An email to library members says officials were contacted last month by someone claiming to have information from the library system’s entire database of users. That contact included the names and addresses of about three dozen library patrons.
From Alameda County Library Patron Records Possibly Hacked « CBS San Francisco
Why? There are so many reasons. Blame Amazon? Sure, that’s the easy thing to say but the massive changes in the world of bookselling are far larger than that. In fact, the changes in the over-all economy make it a much, much bigger story.
From Seattle Mystery Bookshop: Why the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Must Close
It’s funny to think I just stumbled on this book by chance. I must have been escaping from something much more heavy—I love the turgid pace of an academic book, if it’s a topic I really care about, about once a year. I think I probably escaped to Jean Stafford from something like that, and I didn’t expect much of her. I thought, Oh, this is just good old-fashioned fiction, I’ll try that for a change. So often you’re just reacting to the last book you read, and you want something that’s a little bit of an antidote to that. I’ve found that if I live a more programmatic life where I’m reading the books that I’m supposed to read—if I’m accomplishing all my little chores of reading what everybody else is reading—I stop having time to read in a way that’s rich and multiple.
From Happy Accidents
“Zooming in on the document, they were pretty obvious,” says Ted Han at cataloguing platform Document Cloud, who was one of the first to notice them. “It is interesting and notable that this stuff is out there.”
Phyllis Rose’s book about her extreme reading experiment, in which she tackled the entire contents of a shelf in a New York library, has won high praise, but are such ‘bibliomemoirs’ a sign of an increasingly superficial literary culture or vital guides for a public swamped by choice?
From The woman who went to the library and read every book on the shelf | Books | The Guardian
That’s where most people left Robert Morin. A second, smaller wave of coverage focused on UNH’s troubling decision to funnel only $100,000 of his money to the library, even as it committed $1 million of it to a video scoreboard for its football stadium. But the full story is more troubling still. Through a series of interviews and public records requests, Deadspin has uncovered the 17-month backstory to Morin’s bequest. Like so many schools, big and small, UNH spent wildly on its athletic department. The university went a step further in trying to engineer a public relations victory, deceptively connecting a fragment of Morin’s life to its football splurge. The media eagerly repackaged the story as an inspirational fable.
From How UNH Turned A Quiet Benefactor Into A Football-Marketing Prop
“Many of Napoleon’s biographers have incidentally mentioned that he […] used to carry about a certain number of favorite books wherever he went, whether traveling or camping,” says an 1885 Sacramento Daily Union article posted by Austin Kleon, “but it is not generally known that he made several plans for the construction of portable libraries which were to form part of his baggage.” The piece’s main source, a Louvre librarian who grew up as the son of one of Napoleon’s librarians, recalls from his father’s stories that “for a long time Napoleon used to carry about the books he required in several boxes holding about sixty volumes each,” each box first made of mahogany and later of more solid leather-covered oak. “The inside was lined with green leather or velvet, and the books were bound in morocco,” an even softer leather most often used for bookbinding.
The Federal Trade Commission wants to hear from you – we’ve worked with libraries for many years to distribute free materials and tips for consumers to help them avoid scams, recover from identity theft, and make wise buys. We’re creating new materials especially for public librarians to use for patron advice and programming.
Please share this invitation with your staff and colleagues. You or they can get on the phone and tell us what you think during our 15-minute listening session.
What consumer topics are the most needed for patrons? (for instance, budgeting/money management, credit and debt; avoiding scams; recovering from identity theft; others?)
What formats work best for your patrons (for instance, bookmarks, brochures, short videos, webinars, podcasts, FB Live, Twitter chats, other social media content, other?)
What formats work best for the librarian as they research the topic for a patron or put together programming (perhaps an online list of links for a deeper dive on certain topics, a brochure, slide presentations, podcasts, other?)
Sept 19 11:00 am PT|2:00 pm ET
To RSVP and get the call-in number, email Carol at [email protected].
Can’t make a session? We would greatly appreciate any thoughts, however brief, you have on this – you can email me at [email protected].
Languages not seen since the Dark Ages have come to light after scientists used a new method to inspect a trove of ancient manuscripts found in a monastery in Egypt.
They turned up extremely rare tongues, including Caucasian Albanian, on documents they found in Saint Catherine’s monastery on the Sinai peninsula that date back 1,500 years.
Monks originally wrote their texts down on parchments which were later scrubbed off and used to write the Bible by future generations who spoke in more modern languages.
These shelves exist because poet and novelist Richard Brautigan described a library of unpublished books in his 1971 novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance. And 27 years ago in Vermont, a man named Todd Lockwood decided he would create the library for real.
Lockwood fielded submissions from as far away as Saudia Arabia but in 1995, he ran out of money. The collection was orphaned until 2010, when John Barber, a Brautigan scholar, arranged to have the library brought to a new Vancouver home.
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