Cyberpunk Librarian

After suffering major damage during a monsoon storm, Burton Barr Library, the main library of the Phoenix Public Library will remain closed until June 2018. On July 15, 2017, high winds lifted the roof of the library causing the rupture of a fire-sprinkler pipe on the top floor. Torrents of water flooded the building before the system was shut off.

Earlier today, AZCentral released new information that city employees knew about the condition of the pipe for at least three years, but nothing was done to fix it.

Photos and more at AZCentral.

From the article:

After working on the problem through the night, tech experts regained control of the server, Jen Hatton, PR and content manager, said Friday.

The library did not pay the ransom demanded by hackers and reported the attack to the FBI, Hatton said.

More from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Library districts need to adapt to the needs of their communities. A one-size-fits-all tax levy simply will not work. The library districts in Arizona have never been accused of abusing their authority, and, what’s more, they provide valuable service to all of the libraries in their geographic areas.

Read more from The Hipster Librarian.

From the article:

The creator of the hit animated series “Family Guy” has donated a vast trove of the late astronomer Carl Sagan’s papers to the Library of Congress, officials announced today (June 27).

Writer, producer and director Seth MacFarlane gave the U.S. Library of Congress — the largest library in the world — about 800 boxes of material documenting Sagan’s life and work. The papers include book drafts, “idea files” on various subjects and Sagan’s extensive correspondence.

More from Space.com.

It’s bad enough when a local politician is trying to designate which books a school should or should not buy, but it’s even more frightening when he doesn’t even know what he’s doing.

From the article:

At the beginning of the school year, as the Dysart Unified School District was preparing to buy more than 1,000 novels for its libraries and classrooms, Rep. Jack Harper, R-Surprise, posted to an online message board a list of books he thought the district was considering buying that he found objectionable.

It turned out that Harper had clicked on the wrong link for Follett Library Resources and viewed books from a general list of inventory available through the company, Follett, rather than a specific list created by the district.

More from AZCentral.com.

And so, it begins.

Today, Amazon announced the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

A Paradise Valley, AZ mother is upset that her daughter was subjected to Lovingly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

“If you looked on the cover, it’s just a very young cute girl on the cover,” Lockhart said. “My (incoming) second-grader can pick this book up and think, ‘This is a cute book.’ There needs to be some sort of warning label.”

Officials with the Paradise Valley Unified School District have pulled the book from their shelves.

More from AZCentral.

As the Nazi’s power grew in the early 1930s, a Jewish librarian living in Frankfurt published a catalogue of of 15,000 books he’d collected.

When the war hit, large portions of the collections disappeared, a frighteningly common occurrence with Jewish literature and writing in Germany just before and during World War II. Yet somehow many of these books made their way to America, to the shelves of the Leo Baeck Institute where they were recently re-discovered.

More from the New York Times.

In Spokane, WA a group of civic and literary minded folks are planning a fundraiser to pay off the fines and fees on children’s library cards so they can use them again. The local libraries block cards from use if they carry a balance of $10 or more. By paying off these fines, the group raises money for the library and opens up blocked cards so kids can once again borrow books.

Brief story.

Google has done search, email, documents, video, and now…

Art.

From the Alte Nationalgalerie of Berlin to the Metropolitan in New York to the National Gallery of London, Google has taken extremely high resolution images of some of the most famous artwork and put it online. View the artwork online and create your own gallery of favourites.

Learn more at the Google Art Project.