TILT #70 — For now, it’s up to us
I’ve seen some good library vending machines, ones that dispense poetry, or paperbacks, or just pencils. This one is currently my favorite, installed in the Salt Lake City main branch.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, here’s a photo of 78 of the 82 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Seen in a tweet, but from the Folger Library, of course.
Elsevier has been in the news lately. The University of California system decided to sever their relationship with them. A few weeks later, Norwegian research institutions did the same. Elsevier has been working to control the scholarly supply chain (pdf) and has no good open access options for institutions, though they are trying to hire a strategy manager who will “change the image of Elsevier, so that we are viewed as an organisation which supports OA.” Heh.
Speaking of non-libraries that try to sidle up to libraries like they were slipping into your DMs, Amazon reports that it’s closing all of its mall pop-up shops, but keeping its bookstores, while they also hire more PhD economists than anyone else in the world. Says one of their hires:
“You should be agonizingly jealous of the sorts of problems we work on and the almost anxiety-provoking magnitude of data with which we get to work”
True confessions time: I sometimes get books I can’t find elsewhere from the grey web of book piracy websites. According to this Guardian article, a long exposé on the practice, I am not alone. Meanwhile Open Library, (where I used to work) is receiving challenges for its Controlled Digital Lending system.
Another confession, this time from a sensitivity reader of children’s literature, helping authors make sure “they’ve got the Jewish stuff right.” a long and thoughtful look into the challenges of fighting to make books, and publishing, more inclusive.
“Of the thousands of children’s books published every year, a small handful attract pre-publication outrage. Yet that handful gets way more ink than the fact that a character in a picture book is four times more likely to be a dinosaur than a Native American.”
The Daviess County Public Library in Owensboro, KY has a neat teen “subscription box” type program called LibCrate. Free books and some other goodies, centered on a theme. The “Romance” box had a few books in it that a few parents found too “explicit” for teens and made a fuss. Tough issue which I think the library director handled masterfully.
“There are not lesbian mysteries, there are mystery books with lesbian detectives.” Technology Integration and Library Media Specialist Nessa Perez writing about how to make libraries LGBTQ-Affirming Spaces on School Campuses.
I’ve been winding down my Wikipedia work as it’s been getting nicer out. I’ve been able to attach more names to faces in the C. M. Bell collection by using the House of Representatives People Search Tool. They’re not interested in adding more images; I asked, they’re working with internal images first.
I did make a connection at the Library of Congress though, and am now sending metadata updates to them including full names of some of the subjects known only with initials. I hope they make it in to the records. I’m sure machines will be doing these sorts of jobs in the coming decades, but for now, it’s up to us.
A few library collections of interest:
- Area spelunker donates cave collection — a thousands books and periodicals about caving go to the Walter Geology Library at the University of Texas
- Inside look at the world’s largest library collection of comic books (autoplay video) — in East Lansing Michigan
- The Secret Service Uses This Massive Ink Library to Catch Forged Documents — if you read one link in this newsletter, let it be this one
A few graceful essays of the “I love the library” variety, which I can never get enough of:
- The Public Library, an essay by Nickolas Butler
- The Tiny, Tiny Library Looms Large, by Terese Svoboda
And two more-thinky pieces on specific topics:
- Presidential Libraries and the Digitization of Our Lives by Dan Cohen — With Obama being the first “mostly digital president and the collections of his archives not being called a library (or being run by NARA) what does it mean for future history and historians?
- If you use the library discovery tool Summon, you need to turn off the Topic Explorer sidebar like yesterday. Matthew Reidsma from Grand Valley State University explains exactly why.
A few books I finished reading lately.
If anyone’s got access to the archives of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, hit me up, I want to read Preserving Books with Jell-O™ by Nouleigh Rhee Furbished (vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 10–11). Happy almost-Spring!
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s available in more-accessible format your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
