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Ten Stories That Shaped 2016

Can you believe we’re closing in on 2017? It’s time once again to look back at the notable library-related stories from the past year.

Dishonorable Mention: Librarian Arrested in “First Amendment” Issue
In May, an altercation with security personnel at a Kansas City Public Library event led to violent arrests against several people, including the programming director.

10. Google Books Case Finally Ends
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the last appeal of the Authors Guild in the nearly decade-old Google Books copyright case.

9. Open Data Initiatives
This year saw continued growth of efforts to make research data freely available.

8. Libraries Catch Pokémon Go Fever
Many libraries got on board with the latest augmented reality app based on collecting and fighting with other Pokémon creatures.

7. Intellectual Property Disputes Aplenty
Legal cases involving everyone from Anne Frank to the NFL made headlines this year.

6. Libraries Fund Open Access
More libraries now offer to pay author fees for open access publications.

5. Welcome, Robot Overlords
This year AI agents won a game against a grandmaster of Go, made medical diagnoses, and drove a truck across the highway. Time will tell how these advances impact libraries.

4. Sci-Hub
Piracy of academic research became a big league success via the website Sci-Hub, raising many questions and discussions about the need for such a clandestine distribution of knowledge.

3. “Illegal Aliens”
After the U.S. Library of Congress announced the Subject Heading “Illegal Aliens” would be replaced with the terms “Noncitizens” and “Unauthorized immigration,” Congress legislated a halt to the renaming process.

2. Carla Hayden becomes the new Librarian of Congress
In September, Dr. Hayden was sworn in as the successor to James Billington, giving many hope about the future of the nation’s library.

1. Our “Post-truth” Era
The circumstances resulting in the naming of OED’s word of the year, namely the rise of fake news and our current political climate, make librarians and other educators as important as ever.

What was your favorite story this year?

December 15, 2016 by EBooks Google Legal Issues Libraries Stories Of The Year

Can Google Help Translate a Classic Novel? (no)

A classic of Argentine literature, Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama is available for the first time in English. The novel, about a provincial magistrate of the Spanish crown named Zama, is a riveting portrait of a mind deteriorating as the 18th century draws to a close. Esther Allen brilliantly translates Di Benedetto’s novel, and talks about the six-year process of bringing the book to U.S. readers.

No, Google Translate was in no way useful to my translation of the 1956 Argentine novel Zama: let’s get that out of the way first thing.

From Can Google Help Translate a Classic Novel?

September 1, 2016 by Google Technology

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel archive vanishes from Google’s news archive

What’s different about Milwaukee is that the city is being asked to buy back something it already had—and, in the case of the library’s digital scans, had even helped build.

“Our archives should be available again soon,” Journal-Sentinel president Chris Stegman wrote to Urban Milwaukee. “As we switch over to our new parent company’s systems we are also switching our archiving system from Google to Newsbank. There is a delay in the process but we hope to have them available again shortly. I apologize for the inconvenience and hope our solution is up and running soon.”

From Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel archive vanishes from Google’s news archive

August 25, 2016 by Archives Google Libraries Technology

Tracking Excavator: Uncovering Tracking in the Web’s Past

As users browse the web, their browsing behavior may be observed and aggregated by third-party websites (“trackers”) that they don’t visit directly. These trackers are generally embedded by host websites in the form of advertisements, social media widgets (e.g., the Facebook “Like” button), or web analytics platforms (e.g., Google Analytics).

Though web tracking and its privacy implications have received much attention in recent years, that attention has come relatively recently in the history of the web and lacks full historical context. In this work, we conduct a longitudinal archaeological study of tracking on the web from 1996 to 2016. Our key insight: that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine enables a retrospective analysis of properties of the web, even though researchers did not anticipate in advance the need to study these properties over time. We evaluate the potential and limitations of the Wayback Machine for this purpose and offer strategies to overcome several challenges we encountered in relation to using its data to study tracking.

