Libraries

From The New Yorker. The Collection comprises around three hundred linear feet of paper records, electronic records, and photographs; some thirty-six hundred audio recordings; and some thirteen hundred video recordings.

The Open Directory Project that uses human editors to organize web sites — is closing. It marks the end of a time when humans, rather than machines, tried to organize the web. The announcement came via a notice that’s now showing on the home page of the DMOZ site, saying it will close as of March 14, 2017:

From RIP Dmoz: The Open Directory Project is closing

“It’s really hard to find them,” says Kopley. She had more success looking in scholarly databases, where she could turn up examples that others had written about, and in collections of book reviews. But those searches revealed anonymous texts that were already known, in some way. “The hardest thing is to find a completely unknown or unstudied author who was anonymous or pseudonymous,” she says.

From Uncovering the Hidden Books Tucked Inside Every Single Library | Atlas Obscura

Via CNN.

West Orange NJ's childrens librarian Faith Boyle read "Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale" by Mo Willems to a group of children and their fluff-filled companions. After that late afternoon story time, the children kissed their toys good night.

A group of teenage volunteers quickly got to work, snapping photos of the stuffed animals in the library. There were images of a teddy bear and bunny holding hands while watching a puppet show and a tiny plush alligator reading about swamps. Even the photos of the monkeys sneaking Chips Ahoy cookies from the break room made it onto the library's Facebook page.

Most library activity is entertainment, not research, not knowledge. It's still difficult, even with SAILS, to find good technical books. Romance novels, detective stories, sure, hundreds of those. But the tech side is weak at best. So my question is this: would the general public support libraries if all that entertainment went away? I don't think they would

From The value of libraries

And tsunami is an apt description of what we now face. We all generate and consume information on countless screens. Information is now free-form. It’s evident in our move away from formalized data stores into call-and-response APIs. It’s evident in our information-gathering habits – now more a process of grazing than a formal process of gathering. And it’s evident in our media which now comes at us with a force unmatched in history. The world around us wants to offer us all the information all the time and we have no time to assess what is true, what is not, and, most important, what is valuable.

From Information is garbage | TechCrunch

From Mediaite, news that Simon & Schuster has cancelled publication of Milo Yiannopouloss book (after creating hell for all their other authors). He has also left the extreme right-leaning Breitbart News.

Here's another piece from the Washington Post. And Ryan Lizza's piece from the New Yorker.

Dewey and his crew of “a dozen catalogers and librarians” spent, in his estimation, “an hour daily for nearly an entire week” hashing out the rules of library hand. They started by examining hundreds of card catalogs, looking for penmanship problems and coming up with ways to solve them. They concluded that the “simpler and fewer the lines the better,” and decided that, while a slant was best avoided, a slight backward slant was acceptable. Then they got to the more nitty-gritty stuff, such as whether to opt for a “square-topped 3” or a “rounded-top 3.” (The rounded-top 3 won out, as it is less likely to be mistaken for a 5 during hasty reading.)

From Library Hand, the Fastidiously Neat Penmanship Style Made for Card Catalogs | Atlas Obscura

From Slate, why libraries are dropping late fees.

As fake news and complex immigration orders have inundated the public sphere, libraries are opening their doors and fact-checking skills to people of all backgrounds seeking information. 

From The fight against fake news is putting librarians on the front line – and they say they’re ready - CSMonitor.com

Librarians who spoke to the NewsHour said these orders touched a nerve, especially for those who work at public libraries, which often serve a diverse population that includes new immigrants. According to the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, 55 percent of new Americans use a library at least once a week. “We are huge resources for newcomers to this country, whether it’s for connection to this country, legal resources, testing preparation, citizen tests, services like storytimes or homework help,” said Elizabeth McKinstry, a public librarian based in Dedham, Massachusetts, who has been vocal in rallying librarians online post-election. “We are there for the most vulnerable folks in our communities, people on the other side of the digital or language divide.”

