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Category Archives: Libraries

Making the Greatest Medical Library in America

NLM: “On a quest to bring together and catalog the world’s medical knowledge, John Shaw Billings, an Army surgeon and book collector who oversaw the U.S. Surgeon General’s library (today known as NLM), acquired approximately 300 pamphlets from the private collection of the renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard in 1878. Later that year, these scientific… Continue Reading

Generative AI and Finding the Law

Callister, Paul D., Generative AI and Finding the Law (December 8, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4608268 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4608268 – “Legal information science requires, among other things, principles and theories. The article states five principles or considerations that any discussion of generative AI large language models and their role in finding the law must include. The… Continue Reading

British Library to burn through reserves to recover from cyber attack

FT.com [read free]: “The British Library will drain about 40 per cent of its reserves to recover from a cyber attack that has crippled one of the UK’s critical research bodies and rendered most of its services inaccessible. The London-based institution, which stores nearly 170mn pieces of work ranging from books to sound recordings, was… Continue Reading

More Than Just Mickey: Chaplin, Peter Pan, ‘Western Front’ Enter Public Domain

Rolling Stone “Winnie the Pooh’s Tigger, films by Buster Keaton, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and — yes — the Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie are now fair use as of Jan. 1, Public Domain Day 2024. Jan. 1, isn’t just New Year’s Day — it’s also Public Domain Day, where thousands of cinematic treasures, literary classics,… Continue Reading

The Low Down on the Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World

Atlas Obscura: From “unabridged” to “slanguage,” Madeline Kripke’s library is a logophile’s heaven (or hell). “Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had… Continue Reading

Read it yourself: All 673 books removed from Orange classrooms

Orlando Sentinel: “These books are among the 673 rejected by Orange County Public Schools this year [read free] for fear they violate a new Florida law that prohibits “sexual conduct” in books available to students. The books were in teachers’ classroom libraries. The books will get another review by OCPS staff, and could be returned… Continue Reading

Using Maps of Historical Locations to Understand Historic Events

This post is by Tyron Bey, the 2023-2024 Library of Congress Teacher in Residence. “In the November/December issue of Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, our “Sources and Strategies” article features a map titled “Important farmlands map, Clarendon County, South Carolina.” Created by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service in… Continue Reading

The lives upended by Florida’s school book wars

Washington Post (read free): “…The battle over what children should be allowed to read in school has riven Florida’s Escambia County School District. It’s part of a national battle, as school book objections surge to historic highs across the country. In Escambia County, the controversy kicked off in 2022, when a high school language arts… Continue Reading

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023

LitHub: “Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year. As longtime readers of this annual feature will know, each year in the run up to the holidays, we (the normally benevolent stewards of BookMarks.reviews) make a sacrificial offering to the literary criticism gods in the hope of… Continue Reading