In Custodia Legis – Mitch Ruhl, a paralegal specialist in the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service. “One of the challenges for any researcher tackling questions of constitutional interpretation is knowing where to start. The Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation (or “Constitution Annotated”) serves… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Libraries
How book-banning campaigns have changed the lives and education of librarians
Via LLRX – How book-banning campaigns have changed the lives and education of librarians – Nicole A. Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, at the University of South Carolina, identifies the significant and socially charged work of librarians who are defending the rights of readers and… Continue Reading
Digital Overload – To scholars, Web 2.0 has vastly complicated the production of biography and life writing
JSTOR Daily: How can contemporary biographers contend with the explosion of materials at their disposal? “It may be that the digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography and life writing than on any other branch of literature, perhaps any branch of the arts,” writes the scholar Paul Longley Arthur. The developments of… Continue Reading
A.I. brings shadow libraries into the spotlight
The New York Times [free link] – to see this text scroll down the page: ” Large language models, or L.L.M.s, the artificial intelligence systems that power tools like ChatGPT, are developed using enormous libraries of text. Books are considered especially useful training material, because they’re lengthy and (hopefully) well-written. But authors are starting to… Continue Reading
Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books
Wired – free link: “Every new technology from the internet to virtual reality has tried to upend book culture. There’s a reason they’ve all failed—and always will…The tech world has long been convinced that it understands the desires of readers better than they do themselves. For years, VCs have promised to upend books and the… Continue Reading
Why Does the U.S. Copyright Office Require Libraries to Lie to Users about Their Fair Use Rights? They Won’t Say.
Via LLRX – Why Does the U.S. Copyright Office Require Libraries to Lie to Users about Their Fair Use Rights? They Won’t Say. Rick Anderson, University Librarian at Brigham Young University, contends that the copyright warning notice prescribed by the US Copyright Office misleads library patrons about their fair use rights, and must change. Continue Reading
Digital Public Library of America Launches The Banned Book Club to Ensure Access to Banned Books
PR Newswire: “The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has launched The Banned Book Club to ensure that readers in communities affected by book bans can now access banned books for free via the Palace e-reader app. The Banned Book Club makes e-book versions of banned books available to readers in locations across the United States where… Continue Reading
Build, Access, Analyze: Introducing ARCH
Internet Archive Blogs: “We are excited to announce the public availability of ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), a new research and education service that helps users easily build, access, and analyze digital collections computationally at scale. ARCH represents a combination of the Internet Archive’s experience supporting computational research for more than a decade by providing… Continue Reading
The Coolest Library on Earth
Hakai Magazine: “At the University of Copenhagen, researchers store ice cores that hold the keys to Earth’s climate past and future…Copenhagen is one of several places in the world where pieces of ice cores drilled from our planet’s extremities are kept safely cold. Other large research freezers are located in the United States, Australia, France,… Continue Reading
“Shadow libraries” at heart of mounting copyright lawsuits against OpenAI
Quartz: “…Shadow libraries are online databases that provide access to millions of books and articles that are out of print, hard to obtain, and paywalled. Many of these databases, which began appearing online around 2008, originated in Russia, which has a long tradition of sharing forbidden books, according to the magazine Reason. Soon enough, these… Continue Reading
Don’t Use A.I. to Cheat in School. It’s Better for Studying
The New York Times – Generative A.I. tools can annotate long documents, make flashcards, and produce practice quizzes. “…First, let’s explore one of the most daunting studying tasks: reading and annotating long papers. Some A.I. tools, such as Humata.AI, Wordtune Read and various plug-ins inside ChatGPT, act as research assistants that will summarize documents for… Continue Reading
Why Does the U.S. Copyright Office Require Libraries to Lie to Users about Their Fair Use Rights? They Won’t Say.
The Scholarly Kitchen, Rick Anderson: “If you’ve ever made a photocopy in a U.S. library or received a copy of an in-copyright document supplied by your library, you’ve likely seen a notice that looks like this: The copyright law of the United States (title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other… Continue Reading
