Toronto Public Library’s New Collection is the hottest book club in town
The Toronto Public Library has gone VIP.
By Nick Patch
October 31, 2015
For those who still view the library through a dust-crusted lens, it must seem the stuff of fiction: droves of fashionable young people gathering to kick back in the stacks.
Toronto Public Library’s New Collection has made it a reality. For $300 per year, Dewey devotees get access to intimate exclusive talks, insider status at other special library events — including private meet-and-greets with guests including Justin Trudeau — and perks at other literary events scattered around the city.
And the club has proven a persuasive draw for a demographic that might otherwise leave the library behind.
“For essentially a donation to the library, you are suddenly part of this ongoing conversation where you’re exposed to authors and books and ideas that open up a whole new world,” said David Sax, author of Save the Deli and a New Collection member.
“Even if you’re someone who reads a lot, who’s intellectually curious, it exposes you to things you wouldn’t normally get exposed to.”
Halloween heralds the organization’s third annual Hush Hush party, a costumed soiree (open to non-members) at the exemplary Bloor-Gladstone branch that has become the group’s marquee event..
Inspired by the New York Public Library’s Young Lions program, New Collection specifically targets a 19-45 age range and, according to members, seems to draw mainly 25-35-year-olds, a group whose library patronage might slow in the post-graduation, pre-parenthood stage of life.
Sax, for instance, concedes that he didn’t even have a library card until he attended a New Collection event as a featured guest.
“It got me back into the library. I grew up in Toronto and went to the library as a kid but I hadn’t had a library card in years. I bought books at Amazon, or the bookstore,” said Sax, 36.
“(This) totally changed the way I read, consume books, do research for the book I’m writing. And it’s showed me that there’s such a depth of resources in the system that I took for granted before.”
Beyond the program’s noble scholarly and charitable dimensions — $320,000 has been raised so far, with funds directed toward a variety of library programs, services, spaces and collections — there is also doubtless a degree of social appeal to gathering together young bookworms.
“I was there the other day watching the hockey guy, Mike Babcock, and I was like: ‘How did I not notice how many good-looking men are here?’” laughed member Jenna Parrett, 38. “It’s a lot of young, good-looking people.”
In fact, members do whisper about New Collection love connections.
“One of my best friends started dating his girlfriend at (Hush Hush),” said David Delaney, 31. “The (social aspect) is a huge part of it. If you can make sure people are having fun, they’re going to want to get involved, and just by getting involved, they’re supporting the library, whether they realize it or not.”
Of course, some would argue that the perceived exclusivity of New Collection runs counter to a public library’s duty for parity. Even some members of the program squirm at the notion of library privilege.
“I hate ‘VIP,’” Parrett said. “It’s uncomfortable for me. We get invited to the speaker series — they’re free for anybody … but they VIP us, let us sit up front, give us a drink ticket. And I’m just like: ‘Oh my God, I hate this!’
“I’m uncomfortable with the term ‘VIP,’ she continued, “but we pay membership fees, and I think the one thing it’s doing for the library is I’m talking about it all the time. So if it’s VIP, it’s in a really good way.”
Source: Toronto Star.com/Entertainment
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Charlotte Agenda: How Charlotte Mecklenburg Library convinced 13,000 people to come back
How Charlotte Mecklenburg Library convinced 13,000 people to come back
By Andrew Dunn
September 8, 2015
You’re used to Harris Teeter knowing you better than you know yourself because of the VIC card on your key ring. Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is now proving that even civic groups with much smaller budgets can harness data analytics to improve.
The library is in the middle of a project to track cardholder behavior and use that information to place programs in the right locations, better advertise services and give people gentle nudges to influence behavior. The end goal is to get more people either in the doors or using the library’s online services. The ultimate goal is to more effectively tackle community issues like third-grade literacy and the digital divide.
It’s involved a significant investment in technology. The library’s computer systems were built for books. They weren’t built for people. So Charlotte Mecklenburg Library decided to build a new customer relationship managing tool that breaks library patrons into demographic clusters based on their activity.
The system doesn’t track people by name and doesn’t look at what specific titles people are checking out, said library director of marketing and communications Cordelia Anderson. It also can’t see when people are using the free Wifi. But it logs in when people check out a book in person, or download an e-book or use the site’s other services.
New cardholders now get an email welcoming them and a list of services. If you haven’t interacted with the library in three months, you become “occasional” and get an email every month with a service you might be interested in. This is now the library’s free access to Lynda.com tutorial videos.
After a year, you go to “inactive” status and begin getting emails saying the library misses you. These alone have brought back 13,000 people so far, Anderson said. Interestingly enough, the library’s found that the No. 1 thing inactive users do first is to actually go into a branch and check out a book.
More granular demographic clusters include “dependables,” or heavy users, “rising stars,” or children who check out books regularly, “audiophiles,” who use audiobooks, or “bedtime stories,” or people checking out a lot of fiction/nonfiction books.
The data project coincides with a special advertising campaign the library is introducing this fall. Beginning this month, the library will have billboards on I-77, I-85 and Independence Boulevard, each for eight weeks at a time.
It’s funded by about $185,000 in county money specially allocated this year. They’re expecting at least 200,000 views by people age 18 or older each week. The library will then measure to see whether locations in those areas bring in new cardholders or more activity.