From Why these librarians are protesting Trump's executive orders | PBS NewsHour

There's a huge problem with access. The federal government estimates that, at the current pace, it will take 100 years for the national archives to fully open a given presidential library's records. No record is available under FOIA for five years. Initially they thought all the records could be arranged and processed in that time. It was a stunningly shortsighted view of how long it would take. There are records from the Truman library that are still being withheld. My favorite example: three years ago a researcher requested a single electronic record at the George W. Bush library and received a reply that said it's in the queue and we estimate that it will be fulfilled in 12 years.

From What’s wrong with presidential libraries? | On Culture | Chicago Reader

Before the printing press, memory was the main store of human knowledge. Scholars had to go to find books, often traveling around from one scriptoria to another. They couldn’t buy books. Individuals did not have libraries. The ability to remember was integral to the social accumulation of knowledge. Thus, for centuries humans had built ways to remember out of pure necessity.

From Memory and the Printing Press

What, then, are the underlying intellectual, creative, and aesthetic issues that can cause even brilliant critics to misfire? An answer can be found in the tension between what we might call literary time and critical time. Critics, of course, have deadlines. A given review or essay must appear by such and such a date, generally just before or after the book’s publication. But as Terry Eagleton points out in Literary Theory: An Introduction, the designation "classic" or "literary masterpiece" is almost always retrospective. By showing how literary genius can be found in works as diverse as Plato’s dialogues, Bacon’s essays, Keats’s poetry, and Hemingway’s prose, Eagleton establishes that there is no intrinsic property that can safely lead a critic to confer the coveted tag of "literary value" to a work:

From Why Great Critics Make Disastrous Judgments - The Chronicle of Higher Education

So what's the big deal about one tiny little article? Who cares if one little sea squirt on the reef gets destroyed? I care, but not enough to re-engage with Wikipedia's deletionists. Wikipedia went from people writing an encyclopedia to people writing rules about writing an encyclopedia, or writing bots to defend an encyclopedia, but without enough safeguards to save content from deletionists.

From Watching Wikipedia's extinction event from a distance / Boing Boing

Familiar landmarks in hundreds of American towns, Carnegie libraries today seem far from controversial. In Free to All, however, Abigail A. Van Slyck shows that the classical façades and symmetrical plans of these buildings often mask a complex and contentious history.
Book - Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920

That’s a weakness Top Hat Chief Executive Officer Mike Silagadze said he’s trying to exploit. He started by selling software tools to professors that help them engage their students, such as smartphone apps that let them tell lecturers if they understand new concepts in real-time. The company, which launched in 2009, has 2 million students using its products. The next step is to go directly after the textbooks and digital course content made by Pearson and McGraw, Silagadze said in an interview. In November, they launched an online content marketplace, where professors can create course materials and sell it around the world. The idea is to cut out the publisher and let professors sell directly to students and each other, Silagadze said.

From Top Hat Raises $22.5 Million to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill - Bloomberg

On behalf of three national library associations, EFF today urged a federal appeals court for the second time to protect librarians’ and students’ rights to make fair use of excerpts from academic books and research.

From Publishers Still Fighting to Bury Universities, Libraries in Fees for Making Fair Use of Academic Excerpts | Electronic Frontier Foundation

From the New York Times. Designer Phillipp Plein has never had a fashion show in the US, his last one of course was in Milan. His associate de Boni began looking for a show venue in August and considered both the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and the Statue of Liberty, but the New York Public Library won out and the show is taking place there this week.

Here are Getty Images of the show this week. Madonna and Paris Hilton among others were in attendance.

LITA’s Patron Privacy Interest Group has partnered with the ALA IFC’s Privacy Subcommittee to create new checklists to support library patron privacy policies. The checklists cover: data exchange between networked devices and services e-book lending and digital content vendors library management systems/integrated library systems library websites, OPACs, and discovery services public access computers and networks students in K-12 schools.

From New Checklists to Support Library Patron Privacy – LITA Blog