Moves are spreading in Japan to set up private libraries where each bookshelf is owned by individuals who display books on their hobbies or those that they recommend.
Such libraries are helping revitalize local communities by creating a place where people can mingle through events. Around 50 such facilities have been created throughout the country.
Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations?
The Internet Archive also takes multi-century preservation energy costs into account: “We own and operate and run all our own data centers,” says Bailey. “That’s partly because we’re an archive and don’t want to be dependent on corporate infrastructure, and partly because we can then run less expensive climate control operations.”
My Books Were Used to Train AI
I have said in one of my few forays into nonfiction (On Writing) that you can’t learn to write unless you’re a reader, and unless you read a lot. AI programmers have apparently taken this advice to heart. Because the capacity of computer memory is so large—everything I ever wrote could fit on one thumb drive, a fact that never ceases to blow my mind—these programmers can dump thousands of books into state-of-the-art digital blenders. Including, it seems, mine. The real question is whether you get a sum that’s greater than the parts, when you pour back out.
The Buchanan County party leader threatened not to allow city council members to run as Republicans if they approved the appointment of a gay pastor to the city’s library board. The controversy has created a push for broader change in St. Joseph.
In St. Joseph, local GOP pressured lawmakers to block approval of gay library board member
“This transgender and homosexual propaganda is pure evil, It is designed to destroy the family, to undercut traditional American values and our way of life, and ultimately institute governmental control that will undermine our city, county, state, and nation.”
Why the smell of vinegar shut down a Toronto library’s historical newspaper archive
But in the years since, libraries, archives and collectors have discovered “safety film” actually poses a huge threat to film-based archives and collections because it eventually breaks down. An early indication is the smell of vinegar, which comes from acetic acid that the film gives off as it degrades. Eventually, the film shrinks and cracks until the image is lost.
The destructive and contagious chemical decay is aptly called “vinegar syndrome” — and it means the clock is ticking for those trying to preserve history from this era in Toronto, across the country and around the world.
Statement from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive:“When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify. When people want to study sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”
His Preface, “The Freedom of the Press” was omitted from the first edition of the book, then disappeared, and was not rediscovered until 1971. From it, we learn that Orwell had considerable difficulty getting his fable published. That wasn’t principally because of wartime issues. There was a shortage of books and his was highly readable. Rather, British intellectuals of the day did not wish to hear any criticism of Stalin or allusions to his atrocities…
A Warning From the Unpublished Preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm
And he ends his Preface on a high note,
I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The Hip Hop Historians Who Are Racing to Preserve Its Story
From vinyl to photos, blogs to music streams, chronicling 50 years of culture involves reckoning with what can and cannot be saved and the tools that can do it.
Book battles are raging across the nation, but none have carried the kind of stakes as the one here in Dayton, a one-stoplight farming community in the southeastern corner of Washington.
For the county%u2019s only library, the battle has turned, quite literally, existential: Voters will decide in November whether to shut it down.
Texas Revamps Houston Schools, Closing Libraries and Angering Parents
As part of a state takeover plan, libraries in underperforming schools are becoming spaces for disruptive students to watch lessons on computers.
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