Other ads will run on Pandora, Yelp and on-screen at movie theaters.
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library by the numbers
20 locations
486 employees
271,000 active users
947,863 print books
6,110,131 books checked out last year
$35.9 million budget this year
Source: Charlotte Agenda.com
By Andrew Dunn
September 8, 2015
You’re used to Harris Teeter knowing you better than you know yourself because of the VIC card on your key ring. Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is now proving that even civic groups with much smaller budgets can harness data analytics to improve.
The library is in the middle of a project to track cardholder behavior and use that information to place programs in the right locations, better advertise services and give people gentle nudges to influence behavior. The end goal is to get more people either in the doors or using the library’s online services. The ultimate goal is to more effectively tackle community issues like third-grade literacy and the digital divide.
It’s involved a significant investment in technology. The library’s computer systems were built for books. They weren’t built for people. So Charlotte Mecklenburg Library decided to build a new customer relationship managing tool that breaks library patrons into demographic clusters based on their activity.
The system doesn’t track people by name and doesn’t look at what specific titles people are checking out, said library director of marketing and communications Cordelia Anderson. It also can’t see when people are using the free Wifi. But it logs in when people check out a book in person, or download an e-book or use the site’s other services.
New cardholders now get an email welcoming them and a list of services. If you haven’t interacted with the library in three months, you become “occasional” and get an email every month with a service you might be interested in. This is now the library’s free access to Lynda.com tutorial videos.
After a year, you go to “inactive” status and begin getting emails saying the library misses you. These alone have brought back 13,000 people so far, Anderson said. Interestingly enough, the library’s found that the No. 1 thing inactive users do first is to actually go into a branch and check out a book.
More granular demographic clusters include “dependables,” or heavy users, “rising stars,” or children who check out books regularly, “audiophiles,” who use audiobooks, or “bedtime stories,” or people checking out a lot of fiction/nonfiction books.
The data project coincides with a special advertising campaign the library is introducing this fall. Beginning this month, the library will have billboards on I-77, I-85 and Independence Boulevard, each for eight weeks at a time.
It’s funded by about $185,000 in county money specially allocated this year. They’re expecting at least 200,000 views by people age 18 or older each week. The library will then measure to see whether locations in those areas bring in new cardholders or more activity.
Other ads will run on Pandora, Yelp and on-screen at movie theaters.
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library by the numbers
20 locations
486 employees
271,000 active users
947,863 print books
6,110,131 books checked out last year
$35.9 million budget this year
Source: Charlotte Agenda.com
Monday, November 2, 2015
The New York Times Opinion Pages: Reinventing the Library
Reinventing the Library
by Alberto Manguel
October 23, 2015
Plato, in the “Timaeus,” says that when one of the wisest men of Greece, the statesman Solon, visited Egypt, he was told by an old priest that the Greeks were like mere children because they possessed no truly ancient traditions or notions “gray with time.” In Egypt, the priest continued proudly, “there is nothing great or beautiful or remarkable that is done here, or in your country, or in any other land that has not been long since put into writing and preserved in our temples.”
Such colossal ambition coalesced under the Ptolemaic dynasty. In the third century B.C., more than half a century after Plato wrote his dialogues, the kings ordered that every book in the known world be collected and placed in the great library they had founded in Alexandria. Hardly anything is known of it except its fame: neither its site (it was perhaps a section of the House of the Muses) nor how it was used, nor even how it came to its end. Yet, as one of history’s most distinguished ghosts, the Library of Alexandria became the archetype of all libraries.
Libraries come in countless shapes and sizes. They can be like the Library of Congress or as modest as that of the children’s concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the older girls were in charge of eight volumes that had to be hidden every night so that the Nazi guards wouldn’t confiscate them. They can be built from books found in the garbage, like the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., set up in 1980 by the 24-year-old Aaron Lansky from volumes discarded by the younger generations who no longer spoke the tongue of their elders, or they can be catalogued in the mind of their exiled readers, in the hope of resurrection, like the libraries plundered by the Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories of Palestine. It is in the nature of libraries to adapt to changing circumstances and threats, and all libraries exist in constant danger of being destroyed by war, vermin, fire, water or the idiocies of bureaucracy.
But today, the principal danger facing libraries comes not from threats like these but from ill-considered changes that may cause libraries to lose their defining triple role: as preservers of the memory of our society, as providers of the accounts of our experience and the tools to navigate them — and as symbols of our identity.
Since the time of Alexandria, libraries have held a symbolic function. For the Ptolemaic kings, the library was an emblem of their power; eventually it became the encompassing symbol of an entire society, a numinous place where readers could learn the art of attention which, Hannah Arendt argued, is a definition of culture. But since the mid-20th century, libraries no longer seem to carry this symbolic meaning and, as mere storage rooms of a technology deemed defunct, are not considered worthy of proper preservation and funding.
In most of the Anglo-Saxon world (but not significantly in most Latin American countries) the number of libraries has been decreasing. In Britain, close to 350 libraries have been shut down in the past decade. In Canada, the public libraries of Toronto were threatened with closure by ex-Mayor Robert Ford and saved in extremis thanks to a campaign led by Margaret Atwood. In the United States, while the number of libraries that have disappeared is not remarkably high, public libraries have seen their budgets cut, their stocks culled, their staffs reduced and their opening hours shortened.
