404 Media – “A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Libraries
Trump Freezes All Grant Funding to Libraries, Archives, and Museums
everylibrary – “While this “pause” will negatively impact millions of Americans, it will also considerably impact libraries. rump has demanded a freeze on all federal grants and for all agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.” The memo also calls for each agency to perform a… Continue Reading
Climate Deregulation Tracker
“The Climate Deregulation Tracker identified steps taken by the Trump administration and Congress to scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures. The tracker is linked to our database of climate change regulations and our two other climate regulation trackers: the Climate Reregulation Tracker covering the Biden administration and the Climate Backtracker covering the second Trump administration. Read more about… Continue Reading
The New Yorker is 100 years old this year
“On February 22, 2025, A Century of The New Yorker will open at The New York Public Library, showcasing the history of The New Yorker from its launch in 1925 to present day and bringing to life the people, stories, and ideas that have defined the iconic magazine. Founding documents, rare manuscripts, photographs, and timeless cover… Continue Reading
US sales of physical books rose in 2024 after three years of decline
“Industry figures showed that 782.7 million print books were sold last year, up 1% on 2023 although still nearly 40 million down from the peak of 2021. Growth was driven by fiction, especially fantasy, while adult nonfiction, the biggest category, fell slightly. Print editions have been challenged by both ebooks and audiobooks: The latter are… Continue Reading
How to Browse All Digitized Titles in Chronicling America
“Chronicling America is in the process of transitioning from the legacy interface to a new interface and back-end search infrastructure. Read more about it. Through its enhanced search interface, the new Chronicling America offers more options to search the collection, as well as the ability to browse newspapers through the “All Digitized Titles” list and a new… Continue Reading
Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database
Wired – [unpaywalled] Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal – One of the most important AI copyright legal battles just took a major turn : “Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against… Continue Reading
In ‘a mass erasure of heritage,’ numerous historic landmarks lost in L.A.
LA Times providing free access to updates on the fires – There have been at least 24 deaths and more than 12,000 structures damaged or destroyed in the L.A.-area fires. Cal Fire reported the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth and Hurst fires had consumed more than 62 square miles, an area larger than San Francisco. The Palisades… Continue Reading
Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive
“After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical… Continue Reading
LLRX December 2024 Articles and Columns
December 2024 – LLRX.com® – the free web journal on law, technology, knowledge discovery and research for Librarians, Lawyers, Researchers, Academics, and Journalists. Founded in 1996. January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924 – by Jennifer Jenkins. AI in Finance and Banking,… Continue Reading
Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse Enter the Public Domain
Hyperallergic: “Happy Public Domain Day! Starting today, January 1, you can legally access, adapt, remix, and republish (depending on your jurisdiction) the work of Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo, and Robert Capa, as well as certain texts by William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. In the United States, the copyright term surrounding commissioned… Continue Reading
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
Persuasion – “Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told [The nation – unpaywalled]. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding. It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has… Continue Reading