From Tracking Excavator

August 19, 2016 by EBooks Google Internet Privacy

Will Reading Romance Novels Make Artificial Intelligence More Human?

This past spring, Google began feeding its natural language algorithm thousands of romance novels in an effort to humanize its “conversational tone.” The move did so much to fire the collective comic imagination that the ensuing hilarity muffled any serious commentary on its symbolic importance. The jokes, as they say, practically wrote themselves. But, after several decades devoted to task-specific “smart” technologies (GPS, search engine optimization, data mining), Google’s decision points to a recovered interest among the titans of technology in a fully anthropic “general” intelligence, the kind dramatized in recent films such as Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2015). Amusing though it may be, the appeal to romance novels suggests that Silicon Valley is daring to dream big once again.

From Will Reading Romance Novels Make Artificial Intelligence More Human? | JSTOR Daily

August 16, 2016 by Google

Historypin Wins Knights Foundation Grant to Help Libraries Tell the History of Rural America

“Libraries are really gathering places,” says Jon Voss, the strategic partnerships director of Historypin. The global nonprofit is one of 14 winners of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge on Libraries. “In popular thought or literature, we think of them as storehouses for materials, but that’s really changed in the past 20 years at least.”

In February, the Knight Foundation challenged people to reimagine libraries to fit the information needs of the 21st century. More than 600 groups submitted proposals, including some that would turn libraries into environmental monitoring hubs and spaces for children to interact with incarcerated parents. The winners will share a $1.6 million grant to realize their visions.

From Historypin Wins Knights Foundation Grant to Help Libraries Tell the History of Rural America – CityLab

June 30, 2016 by Google Libraries

The Rise of Plagiarism in the Age of Self-Publishing Books on Amazon, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble

Many authors who sell their work directly on platforms like Amazon are having their stories plagiarized, which can take an emotional and financial toll.

From The Rise of Plagiarism in the Age of Self-Publishing Books on Amazon, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble – The Atlantic

Many authors who sell their work directly on platforms like Amazon are having their stories plagiarized, which can take an emotional and financial toll.

From The Rise of Plagiarism in the Age of Self-Publishing Books on Amazon, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble – The Atlantic

June 5, 2016 by Amazon Books Google Publishing Technology

Title Fights: Who Gets to Name an Author’s Book?

So what kinds of titles do publishers prefer? For starters, according to Garnett, they naturally favor “titles that are memorable and striking and, of course, that manage to communicate the flavor or feel of the book’s content and writing and sensibility,” though these are subjective criteria—both she and my own editor, Margaux Weisman at William Morrow, concede that the titling process amounts mainly to a gut feeling, informed by trial and error. (And it’s hard to imagine that they aren’t influenced by the desire for Google-friendliness or e-retail “discoverability”—think of the Twitter-friendly #GIRLBOSS—though nobody I spoke to claimed these were heavy considerations.) Titles are hashed out in biweekly meetings with the publisher, editor-in-chief, deputy publisher, digital and paperbacks publisher, and managing editor, and later in the process, marketing, design, and publicity departments, as well as the author and their agent.

From Title Fights: Who Gets to Name an Author’s Book?

So what kinds of titles do publishers prefer? For starters, according to Garnett, they naturally favor “titles that are memorable and striking and, of course, that manage to communicate the flavor or feel of the book’s content and writing and sensibility,” though these are subjective criteria—both she and my own editor, Margaux Weisman at William Morrow, concede that the titling process amounts mainly to a gut feeling, informed by trial and error. (And it’s hard to imagine that they aren’t influenced by the desire for Google-friendliness or e-retail “discoverability”—think of the Twitter-friendly #GIRLBOSS—though nobody I spoke to claimed these were heavy considerations.) Titles are hashed out in biweekly meetings with the publisher, editor-in-chief, deputy publisher, digital and paperbacks publisher, and managing editor, and later in the process, marketing, design, and publicity departments, as well as the author and their agent.

From Title Fights: Who Gets to Name an Author’s Book?

May 26, 2016 by Authors Books Google

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