But libraries are resilient. Intent on surviving in an age where the intellectual act has lost almost all prestige, libraries have become largely social centers. Most libraries today are used less to borrow books than to seek protection from harsh weather and to find jobs online, and it is admirable that librarians have lent themselves to these very necessary services that don’t traditionally belong to their job description. A new definition of the role of librarians could be drafted by diversifying their mandate, but such restructuring must also ensure that the librarians’ primary purpose is not forgotten: to guide readers to their books.
Libraries have always been more than a place where readers come to read. The librarians of Alexandria no doubt collected things other than books: maps, art, instruments, and readers probably came there not only to consult books but also to attend public lectures, converse with one another, teach and learn. And yet the library remained principally a place where books, in all their various forms, were stored for consultation and preservation of “ancient traditions or notions ‘gray with time’.” Other institutions fulfilled other complementary tasks necessary in a civilized society: hospitals, philanthropic associations, guilds.
Librarians today are forced to take on a variety of functions that their society is too miserly or contemptuous to fulfill, and the use of their scant resources to meet those essential social obligations diminishes their funds for buying new books and other materials. But a library is not a homeless shelter (at the St. Agnes library in New York, I witnessed a librarian explaining to a customer why she could not sleep on the floor), a nursery or a fun fair (the Seneca East Public Library in Attica, Ohio, offers pajama parties), or a prime provider of social support and medical care (which American librarians today nonetheless routinely give).
All these activities are good and useful, and may grant libraries a central role in society once again, but we must be prepared to invest the system with more, not less funds, to allow it to reinvent itself. Librarians are not trained to act as social workers, caregivers, babysitters or medical advisers. All these extra tasks make it difficult, if not impossible, for librarians to work as librarians: to see that the collections remain coherent, to sift through catalogues, to help readers read, to read themselves. The new duties imposed on them are the obligations of civilized societies toward their citizens, and should not be dumped pell-mell onto the shoulders of librarians. If we change the role of libraries and librarians without preserving the centrality of the book, we risk losing something irretrievable.
Every economic crisis responds, first of all, by cutting funds to culture. But the dismantling of our libraries and changing their nature is not simply a matter of economics. Somewhere in our time, we began to forget what memory — personal and collective — means, and the importance of common symbols that help us understand our society.
If libraries are to be not only repositories of society’s memory and symbols of its identity but the heart of larger social centers, then these changes must be made consciously from an intellectually strong institution that recognizes its exemplary role, and teaches us what books can do: show us our responsibilities toward one another, help us question our values and undermine our prejudices, lend us courage and ingenuity to continue to live together, and give us illuminating words that might allow us to imagine better times. According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, one of the ancient libraries he saw in Egypt carried above its entrance the words: “Clinic of the Soul.”
Source: New York Times Opinion Pages
by Alberto Manguel
October 23, 2015
Plato, in the “Timaeus,” says that when one of the wisest men of Greece, the statesman Solon, visited Egypt, he was told by an old priest that the Greeks were like mere children because they possessed no truly ancient traditions or notions “gray with time.” In Egypt, the priest continued proudly, “there is nothing great or beautiful or remarkable that is done here, or in your country, or in any other land that has not been long since put into writing and preserved in our temples.”
Such colossal ambition coalesced under the Ptolemaic dynasty. In the third century B.C., more than half a century after Plato wrote his dialogues, the kings ordered that every book in the known world be collected and placed in the great library they had founded in Alexandria. Hardly anything is known of it except its fame: neither its site (it was perhaps a section of the House of the Muses) nor how it was used, nor even how it came to its end. Yet, as one of history’s most distinguished ghosts, the Library of Alexandria became the archetype of all libraries.
Libraries come in countless shapes and sizes. They can be like the Library of Congress or as modest as that of the children’s concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the older girls were in charge of eight volumes that had to be hidden every night so that the Nazi guards wouldn’t confiscate them. They can be built from books found in the garbage, like the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., set up in 1980 by the 24-year-old Aaron Lansky from volumes discarded by the younger generations who no longer spoke the tongue of their elders, or they can be catalogued in the mind of their exiled readers, in the hope of resurrection, like the libraries plundered by the Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories of Palestine. It is in the nature of libraries to adapt to changing circumstances and threats, and all libraries exist in constant danger of being destroyed by war, vermin, fire, water or the idiocies of bureaucracy.
But today, the principal danger facing libraries comes not from threats like these but from ill-considered changes that may cause libraries to lose their defining triple role: as preservers of the memory of our society, as providers of the accounts of our experience and the tools to navigate them — and as symbols of our identity.
Since the time of Alexandria, libraries have held a symbolic function. For the Ptolemaic kings, the library was an emblem of their power; eventually it became the encompassing symbol of an entire society, a numinous place where readers could learn the art of attention which, Hannah Arendt argued, is a definition of culture. But since the mid-20th century, libraries no longer seem to carry this symbolic meaning and, as mere storage rooms of a technology deemed defunct, are not considered worthy of proper preservation and funding.
