Stephen King ‘horrified’ by loss of his manuscripts in bookstore flooding

Gerald Winters’ bookstore, which specializes in rare and limited edition copies of King’s books, was among the handful of businesses damaged by flooding from the broken pipe in front of 46 Main St. “I’m horrified. As a book lover, my heart goes out to him,” King told the Bangor Daily News on Wednesday. “I will eventually reach out and see if I can help in any way.”
From Stephen King ‘horrified’ by loss of his manuscripts in bookstore flooding — Arts & Culture — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine
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Reading Suggestions from a Michigan Bookseller, Books from Shithole Countries

Petosky’s McLean and Eakin Booksellers have borrowed a phrase from the Commander in Chief to promote the reading of books from Haiti and Africa. They are continuing to take suggestions.

University of Rhode Island Library Opening Artificial Intelligence Lab

In the fall semester of 2018, a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab will be accessible to all University of Rhode Island students on the first floor of the Robert L. Carothers Library. Funded by a $143,065 grant from The Champlin Foundation, the AI Lab is believed to be the first in the nation to be located in a library.
From Artificial Intelligence Lab to be Accessible to All URI Students
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CA Mudslide Info

The Altadena CA Library has a page of useful resources for mudslide information and assistance here.

Life Lessons From Chinese Children's Books Differ From Those In The U.S.

They created a list of "learning-related" values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you're born with. The results — published in the Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology: The storybooks from China stress those values about twice as frequently as the books from the U.S. and Mexico.
From Life Lessons From Chinese Children's Books Differ From Those In The U.S. : Goats and Soda : NPR
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Germany vs Elsevier: universities win temporary journal access after refusing to pay fees

The Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has granted uninterrupted access to its paywalled journals for researchers at around 200 German universities and research institutes that had refused to renew their individual subscriptions at the end of 2017. 
From Germany vs Elsevier: universities win temporary journal access after refusing to pay fees
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The illiteracy-promoting interior design abomination called "backwards books"

The rationale is that the pages of books provide a more neutral backdrop than those pesky spines, which detract from the look that the designers are going for, which seems to be a bland uniformity. A quick search revealed that there are a number of designers who think this is a good idea.
From The illiteracy-promoting interior design abomination called “backwards books” - The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
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Making Manuscripts In The Middle Ages - YouTube Video from Getty Museum

An illuminated manuscript is a book written and decorated completely by hand. Illuminated manuscripts were among the most precious objects produced in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, primarily in monasteries and courts. Society's rulers--emperors, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops--commissioned the most splendid manuscripts.
From Making Manuscripts - YouTube
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Raspberry Pis as Catalog Computers

As library budgets and fundings continue to be diminished, we must look for creative outlets to increase reallocation. Libraries should also look to increase their usage of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) when available and see how FOSS directly aligns with the views and policies of the library system. We are effectively able to integrate both monetary reallocation and the usage of FOSS by replacing old catalog computers with Raspberry Pis. This report will detail an estimation of the initial investment and future reallocation by using Pis as well as explain how using FOSS betters patron privacy and overall security.
From rPi Catalog Computer Case Study
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The Kindle Changed the Book Business. Can It Change Books?

Now, however, Amazon's ebook project comes to a crossroads. The Kindle team has always professed two goals: to perfectly mimic a paper book, and to extend and improve the reading experience. That's what readers want, too. In a world filled with distractions and notifications and devices that do everything, the Kindle's lack of features becomes its greatest asset. But readers also want to read everywhere, in places and ways a paperback can't manage. They want more tools, more features, more options, more stuff to do. Amazon's still working out how to satisfy both sides. Whatever route it takes, the next decade of Kindle is likely to be even more disruptive than the last. First it changed the book business. Next it might help change books themselves.
From The Kindle Changed the Book Business. Can It Change Books? | WIRED
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Have a Cold? Go To Work or Stay Home?

From The Philadelphia Inquirer a question many library workers have to answer these days.

