Drop your words into giant origami boat for National Poetry Day competition 

What a clever way to  celebrate National Poetry Day!

The boat is part of a competition, inviting people  to submit words related to the sea into it to be in to win dinner ...

The public are invited to drop a word relating to the sea, along with contact details, into the boat. They will receive an instant prize of a biscuit and a poem from one of two new collections of poetry, Keel & Drift by Adrienne Jansen and Everything is Here by Rob Hack and go into the draw to win dinner for two and a cruise on a boat in Mana or copies of these collections.

Full Story:  Drop your words into giant origami boat for National Poetry Day competition | Stuff.co.nz

19th Annual Battle of the Books takes place at ECC South | wivb.com

I would have absolutely LOVED this as a kid!!

Twenty three teams. One hundred and fifty nine competitors.14 libraries and five books. That’s what makes up Buffalo’s Battle of the Books.

Mary Jean Jakubowski, Director of Erie County’s Public Library System, told News 4, “It is an exciting jeopardy round program, that will go through a series of eliminations answering unbelievably specific questions about 5 books that these children have been reading.”

Full Story:  19th Annual Battle of the Books takes place at ECC South | wivb.com

Universities Ditch Books for Digitization | theTrumpet.com

Controversy erupted at the University of California–Santa Cruz when 60 percent of its printed materials were removed from the Science & Engineering Library. Faculty members were outraged that approximately 80,000 books valued between $2-$6 million were hauled off campus or destroyed without their consultation. A proposal to remove 90 percent of written material from the Cabot Science Library at Harvard was scaled back by the faculty there.

The more I think about this story, the angrier I become.

It’s not the fact that the schools are going “digital” – that’s fine if their students are happy with that decision and I understand how much easier it probably is to manage their inventory & to provide open spaces in the library for the students.

No, what has me upset is that in some cases these “schools” are DESTROYING printed books when they make the transfer to digital.  How could they do this?

I cover stories on a weekly basis of schools desperately reaching out for book donations, of schools trying to find money in their budgets to add to a sub-par library.  Why would they do this when there are so many other options available?  Donate the unwanted tomes, hell – even sell them if you want some type of payoff for disposing of them.  But to just out-and-out destroy them?!

Shame.  Shame on you.  Shame on you for destroying the books, shame of you for apparently not even considering other options but most of all – shame on you for calling yourself a “school” or “educator”.  You are not worried about “educating” people, at least not as much as you are worried about making a profit.

I just find this all so very, very sad.

Source: Universities Ditch Books for Digitization | theTrumpet.com

Chattanooga Public Library turns up the music with new production space | Times Free Press

What a GREAT idea!!

Thanks to grants of $75,000 from Benwood Foundation and $90,000 from Lyndhust Foundation, the library has a professional-quality 24-track studio that is available to library patrons, primarily for learning and teaching purposes.

While musicians will eventually be able to use the facility to record a track or a fairly simple song or podcast, it is not intended to be used in place of a professional working studio, according to Meredith Levine, head of youth services and the studio manager at the library.

Full Story: Chattanooga Public Library turns up the music with new production space | Times Free Press

Swedes Burn Astrid Lindgren Books for “Racism”

Wow.  Now it’s “Pippi Longstocking”.  To make matters even worse, they replaced the “burned books” with “scrubbed” copies that omit what they determined to be “offensive” or “racist”.  The author died several years ago so of course this was done without her consent.

Why can’t we leave them alone & teach our children how far we have come from the days people thought this way?  Erasing our “bad thoughts” from history does not make the impact those thoughts had magically “go away”.

Is destroying our history, even what we now deem to be “bad” any better than some of the so-called “terrorist” organizations who burn down or demolish historical buildings or monuments just because they disagree with the motivation behind their construction?  Have we really come to this – this protectionist from ourselves, our history?  Have we know fortitude, courage and willingness to teach from our history instead of pretending it never happened.  What on earth has happened to us?

 

 

In 2017, however, it’s not conservatives who are criticizing Lindgren. The other day came the news that the library in Botkyrka municipality, on the outskirts of Stockholm, had burned older editions of one of the Pippi books, Pippi in the South Seas (1948), because local officials have decided that they “contain racism.”

After this action came to light, the municipality issued a press release acknowledging that the books had indeed been destroyed because they con

Full story:   Swedes Burn Astrid Lindgren Books for “Racism”

Stacks Of Books, But Short On Cash: New England’s Public Libraries Face Funding Troubles 

On a sultry weekday morning, patrons escaped the heat and gathered at the Essex public library in Essex, Conn. for a weekly book discussion.”So what did you all think of the book?” asked librarian Emily Boucher. She was leading the discussion of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel “The Remains of the Day.” Library copies of the book were littering the table — copies on loan from other public libraries, sent via the state’s interlibrary loan system — a system which library patron Bob Phoenix routinely relies on.”I constantly use it,” Phoenix said. “The only other resource for me is to go and buy a book, and so that if I had absolutely no access, this would cost me a good deal of money each year.”

Source: Stacks Of Books, But Short On Cash: New England’s Public Libraries Face Funding Troubles | The ARTery

Mosul’s Library Without Books – The New Yorker

MOSUL’S LIBRARY WITHOUT BOOKSI could smell the acrid soot a block away. The library at the University of Mosul, among the finest in the Middle East, once had a million books, historic maps, and old manuscripts. Some dated back centuries, even a millennium, Mohammed Jasim, the library’s director, told me. Among its prize acquisitions was a Quran from the ninth century, although the library also housed thousands of twenty-first-century volumes on science, philosophy, law, world history, literature, and the arts. Six hundred thousand books were in Arabic; many of the rest were in English. During the thirty-two months that the Islamic State ruled the city, the university campus, on tree-lined grounds near the Tigris River, was gradually closed down and then torched. Quite intentionally, the library was hardest hit. isis sought to kill the ideas within its walls—or at least the access to them.

Click link for full article…

Source: Mosul’s Library Without Books – The New Yorker
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