Along with bomb threats and book challenges, we%u2019re seeing an increase in the number of libraries dealing with ransomware attacks, where hackers gain access to a library system%u2019s data, encrypt the files, and then demand a ransom in exchange. (The Seattle Public Library system recently went through an enormous ordeal earlier this year that has already cost the library over $1 million in technology upgrades and legal fees.) But now Delaware libraries across the state have closed their computer labs after being hacked last week. The ransom demand is allegedly around $1 million, although typically, organizations rebuild in the wake of a ransomware attack, rather than pay the ransom. Thankfully, patron data has not been affected in Delaware.
October 2024
I Tried to Summarize a Book With ChatGPT, and the Plagiarism Protections Worked – CNET
I Tried to Summarize a Book With ChatGPT, and the Plagiarism Protections WorkedIn case you were hoping ChatGPT could help you get through your TBR pile a little faster, know that the plagiarism safeguards are alive and well.
If you want to use ChatGPT to learn about a book, you’ll have to spend at least 30 minutes browsing reader summaries yourself and use the most interesting ideas to frame your prompts. This inevitably takes a chunk of your potential deep work time. You can’t just ask the AI tool to do it for you.
Patrons help Porter Square Books move to new Cambridge location
The beloved local bookstore is moving from White Street in Cambridge after 20 years. Its new location is at Lesley University, down the street.
“We hired expensive movers to start moving us on Tuesday but we thought, to get it started, it would just be more fun to let our customers and our community start the move. So we made a chain of people from there to here, it’s about 1,000 feet, and we passed about, I don’t know, a few hundred books to get started and they moved the romance section,” said David Sandberg, owner of Porter Square Books.
Bomb threat disrupts drag queen story hour at Somerville Library
A small number of people gathered on Saturday to protest a drag queen story hour at the Somerville Library, but video shows about 100 supporters of the event also showed up.
"Whenever hate arrives in Somerville or Medford or Boston, love and joy always come out 10-fold to kind of drown it out, and that's what happened here," said Christian Krenek.
Vienna central library has an exhibition of improvised bookmarks
Sausage slices and love notes: The improvised bookmarks librarians findThe Vienna central library has a new exhibition drawn from its collection of 8,000 items found over the past 20 years.
“When books are returned, sometimes the objects just fall out,” she said. “I started collecting the objects because the things I found — the photos, notes, prescriptions, a receipt from 1965 — they were just too fascinating to throw away. There were a lot of interesting and touching things that give us a really unique insight into readers’ lives.”
More than two decades after beginning her collection, Bitter enlisted the help of artist and co-curator Sebastian Kraner to design the exhibition. A black-and-white photo of a schoolgirl wearing a backpack is the first artifact visitors see.
Utah book banners now want to make Little Free Libraries susceptible to criminal charges
As conservative parents, educators, and politicians spread the book-banning movement across the nation, Utah has quickly arisen as one of the most dystopian states when it comes to the right to read. The state recently passed a law that allows it to enact statewide book bans. Essentially, if a handful of schools find some kind of fault with a book, it can be banned in every single public and charter school in the state. The Utah Board of Education also suggested adding a stipulation to the law that would’ve required teachers to burn the books banned statewide. Meanwhile, the state’s conservative politicians and educators recently held a book-banning party to celebrate the archaic law and demand that authors “repent” for writing books.
Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library
Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library
The voluminous papers of the celebrated neurologist include letters, notebooks, drafts and other traces of a man who couldn’t stop writing.
Now, the New York Public Library has acquired Sacks’s personal archive, a trove documenting his intellectual explorations of topics as diverse as “aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins,” to cite a partial list that once appeared on his website.
Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App – The Atlantic
Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App
It’s enough to drive you crazy, which is a process you can also track with apps for mental health, such as Headspace and Calm. Lots of apps are aiming to help you feel your best. My iPhone comes with Apple Health, but you might also find yourself with Garmin or Strava or maybe Peloton if you’re into that, or whichever app you need to scan into your local gym, or Under Armour, a polyester-shirt app that is also a jogging app. The MyChart app may help you reach a subset of your doctors and check a portion of your medical-test results. As for the rest? Different apps!
Banned Books Week? Try “First Amendment Week” instead
Banned Books Week? Try %u201CFirst Amendment Week%u201D instead
Unlike the ostensible celebration of freedom and (frankly) the booksellers’ marketing opportunity associated with promoting “banned” books, First Amendment Week would invite students to think actively, critically, and deeply. Banned Books Week already gets people talking about censorship, but the problem is that the conversations can often be overly simplistic or observably misleading. Civics teachers have an opportunity to raise the bar and develop a more nuanced understanding of what “book banning” really means—and what it doesn’t.
Librarians could help relieve health care access gap in Arkansas
Arkansas librarians get training to relieve health care access gap
The module is designed to enable librarians to answer telehealth-related questions patrons might ask them. It covers what kind of telehealth services are available, how to make appointments and technical aspects of telehealth like navigating patient portals, Mary Larkin Furlow, senior manager of the Connecting the Heartland initiative, said during the event Wednesday.
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