The Future Library

A few years ago, in a forest just outside of Oslo, 1000 trees were planted. In 2114, after a century of growth, the trees will be cut down and made into paper for an anthology of books. Meet the Future Library, an artwork by Katie Paterson.
From The Future Library
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2018 Microsoft ebook predictions

In 1999 Microsoft made a series of predictions about the upcoming 20 years and ebooks. There was a prediction about 2018. See all the predictions here.
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Ten Stories That Shaped 2017

Can you believe it's almost 2018? That means it's time to look back at some of the notable library-related stories from the past year.

10. Librarians Fight Fake News

The problems with fake news caused many of us to revamp our web evaluation handouts into guides for spotting bogus information sources.

9. Elsivier Roundup

Elsivier made several headlines this year, in the form of boycotts and resignations. Their buyout of bepress also raised eyebrows.

In related news, Beall's List went dark in January.

8. ALA's Trump Statements

Late last year, many librarians were quick to jump on an initial (and now retracted) press release by the American Library Association about being "ready to work with President-elect Trump." Recent statements have taken a far more militant tone.

7. Milo's Book Cancelled

What Public Libraries Will Lose Without Net Neutrality

Via the Verge, New York Public Library’s CEO and president Anthony Marx and associate director of information policy Greg Cram discuss the issue, explaining exactly which library resources an open internet protects, who would be hurt the most by net neutrality’s rollback, and why handing the internet to ISPs could threaten the basic foundation of American democracy.

The rollback of net neutrality opens the possibility for ISPs to start to play with how we pay for the internet, but because [it hasn’t] been rolled back yet, we don’t have evidence that they will in fact do those things. It’s a little speculative at this point. I think everyone is speculating a little bit in this. But the indications we got from the ISPs are that there will be paid prioritization and for us, there are specific things that would likely end up in the slow lane.

Stolen Car Crashes into Southwest Side Chicago Library

From the Chicago Tribune, A 14-year-old boy was shot while riding in a stolen car Tuesday night on the Southwest Side, causing the driver to lose control and crash into a public library, according to Chicago police. The Scion crashed into the Chicago Lawn Library in the 6100 block of South Kedzie Avenue, sending books, wooden tables and glass flying. The car came to rest in the middle of a large room of the library, breaking out its glass windows.

Egyptian President Closing Libraries

Scientific Search Engines Are Getting More Powerful | WIRED

But most science is still paywalled. More than three quarters of published journal articles—114 million on the World Wide Web alone, by one (lowball) estimate—are only available if you are affiliated with an institution that can afford pricey subscriptions or you can swing $40-per-article fees. In the last several years, though, scientists have made strides to loosen the grip of giant science publishers. They skip over the lengthy peer review process mediated by the big journals and just … post. Review comes after. The paywall isn’t crumbling, but it might be eroding. The open science movement, with its free distribution of articles before their official publication, is a big reason.
From Scientific Search Engines Are Getting More Powerful | WIRED
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Understanding Bias in Peer Review

To conclude, we see that the practice of double-blind reviewing yields a denser landscape of bids, which may result in a better allocation of papers to qualified reviewers. We also see that reviewers who see author and institution information tend to bid more for papers from top institutions, and are more likely to vote to accept papers from top institutions or famous authors than their double-blind counterparts. This offers some evidence to suggest that a particular piece of work might be accepted under single-blind review if the authors are famous or come from top institutions, but rejected otherwise. Of course, the situation remains complex: double-blind review imposes an administrative burden on conference organizers, reduces the opportunity to detect several varieties of conflict of interest, and may in some cases be difficult to implement due to the existence of pre-prints or long-running research agendas that are well-known to experts in the field. Nonetheless, we recommend that journal editors and conference chairs carefully consider the merits of double-blind review.
From Research Blog: Understanding Bias in Peer Review
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Libraries are for the homeless, the drifters and the snorers - people like me

And now (3.45pm), the light outside is failing, the sky a uniform grey. Gosh, how cheery. I have another four hours and 15 minutes in this haven, until I take the long road back to East Finchley. Libraries are for the homeless, the drifters, the people who pass out at their desks. The only difference between me and the vagrant in the municipal library is that I have the TLS open in front of me rather than the Daily Express, and I smell better. (And I am “posh”, but I recently heard of an acquaintance who had spotted a bully from his old posh school begging on the Tube, so a private education is no proof against the more odorous kind of indigence.)
From Libraries are for the homeless, the drifters and the snorers – people like me
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