In most of the Anglo-Saxon world (but not significantly in most Latin American countries) the number of libraries has been decreasing. In Britain, close to 350 libraries have been shut down in the past decade. In Canada, the public libraries of Toronto were threatened with closure by ex-Mayor Robert Ford and saved in extremis thanks to a campaign led by Margaret Atwood. In the United States, while the number of libraries that have disappeared is not remarkably high, public libraries have seen their budgets cut, their stocks culled, their staffs reduced and their opening hours shortened.
But libraries are resilient. Intent on surviving in an age where the intellectual act has lost almost all prestige, libraries have become largely social centers. Most libraries today are used less to borrow books than to seek protection from harsh weather and to find jobs online, and it is admirable that librarians have lent themselves to these very necessary services that don’t traditionally belong to their job description. A new definition of the role of librarians could be drafted by diversifying their mandate, but such restructuring must also ensure that the librarians’ primary purpose is not forgotten: to guide readers to their books.
Libraries have always been more than a place where readers come to read. The librarians of Alexandria no doubt collected things other than books: maps, art, instruments, and readers probably came there not only to consult books but also to attend public lectures, converse with one another, teach and learn. And yet the library remained principally a place where books, in all their various forms, were stored for consultation and preservation of “ancient traditions or notions ‘gray with time’.” Other institutions fulfilled other complementary tasks necessary in a civilized society: hospitals, philanthropic associations, guilds.
Librarians today are forced to take on a variety of functions that their society is too miserly or contemptuous to fulfill, and the use of their scant resources to meet those essential social obligations diminishes their funds for buying new books and other materials. But a library is not a homeless shelter (at the St. Agnes library in New York, I witnessed a librarian explaining to a customer why she could not sleep on the floor), a nursery or a fun fair (the Seneca East Public Library in Attica, Ohio, offers pajama parties), or a prime provider of social support and medical care (which American librarians today nonetheless routinely give).
All these activities are good and useful, and may grant libraries a central role in society once again, but we must be prepared to invest the system with more, not less funds, to allow it to reinvent itself. Librarians are not trained to act as social workers, caregivers, babysitters or medical advisers. All these extra tasks make it difficult, if not impossible, for librarians to work as librarians: to see that the collections remain coherent, to sift through catalogues, to help readers read, to read themselves. The new duties imposed on them are the obligations of civilized societies toward their citizens, and should not be dumped pell-mell onto the shoulders of librarians. If we change the role of libraries and librarians without preserving the centrality of the book, we risk losing something irretrievable.
Every economic crisis responds, first of all, by cutting funds to culture. But the dismantling of our libraries and changing their nature is not simply a matter of economics. Somewhere in our time, we began to forget what memory — personal and collective — means, and the importance of common symbols that help us understand our society.
If libraries are to be not only repositories of society’s memory and symbols of its identity but the heart of larger social centers, then these changes must be made consciously from an intellectually strong institution that recognizes its exemplary role, and teaches us what books can do: show us our responsibilities toward one another, help us question our values and undermine our prejudices, lend us courage and ingenuity to continue to live together, and give us illuminating words that might allow us to imagine better times. According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, one of the ancient libraries he saw in Egypt carried above its entrance the words: “Clinic of the Soul.”
Source: New York Times Opinion Pages
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Mass Live: Horror writers share the stories you must read this Halloween
Horror writers share the stories you must read this Halloween
An Infected with Will Smith as Robert Neville in a scene from Warner Bros. Pictures' and Village Roadshow Pictures' "I Am Legend," based on the classic horror novel of the same title written by Richard Matheson. The novel is among those chosen as must reads by a panel from the New England Horror Writers Association. ( Warner Bros. photo)
By Follow on Twitter
on October 27, 2015 at 7:00 AM, updated October 27, 2015 at 7:11 AM
With Halloween at its most notorious day, October is well known for its horror-themed happenings. This is true in literature and pop culture, too, when bookstores and libraries put out their scariest titles for those who can't wait to be kept awake by page-turning trepidation.
MassLive asked Massachusetts members of the New England Horror Writers Association which books kept them awake at night. Here are there answers:
Jennifer Allis Provost: "I am Legend" and "We Have Always Lived in a Castle."
Provost grew up in Western Mass. and she "writes books about faeries, orcs and elves. Zombies too."
Jennifer Allis Provost
Provost started her writing career "as many others do," by writing "by monster of the week short stories, but quickly moved on to more psychological horror."
"Truly, the inside of our minds is the scariest place," she said.
Provost is the author of the fantasy series "The Chronicles of Parthalan" and the urban fantasy "Copper Girl." Her latest release, "Heir to the Sun," launched June 1, 2015, and "Changing Teams," the first in a new contemporary series, will be release Nov. 10 from Limitless Publishing.
Social decline is something that unnerves her, and it is present in both of the books she chose, starting with the book that influenced George Romero's zombies in "Night of the Living Dead," "I Am Legend," by Richard Matheson.
"'I Am Legend' was the first book that truly scared me," Provost said. "Is he really the last man alive?"
Provost also recommended Shirley Jackson's final novel, 1962's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle."
