“Without a book, so often the child is alone,” says Antonio La Cava.
The retired schoolteacher converted his three-wheeled van into a mobile library, the Bibliomotocarro. Driving the hills and mountains of Basilicata, Italy, La Cava is able to reach children in remote villages like San Paolo Albanese, which only has two children of primary school age.
From BBC – Culture – The tiny library bringing books to remote villages
A centuries-old doodle of a cyclops has been discovered in a study-shy teenager’s book of ancient Greek plays by conservation staff restoring his family’s library in a Hampshire mansion.
William John Chute, who lived at The Vyne between 1757 and 1824, was the owner of the book and is believed to have drawn the sketch when he was 15. The National Trust has identified it as the cyclops Polephemus, from Homer’s Odyssey.
From Eighteenth-century schoolboy’s doodles uncovered as library is restored | Books | The Guardian
At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S.
That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films. After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations. Any artist can create and sell a feminist response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Dadaist piece, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments and post it on YouTube.
A new free website spearheaded by the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School makes available nearly 6.5 million state and federal cases dating from the 1600s to earlier this year, in an initiative that could alter and inform the future availability of similar areas of public-sector big data.
Led by the Lab, which was founded in 2010 as an arena for experimentation and exploration into expanding the role of libraries in the online era, the Caselaw Access Project went live Oct. 29 after five years of discussions, planning and digitization of roughly 100,000 pages per day over two years
From Harvard Converts Millions of Legal Documents into Open Data
“The digital divide was about access to technology, and now that everyone has access, the new digital divide is limiting access to technology,” said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine.
From The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected – The New York Times
In my rare calm moments as a curator (when I’m not sending a hundred emails or moving a hundred chairs), I often reflect that the literary world should make greater efforts to reach teenagers, and more high schools should promote contemporary literature by living authors. How else will we build the next generation of literary readers?
Writers need young people. Sigrid Nunez agreed. “I don’t think most people realize how much you can learn about the world from listening to young adults.”
From Every Book Tour Should Include a Public School | Literary Hub
From an article in The New York Times, a judge imposes juveniles to read from a list of books and report on their reactions.
Instead of spending time in community service, Judge Avelina Jacob decided, the youths should read a book.
But not just any book. They had to choose from a list of ones covering some of history’s most divisive and tragic periods.
The horrors of the Holocaust awaited them in “Night,” by Elie Wiesel. The racism of the Jim Crow South was there in Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The brutal hysteria of persecution could be explored in “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller.
But starting late last year, processing requests to borrow material from other libraries has been significantly more time-consuming, and as of last week, about 150 requests were unfulfilled, Fabian said. That’s because a component of the state’s interlibrary loan system – a vast information highway that allows the state’s 234 public libraries, as well as several university and public school libraries, to loan resources to one another – has been down.
From Interlibrary loan system failure tying up librarians’ time
Can you believe it’s almost 2018? That means it’s time to look back at some of the notable library-related stories from the past year.
10. Librarians Fight Fake News
The problems with fake news caused many of us to revamp our web evaluation handouts into guides for spotting bogus information sources.
9. Elsivier Roundup
Elsivier made several headlines this year, in the form of boycotts and resignations. Their buyout of bepress also raised eyebrows.
In related news, Beall’s List went dark in January.
8. ALA’s Trump Statements
Late last year, many librarians were quick to jump on an initial (and now retracted) press release by the American Library Association about being “ready to work with President-elect Trump.” Recent statements have taken a far more militant tone.
7. Milo’s Book Cancelled
Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos found himself out of a book deal after making pro-pedophilia comments. The use of sensitivity readers and related author edits also made the news this year.
6. Whither the Open Web?
It’s too early to tell what the end of net neutrality will mean for the Internet, although most experts predict it won’t be a good thing.
Bonus: Favorite Presentation
For anyone sick of hearing about how, “during these hardships, it’s time for you to demonstrate your coping skills,” the ACRL talk, Resilience, Grit, and Other Lies: Academic Libraries and the Myth of Resiliency is for you.
5. Remember Electronic Reserve?
I first heard about the Georgia State e-reserve lawsuit in grade school. Well, not quite, but after almost a decade, the case is still open.
4. Chinese Censorship
Both Springer and Cambridge found themselves in hot water this year for agreeing to self-censor parts of their web publications for Chinese readers.
3. Little Free “Libraries” Criticism
An interesting point about those community bookshelves was made recently: they don’t often reside in “book deserts” where the need is greatest.
2. The Opioid Crisis
A staggering number of people die every day from overdoses in the United States. This year, public libraries found themselves on the front lines in the fight against opioid overdoses.
1. The Paradox of Tolerance
In the wake of neo-Nazi protests, librarians found themselves discussing the fine line between protected and hate speech.
What was your favorite story of the year?
And now (3.45pm), the light outside is failing, the sky a uniform grey. Gosh, how cheery. I have another four hours and 15 minutes in this haven, until I take the long road back to East Finchley. Libraries are for the homeless, the drifters, the people who pass out at their desks. The only difference between me and the vagrant in the municipal library is that I have the TLS open in front of me rather than the Daily Express, and I smell better. (And I am “posh”, but I recently heard of an acquaintance who had spotted a bully from his old posh school begging on the Tube, so a private education is no proof against the more odorous kind of indigence.)
From Libraries are for the homeless, the drifters and the snorers – people like me
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