Washington Post – The best book-logging apps for 2024 [read free] “Goodreads, which was acquired by Amazon in 2013, is one of the most popular book review apps. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) But as the app faces criticism for its buggy, outdated tech and poor content moderation, other options are rising… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Libraries
Tools for Thinking About Censorship
Ex Urbe: “Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of pressure?” This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks that any expressive work (a book, film, news story, blog post etc.) has been censored or suppressed by the company or group trusted with it (a publisher, a film… Continue Reading
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Affirms That Texas Book Ban Law is Unconstitutional
Association of American Publishers: “The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit today affirmed the preliminary injunction of the “Reader Act” (formerly HB 900) granted by Judge Alan D. Albright of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division in a written opinion issued on September 18, 2023. The law would have required independent bookstores, national… Continue Reading
OpenAI warns copyright crackdown could doom ChatGPT
Telegraph: “The maker of ChatGPT has warned that a ban on using news and books to train chatbots would doom the development of artificial intelligence. OpenAI has told peers that it would be “impossible” to create services such as ChatGPT if it were prevented from relying on copyrighted works, as it seeks to influence potential… Continue Reading
‘Major Win’ in Fight Against Dictionary-Yanking School District
Newser: Federal judge allows lawsuit against Florida’s Escambia County School District to proceed – “A Florida school district is keeping students from accessing dictionaries which, in defining sex and other concepts, are considered to violate the state law prohibiting materials in schools that depict or describe sexual conduct, per the Messenger. Escambia County School District… Continue Reading
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
What’s the Value of 3 Million LPs in a Digital World?
Wired: “Kindle libraries; troves of infinitely streamable songs on Spotify and Apple Music; scores of shows and films on Netflix, Max, and Hulu. Even the Criterion Collection is online now. Cultural archives now live on server farms, so much so that the value of physical media seems ever-shifting. While there’s some benefit to it—the ineffable… 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
Public libraries reveal their most borrowed books of 2023
NPR – “At the end of every year, public libraries around the country assemble lists of the books most borrowed by readers. From Charleston, S.C. to Cincinnati, Ohio, from New Orleans, La. to Minnetonka, Minn., readers favored buzzy memoirs and novels adapted into TV miniseries. “We had Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus as our… 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