"In 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle,' readers follow two sisters and an uncle," she said. "The family used to be bigger, that is until some arsenic found its way into the sugar bowl one evening. Unreliable narration and creepiness at its best."
Jeremy Flagg: "Exquisite Corpse," "Night Watch" and "In the Blood."
Jeremy Flagg
Flagg is a high school graphic design teacher and the MetroWest region's liaison for the NaNoWriMo project, a novel-writing project which takes place each November.
He is currently working on the third installment of his horror satire and science fiction series, "Suburban Zombie High." Book one looks at the outlandish world of suburban high school students and the realities they face in "the real world" when their school becomes ground zero for the zombie apocalypse.
"Suburban Zombie High: The Reunion," was released in August. Flagg is working on the final chapter of the series while also preparing a new series for publication. He can be found on Twitter under @writeremyflagg.
"Exquisite Corpse," by Poppy Z. Brite: "When murder can be described as intimate, I get intrigued," Flagg said. "When you start to make me like the killer, then I begin to get worried."
"Night Watch," by Sergei Lukyanenko: "It's horror and it's Russian, it must be good," Flagg said. "Vampires, werewolves, and witches walk among us, and police one another. Less frightening, but more a darkness that looms in the setting and in the soul of the characters. Beautifully dark."
"In the Blood," by Nancy Collins: "A prostitute turned vampire, hell bent on revenge? Falling in love with a man the demon in your mind hates. Violent and gory; conflict on all fronts."
Trisha J. Wooldridge: "The Girl Next Door," and "Big Sister, Little Sister."
Trisha Wooldridge
Wooldridge is a freelance editor, writer, and journalist and former president of Broad Universe, an organization that promotes science fiction, fantasy and horror written by females.
She has written three novels, "The Kelpie," "Silent Starsong" and "The Earl's Childe." In addition, she has contributed award-winning stories to the anthology series "Bad-Ass Faeries" and is the writing partner in the webcomic "Aurelio."
Find her on Facebook, or on Twitter under @novelfriend.com
"Jack Ketchum's "The Girl Next Door" left me completely disturbed, but I could not put it down," Wooldridge said. "In short stories, one that always springs to my head first is Jennifer Pelland's 'Big Sister, Little Sister,' which is science-fiction horror.
Matthew M. Bartlett: "Mannequins in Aspects of Terror."
Matthew Bartlett
Bartlett, of Northhampton, is the author of "Gateways to Abomination," it's companion piece, "Anne Gare's Rare Book and Ephemera Catalogue," "The Witch-Cult in Western Massachusetts," and "Rangel." In addition, Bartlett's short stories have appeared in several anthologies, including "Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond" and "High Strange Horror." Find him on Twitter under @MattMBartlett
"The story 'Mannequins in Aspects of Terror,' by Mark Samuels, unnerved me," Bartlett said. "It concerns an art exhibit held in an abandoned office building.
"The feeling that something is lurking around every corner, the isolation and disorientation experienced by the narrator, the feeling that he is being watched, or, worse, controlled—it is edge of your seat reading," he said. "I had to laugh when I noticed the physical reaction I had while reading it. My eyebrows were up. I was chewing my thumbnail. My legs had curled up under me. Few stories truly move me to fear. This was one of them."
Amber Fallon (formerly writing as Alyn Day): "Ghoul"
Amber Fallon
Fallon lives in a small town outside Boston. A self-described "techie by day and a horror writer by night," Fallon's published stories include "So Long and Thanks for All the Brains," "Daily Frights 2012," "Women of the Living Dead," "Zombie Tales," "Here Be Clowns," "Horror on the Installment Plan," "Zombies For a Cure," "Quick Bites of Flesh," "Daily Frights 2013," "Mirror, Mirror," "Operation Ice Bat," 'Return to Deathlehem," and "Daughters of Inanna." She can be found on Twitter under @Z0mbiegrl.
"Brian Keene's 'Ghoul' is a really great example of what we writers like to call 'bleeding on the page,'" he said. "There's an awful lot of the author himself there, as well as monsters of both the human and inhuman kind."
From: Mass Live
Friday, October 30, 2015
Metro: Library plagued by pranksters sticking up rude messages by their book drop-offs
Library plagued by pranksters sticking up rude messages by their book drop-offs
Olivia Waring for Metro.co.uk
According to this particular sign LA Public Library exercises positive discrimination (Picture: Obvious Plant/Jeff Wysaski)
Libraries everywhere are now struggling to compete with ever-tightening government budgets, plus that thing called the internet.
But apparently that does not make them exempt from a bit of gentle banter from professional pranksters Obvious Plant.
These cheeky signs, posing as official notices, have appeared next to book drop-offs at the Los Angeles Public Library.
Libraries everywhere are now struggling to compete with ever-tightening government budgets, plus that thing called the internet.
But apparently that does not make them exempt from a bit of gentle banter from professional pranksters Obvious Plant.
These cheeky signs, posing as official notices, have appeared next to book drop-offs at the Los Angeles Public Library.
(Picture: Obvious Plant / Jeff Wysaski)
Whoever’s responsible for these signs clearly has no respect for the sanctity of the written word… and really loves pickles.
Obviously IRL pickles are not welcome in libraries.
Nobody wants vinegar on their Stephen King.
