Bookriot: “Despite the fact that librarians are among the most trusted professionals, per data acquired in several studies of parents on the perceptions of the profession, lawmakers across the country continue to infantilize and criminalize library workers. The 2024 legislative session has been particularly eager to capitalize on the rhetoric from the far right on… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Libraries
Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage
404 Media: “Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history. I was able to find the AI-generated books with the same method we’ve previously used to find AI-generated Amazon… Continue Reading
Watch a 100-year-old book deconstructed and restored
BoingBoing: “Sophia Bogel is an author, teacher, and book restorer. Watch her take us through the fascinating process of deconstructing and restoring a 100-year-old book.Bogel shows us how restoring an old, fragile book is an incredibly delicate undertaking, and one wrong move can result in the entire book being ruined. Restoring a 100-year-old book can often… Continue Reading
The Discarded
“A dazzling array of metafictions, Colin Hamilton’s The Discarded focuses on the lonely work of a solitary librarian assigned to the discard room. This hidden basement space is piled high with books purged from the stacks above. From the heap of discards, the librarian salvages his own idiosyncratic collection: a detective novel in which a… Continue Reading
Law Archive Open Scholarship Platform Launches at Yale Law School
“Yale Law Library in collaboration with the Center for Open Science has announced the launch of Law Archive, the only free open-access platform of its kind that integrates collaboration tools, data storage, and sharing of legal scholarship. Accessible to everyone, regardless of organizational affiliation or ability to pay, Law Archive contributes to the movement to… Continue Reading
Want to finish more books? Super readers share their tips
Washington Post via MSN -“Spring is here, the birds are singing and we’ve got ever more daylight to read by — so it’s the ideal time to check in on our bookish resolutions. Good news: If you finished even one book in 2023, you’re already in the 46th percentile of American readers, as The Washington… Continue Reading
AI Tool To Improve the Usability of Government Reports
“Combing through countless PDF reports for hours in search of a piece of relevant information is no one’s idea of an interesting day at work. Tedious, overwhelming, soul-crushing, maybe. Engaging? Not so much. Dedicated public servants — and many others — do it anyway, often, in service to some larger goal: to make the case… Continue Reading
Free Coloring Books from Libraries & Museums
Open Culture – Download & Color Thousands of Free Images (2024): “Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016, Color Our Collections is “an annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections.” In… Continue Reading
Publishers’ reply brief in Hachette v. Internet Archive: First Impressions
Dave Hansen and Kyle K. Courtney jointly authored this post. They are also the authors of a White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books. We are not, as the Publishers claim in their brief on page 13, a “cadre of boosters.” We wrote the paper independently as part of our combined decades of work… Continue Reading
Public Libraries Saw 92 Percent Increase In Number of Titles Targeted for Censorship Over 2022
“The number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by the American Library Association (ALA). The new numbers released today show efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles* in schools and libraries. This tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles… Continue Reading
Caselaw Access Project
“The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law. Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library. We created CAP’s initial collection by digitizing roughly 40 million pages of court decisions… Continue Reading
Libraries struggle to afford the demand for e-books and seek new state laws in fight with publishers
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — “Whenever bestselling author Robin Cook releases a new medical thriller, the head of the public library in West Haven knows demand for digital copies will be high. So will the price. Like many libraries, West Haven has been grappling with the soaring costs of e-books and audiobooks. The digital titles often… Continue Reading
