Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription req’d]: “…There’s Explainpaper, where one can upload a paper, highlight a confusing portion of the text, and get a more reader-friendly synopsis. There’s jenni, which can help discern if a paper is missing relevant existing research. There’s Quivr, where the user can upload a paper and pose queries like: What are the gaps in this study?…Amy Chatfield, an information-services librarian for the Norris Medical Library at the University of Southern California, can hunt down and deliver to researchers just about any article, book, or journal, no matter how obscure the topic or far-flung the source. So she was stumped when she couldn’t locate any of the 35 sources a researcher had asked her colleague to deliver. Each source included an author, journal, date, and page numbers, and had seemingly legit titles such as “Loan-out corporations for entertainers and athletes: A closer look,” published in the Journal of Legal Tax Research..”
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Category Archives: Libraries
SAGE Releases Free-to-Read Collection with Research into Academic Freedom and Censorship
“Sage has launched a new collection of free-to-read research highlighting the effects of academic censorship on democracy, social-emotional learning, higher education, and more. Banned books symbolize the clash between censorship and academic freedom. The suppression of banned books undermines the core principle of academic freedom, where scholars should explore diverse ideas without fear. This freedom… Continue Reading
Behold the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Forerunner to the Kindle
Open Culture: “In this striking image, you can see an early experiment in making books portable–a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle. According to the library at the University of Leeds, this “Jacobean Travelling Library” dates back to 1617. That’s when William Hakewill, an English lawyer and MP, commissioned the… Continue Reading
These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech
The Atlantic – Use our new search tool to see which authors have been used to train the machines. This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. I wrote in The Atlantic about how the data set,… Continue Reading
I Was Wrong About the Death of the Book And Umberto Eco was right.
The Atlantic [read free]: “Fifteen years ago, in What Would Google Do?, I called for the book to be rethought and renovated, digital and connected, so that it could be updated and made searchable, conversational, collaborative, linkable, less expensive to produce, and cheaper to buy. The problem, I said, was that we so revered the… Continue Reading
Project Gutenberg turned ebooks in its digital library into audiobooks without any need for human voices
Quartz: “The oldest digital library in the world, Project Gutenberg, has transformed thousands of ebooks into audiobooks using AI—bypassing the longer (and more expensive) process of hiring a human reader to do the job. It’s exactly the kind of AI application that actors, who are currently on strike in the US for the first time… Continue Reading
ALA Report – Texas leads the nation in book ban attempts
“ALA compiles data on book challenges from reports filed by library professionals in the field and from news stories published throughout the United States. Because many book challenges are not reported to the ALA or covered by the press, the 2022 data compiled by ALA represents a snapshot of book censorship throughout 2022. A challenge… Continue Reading
How commuter boredom turned audiobooks into a billion-dollar industry
Quartz: “Thomas Edison dreamed of audiobooks. When Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he tested his new device by reciting the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” That wasn’t highbrow literature, but Edison felt that the recorded form would lend itself well to full-length books, too—and that some books, perhaps, were meant to be… Continue Reading
Accidental Government Documents Librarian: Secrecy 101: Classification and Executive Order 13526
Date & Time: Sep 27, 2023 02:00 PM in Eastern Time Description: The classification of government information is an essential part of national security. In this webinar, we will learn how government information is classified and the efforts made to reduce overclassification. The webinar will discuss classification categories, who is authorized to classify information, classification… Continue Reading
The Truth About Hallucinations in Legal Research AI: How to Avoid Them and Trust Your Sources
Rebecca Fordon – AI Law Librarians – “Hallucinations in generative AI are not a new topic. If you watch the news at all (or read the front page of the New York Times), you’ve heard of the two New York attorneys who used ChatGPT to create fake cases entire cases and then submitted them to… Continue Reading
Libro for audiobook
“Libro.fm is an employee-owned Social Purpose Corporation that shares profits from your audiobook purchases with your chosen bookstore, giving you the power to keep money within your local economy. Whether you are paying for monthly membership, giving an audiobook gift to a friend, or buying audiobooks for yourself or your organization, Libro.fm shares the profit… Continue Reading
Conservative book ban push fuels library exodus ALA
AP: “After parents in a rural and staunchly conservative Wyoming county joined nationwide pressure on librarians to pull books they considered harmful to youngsters, the local library board obliged with new policies making such books a higher priority for removal — and keeping out of collections. But that’s not all the library board has done.… Continue Reading