Whoever’s responsible for these signs clearly has no respect for the sanctity of the written word… and really loves pickles.
Obviously IRL pickles are not welcome in libraries.
Nobody wants vinegar on their Stephen King.
(Picture: Obvious Plant / Jeff Wysaski)
One of the signs asks readers to shout ‘not a squirrel’ when opening the flap so that Keith doesn’t have to worry about squirrels stealing his lunch – whoever Keith is.
Another reads: ‘This drop box is for books and pictures of cute boys only!’.
And whatever you do, don’t go inside and ask Cathy about her furry friends.
One of the signs asks readers to shout ‘not a squirrel’ when opening the flap so that Keith doesn’t have to worry about squirrels stealing his lunch – whoever Keith is.
Another reads: ‘This drop box is for books and pictures of cute boys only!’.
And whatever you do, don’t go inside and ask Cathy about her furry friends.
(Picture: Obvious Plant / Jeff Wysaski)
Like all people who place too much emphasis on reading, she’s lonely and square and probably smells.
If she’s real, that is.
At least they got in a book lover’s in-joke at the expense of the Twilight novels.
Like all people who place too much emphasis on reading, she’s lonely and square and probably smells.
If she’s real, that is.
At least they got in a book lover’s in-joke at the expense of the Twilight novels.
(Picture: Obvious Plant / Jeff Wysaski)
That said, they appear to be the only person in the entire universe who hasn’t read Pride And Prejudice.
That said, they appear to be the only person in the entire universe who hasn’t read Pride And Prejudice.
(Picture: Obvious Plant / Jeff Wysaski)
Perhaps the Pride And Prejudice And Zombies movie will appeal to them more.
From: Metro
Perhaps the Pride And Prejudice And Zombies movie will appeal to them more.
From: Metro
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Times of Malta: Too much information
Too much information
Sunday, October 18, 2015
In the last 50 years, we have produced more information than in the previous 5,000 years. But can we understand all of it, Marc Kosciejew asks.
It seems, even feels, as though we are overloaded with information. There seems to be so much of the stuff around. We seem, and in many cases are, obsessed with information, wanting, needing, demanding and expecting more of it for diverse activities and purposes. We have come to expect access to any kind of information, anywhere and at any time.
We constantly produce, record, store, consume, purchase, and share information, from the most important, substantive and serious, to the most trivial, petty and mundane. We are consequently surrounded by information in every sphere of personal, private, and public life and seemingly inundated with it at all times, from all directions, and in all places.
It is said that there has been more information, and more diverse kinds of information, produced in the last 50 years than during the previous 5,000 years. In 2003, for instance, the prestigious School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley, US, estimated that humanity had accumulated approximately 12 exabytes of data in the course of its entire history until the advent of modern computers. To put this huge number into perspective, consider that one exa is a decimal unit prefix in the metric system denoting 1018. To put differently, it’s a 50,000-year-long DVD.
The Berkeley researchers also calculated that print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media had already produced more than five exabytes of data in 2002 alone. This number is staggering for a one-year period, considering that it represents nearly half of all the data humanity had accumulated in the previous thousands of years. To put five exabytes into perspective, it is equivalent to 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress in Washington, US. Further, between 2006 and 2010, the global quantity of digital data (excluding analogue and print data) increased from a whopping 161 exabytes to a mind-boggling 988 exabytes.
These numbers are steadily and inexorably growing every day. As humanity approaches the age of the zettabyte (1,000 exabytes), it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
This inundation of, and obsession with, information is resulting in a dramatic surfeit of information. The phenomenon of excessive information is also referred to as information overload, infoglut, infobesity, or simply, as too much information. Exaflood is a term that is used to describe just the tsunami of digital information that is submerging us. Taking into account all diverse kinds of information, there seems to be a continually rising, churning information flood, or what The Economist describes as a data deluge. This information is helping generate a sensation of drowning. According to The Economist, “Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still.”
Yet ironically, as we create, crave, and expect access to more information, we also increasingly feel as though we are submerged in a tumultuous sea beyond our control or comprehension.
There are historical echoes of information overload. For instance, criticisms and complaints of too much information are found in the ancient world. In the first century AD, Seneca the Elder commented that, “The abundance of books is distraction”. In Ecclesiastes 12:12, it is observed that, “Of making books there is no end.”
Gutenberg’s printing press accelerated the expansion of book and document production and the accompanying feelings of being overwhelmed. Books and documents were produced, circulated, accumulated, and consumed cheaply, in unprecedented numbers to the point that Erasmus asked, “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” According to the philosopher Denis Diderot, “As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.”
But what exactly is information overload? What is this data deluge that seems to be drowning us? Is there such a thing as having too much information? Is more information necessary and helpful or unnecessary and harmful? Since it may only take one or two pages of Google results to overwhelm the average searcher, does it matter whether or not there are hundreds or thousands of more pages after those two?
"An information diet is not about consuming less but instead consuming quality information from original, primary and respected sources"
There are some psychological and sociological studies that demonstrate how information overload can contaminate judgement. More information is usually helpful at first, but as it increases, information becomes more unhelpful. As it grows further, it actually becomes a hindrance.
