Profile: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing its largest journal contract as overwhelmingly positive

This is part of a series of profiles detailing the experiences of institutions that have unbundled or canceled big deal journal contracts. The aim of the series is to provide insights, lessons learned, and inspiration to libraries to consider a similar move.

MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing its largest journal contract as overwhelmingly positive. MIT has long tried to avoid vendor lock-in through big deal contracts and, in 2019, maintained individual title-by-title subscriptions to approximately 675 Elsevier titles. In 2020, they took the significant step of canceling the full Elsevier journals contract – all 675 titles – leaving users with immediate access to only pre-2020 backfile content. Since the cancellation, MIT Libraries estimates annual savings at more than 80% of its original spend. This move saves MIT approximately $2 million each year, and the Libraries provide alternative means of access that fulfills most article requests in minutes.

August 20, 2024 by Academic Libraries Publishing

Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban | Books | The Guardian

Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban

State has ordered books by 13 authors, 12 of them women, to be removed from every public school, classroom and library

The 13 books could be banned under House bill 29, which became effective from 1 July, because they were considered to contain “pornographic or indecent” material. The list “will likely be updated as more books begin to meet the law’s criteria”, according to PEN America.

August 7, 2024 by Censorship Public Libraries

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