There can be negative effects on mind and body when you feel overloaded with information. Information overload can exacerbate psychological issues like anxiety, stress, attention deficit disorder, worry, and depression. It can also create or contribute to various physical problems like blurred vision, headaches, and painful joint, back, shoulder, and wrist issues.
Moreover, individuals can only absorb and process so much information at any given time. Information overload can thus negatively impact cognitive capabilities. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Atlantic Books, 2011), technology writer Nicholas Carr explores how information overload distracts and interrupts, forcing us to scan and skim, thereby diminishing important cognitive abilities such as attentiveness, concentration, reflection, and memory. Carr argues that we are losing our abilities to pay close attention and concentrate over a prolonged periods of time, whether reading a book or engaging in conversation, without being constantly distracted, usually by the internet and some information communication technology. This turns us into superficial thinkers.
The internet and information communication technologies foster compulsive behaviours and habits like constant checking, consulting and refreshing of online information. These compulsions ultimately undermine cognitive consolidation, that is, the transfer of information from short-term or working memory to long-term memory. This transference is crucial to the creation of connections between all the information in your mind. But as this transference is increasingly distracted and interrupted, cognitive consolidation is disrupted. As we train our brains to take in more information, very quickly and in fragmented ways, we strengthen the parts of the brain that are good at multitasking, yet weaken the parts of the brain involved in cognitive consolidation. This weakening is an alarming prospect considering that cognitive consolidation involves some of our most important thought processes, such as long-term memory, contemplation, conceptual knowledge, critical thinking, and reflection.
How can we cope with information overload?
Coping mechanisms for handling and navigating too much information have not significantly changed from ancient civilisations to the present. Whether it is traditional information tools like bibliographies or indexes, or digital ones like search engines and wikis, they all share the same principles of searching, selecting, summarising, sorting, and storing, coupled with human attention and analysis to guide the information-seeking process. These principles are the fundamental concerns and practices of librarianship, archival work, and records and information management. These are enduring professions dedicated to the navigation, organisation, and presentation of information, helping us control and make sense of the information flood. They remain essential in helping to control and understand both information and its surfeit.
A personal way to cope with information overload involves a kind of diet. In The Information Diet (O’Reilly Media, 2012), Johnson compares information overload to a diet. He states that, “We know we’re products of the food we eat. Why wouldn’t we also be products of the information we consume?” Johnson argues that people tend to consume information confirm their biases or that they find interesting, in a similar way that they would prefer to eat their favourite dishes, eat desert before dinner, or choose junk food instead of healthier options. Just as too much dessert or junk food can lead to health problems such as obesity, junk information can lead to intellectual stunting like ignorance.
Johnson argues that it is not information overload that is problematic, but instead our bad consumption habits. “Ask any nutritionist, and they’ll tell you that a diet isn’t about not eating – it’s about changing your consumption habits,” Johnson adds. He proposes that instead of stressing over too much information, we need to adopt a healthy and balanced information diet. A diet does not mean you stop eating but instead consume nutritious foods. Similarly, an information diet is not about consuming less but instead consuming quality information from original, primary and respected sources.
Johnson prescribes discipline in how we consume information. It is not enough to unplug the computer, turn off the television, avoid social media, disconnect from the internet, or ignore the news. These are only superficial coping mechanisms. We need real and sustainable changes to our actual information-seeking habits. For instance, simultaneous distractions, like constant alerts and notifications, should be eliminated. They pull attention away from present tasks, fragment concentration, and reinforce more bad behaviour of compulsive checking, rechecking and scanning. Or, as another example, using smartphones as alarm clocks should be stopped in order to prevent people from becoming immediately drawn into them upon awakening.
“Information obesity isn’t new. Just as it was possible to be obese 500 years ago, it was possible to experience this new kind of ignorance 500 years ago, too. It was just more expensive, and you had to work much harder for it. But now we’re living in a world of abundance,” Johnson reminds us. We continue to need many enduring information practices and tools that have not changed in fundamental ways since their invention, even though most have been updated to adapt to contemporary technological developments.
Perhaps we need to go on an information diet. Johnson argues that, “There always has been more human knowledge and experience than any one human could absorb. It’s not the total amount of information, but your information habit that is pushing you to whatever extreme you find uncomfortable.”
Perhaps it is not information overload that overwhelms us but instead our bad information consumption habits. Perhaps we need to adopt more healthy ways of coping with information. We can look to libraries and archives on successful strategies to deal with information. We need to remember and reaffirm the enduring importance of libraries and archives in the organisation, management, and storage of information. Indeed, libraries and archives of all stripes are information Noah’s Arks that have always helped us navigate information floods and remain crucial in doing so today.
It is important that we recognise and acknowledge part of our own complicity in information’s continual rise. We must come to terms with our obsession with information. We want more, we need more, we expect more, we demand more, we accumulate more, and consequently, we become overloaded with, or submerged in, more information. If we adopt a balanced information diet, and learn important lessons and seek vital guidance from libraries and archives, we will better understand how to manage and deal with information overload.
Marc Kosciejew is head of department and lecturer in the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta.
From: Times of Malta
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
The Atlantic: What the Google Books Victory Means for Readers
What the Google Books Victory Means for Readers
Is a universal library finally within reach?
Beck Diefenbach / ReutersDAN COHEN
OCT 22, 2015
A lawsuit can run on for so long that, even if major issues are still at stake, it can seem dated and even inconsequential by the time it’s resolved. Such is the case with Authors Guild v. Google, which likely came to a conclusion on Friday, more than 10 years after it began. The Second Circuit sided with Google, ruling that the company’s program to scan millions of books, including those still in copyright, was legal.
So much has changed on the Internet, in libraries, and with books in the decade since the Authors Guild first filed suit. In 2005, Google was a relatively young search engine—it had only gone public the previous year—looking to expand its horizon beyond the web. Now Google is part of a conglomerate named Alphabet, and Google Books seems very much like an early, vestigial effort among Alphabet’s larger body of projects, which includes higher-profile ventures like self-driving cars.
Ten years ago there were no Kindles, iPads, or postcard-sized smartphones to read on. Now the growth of e-reading is unmistakable. In 2011, 11 percent of Americans read an ebook; in 2014, 27 percent did. (In the same period, the number of Americans reading a print book fell, from 71 percent to 63 percent.) In the past 12 months, Americans read 120 million ebooks on just one app used by public libraries—an increase of 20 percent from the year before. And while big publishersmay be seeing their ebook sales plateau, self-published authors and indie presses—many of them selling directly to readers through Amazon—continue to gain market share, while charging a fraction of what print books cost. With so much of the landscape for digital books forever altered, what does Friday’s decision mean for readers, writers, libraries, and the public?
As Judge Pierre Leval emphasized throughout his ruling for the Appellate Court, as audacious as Google Books appeared at its inception, it seems less monumental today. Although Google did tip entire library shelves into the scanner without regard for copyright status—triggering an unsurprising revolt from authors and publishers—the tech giant only shows small “snippets” of in-copyright works. The full digitized books are walled-off, making only certain uses possible. Researchers can fact-check using Google Books, or they can examine the number of times particular words and phrases are mentioned in the corpus each year, but they can’t really read Google’s online version of most volumes.
This makes Google Books a wonderful tool—a transformative one, in the eyes of the court, and thus non-infringing—but it also means that the service has ended up being more tantalizing than fulfilling. What Google has created is less a universal library than a tinted window into one.
It was not always going to be this way. A proposed 2011 settlement between Google and its antagonists would have laid the groundwork for paid access to all of the scanned books. Yet many book lovers viewed such a settlement (rightly, in my opinion) as creating an undesirable, near-monopolistic online book outlet. The judge presiding over the case, Denny Chin, agreed and rejected it, ruling for the Southern District of New York that Google Books, as is, was a fair use. The Second Circuit has unanimously concurred.
It’s now a good time to think about more heterogeneous models and markets for ebooks, including in the discussion not only the Googles and Amazons of the world, but also libraries, which find existing channels and platforms for ebooks less than ideal.
This matches larger trends in digital librarianship. As Google has shifted its attention away from books, nonprofits have stepped in to ensure access to our shared culture. The Digital Public Library of America, which I direct, brings together the digitized contents of America’s libraries, archives, and museums.HathiTrust—which was also unsuccessfully sued by the Author Guild—was established by universities to preserve digital copies of their holdings for the long term. The Internet Archive also has scanning centers in multiple locations, and many smaller institutions have started their own digitization programs.
For those organizations to provide greater access to digitized print books, the United States will have to solve thorny issues about the status of much of what is held in its cultural-heritage institutions. Works from before 1923 are in the public domain, and recent volumes are clearly under copyright. But a large percentage of books between the distant and recent past are in a grey territory where their status is foggy. Their copyright may not have been renewed, and their publishers and authors are long gone. With imperfect records we can’t be sure what we can do with these millions of books.
Fortunately, in the U.S., we can also appeal to fair use, an important principle that makes the American system of copyright different from most other countries. As the length of copyright terms has been repeatedly extended, fair use acts as a counterbalance, providing exceptions for using copyrighted materials in ways that benefit society without destroying the market for books. Authors also benefit from fair use, by being able to quote, parody, and build upon copyrighted works.
However, like the status of so many books on our libraries’ shelves, the nature of fair use has often been unclear. Judges are asked to balance four fairly abstract factors in deciding whether a use is fair, including how creative works are being repurposed and to what extent, and how the market for the original might be impacted.
In a narrow sense, the decade-long litigation over Google Books ended with a judgment about the balance of these factors for a specific project: a large company scanning and indexing the contents of millions of volumes.
But critically, and with greater and lasting impact, the case also helped to clarify fair use in general. Authors Guild v. Google stands to make fair use much more muscular. Because many institutions want to avoid legal and financial risk, many possible uses that the courts would find fair—including a number of non-commercial, educational uses—are simply never attempted. A clearer fair-use principle, with stronger support from the courts, will make libraries and similar organizations more confident about pursuing forms of broader digital access.
After all, as Judge Leval emphasized: “While authors are undoubtedly important intended beneficiaries of copyright, the ultimate, primary intended beneficiary is the public.” It may have taken 10 years, but that crucial reminder of copyright’s goal is anything but dated and inconsequential. It will serve all of us as we think about how books are written, read, and preserved for future generations.
From: The Atlantic
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