American Library Association • August 7, 2015
 
APA Handbook
 

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Connecting libraries and social justice

A community dialogue among neighborhood residents and Hartford police officers on the topic of community violence and public safety.

Willie Miller writes: “Officially, the National Conference of African American Librarians has tracks on topics like diversity, emerging technologies, assessment, and financial literacy. Unofficially, the conference has a powerful track on social justice—though one might also call it a track on Ferguson—which includes at least three sessions and a bus tour. The Black Caucus of the American Library Association and NCAAL illuminate the role of libraries in meeting the needs of communities working towards social justice.”...

AL: The Scoop, Aug. 3

NCAAL officially begins with pilgrimage to Ferguson

A memorial to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Willie Miller writes: “Led by St. Louis native and regional history expert John A. Wright, a group of librarians toured the city on August 5, ending at the site of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. The tour, which was offered before the opening session of the 9th Annual National Conference of African American Librarians, gave librarians insight into the city’s history and culture.”...

AL The Scoop, Aug. 5
 
Recorded Books
 

Ferguson, One Year Later

Ferguson (Mo.) Public Library director Scott Bonner

Sarah Ostman writes: “August 9 marks one year since police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown. With the anniversary looming this Sunday, Ferguson Municipal Public Library Director Scott Bonner is hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. Bonner, who has received awards for providing a safe harbor for residents during the Ferguson protests, spoke to ALA about how the past year has changed his library.”...

AL The Scoop, Aug. 7

Nearly 3,000 school libraries closed in Turkey in 2014

School library in Turkey

According to a report by the Turkish Statistics Institute, 2,899 libraries in state and private schools and exam preparations centers across Turkey were closed in 2014, bringing the total number of libraries in schools down to 27,948. Despite an increase in the number of public and university libraries and the number of books available in them, the decrease in the number of libraries in high-school educational institutions from 2013 was as high as 9.4%....

Today's Zaman (Turkey), Aug. 6
 
YA Symposium
 

The future of the MLS

The future of the MLS: A report from the University of Maryland

Alan Inouye writes: “Last summer, the iSchool at the University of Maryland launched the Re-Envisioning the MLS initiative. The premise is that future professionals in library and library-related fields will likely need fundamentally different educational preparation than what is provided by current curricula. Based on an extensive body of research, outreach, and analysis, yesterday the iSchool released its report ‘Re-Envisioning the MLS: Findings, Issues, and Considerations.’”...

District Dispatch, Aug. 7

Internet filtering and the Bill of Rights

How internet filters work

Helen Adams writes: “In 2000, Congress passed the Children’s Internet Protection Act with the purpose of protecting children and young adults online. Unfortunately, the law’s requirements have been misinterpreted by many school districts, resulting in filters overblocking legitimate educational websites and interactive and collaborative web tools valuable to students and teachers. Then on June 30, the ALA Council approved Internet Filtering: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights.”...

Knowledge Quest blog, Aug. 5

Program evaluations: Helpful tool or necessary evil?

Rebecca Starr writes: “Admit it: you have a love/hate relationship with all program evaluation forms. As programmers, we understand these forms’ necessity in ensuring program integrity and value, but as participants, we dislike completing them. So how can we get the information we need while honoring the opinions (and time) of our program attendees?”...

Programming Librarian, Aug. 5

British Library releases 1 million public domain images

The Ballet Girl's Dream

In keeping with its ambition to become the world’s most open institution of its kind, the British Library has released over a million public domain illustrations and other images to the public through Flickr for anyone to reuse, remix, or repurpose. The images, which range from Restoration-era cartoons to colonial explorers’ early photographs, have been used on rugs, album covers, gift tags, a mapping project, and an art installation at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, among other things....

Quartz, Aug. 1

Top 10 LGBTQ titles for youth

Cover of Porcupine of Truth

Michael Cart writes: “With ever-more LGBTQ books on the teen market, it was not difficult to pull together a list of 10 exceptional fiction and nonfiction books starred in Booklist over the past two years. Informative, hilarious, tragic, and exciting—this list has it all. For example, The Porcupine of Truth by Bill Konigsburg: Newly arrived in sleepy Billings, Montana, from New York, Carson finds himself falling in love with Aisha, only to find out she’s a lesbian.”...

Booklist Online, August

Unlikely beach reads

Cover of This One Summer, by Mariko Tamaki

Gwen Glazer writes: “An 800-page biography doesn’t immediately spring to mind as the perfect beach read, unless you’re Lin-Manuel Miranda. The playwright and musician read Ron Chernow’s epic portrait of Alexander Hamilton during a Mexican vacation and turned it into a smash-hit musical a few years later. So, as our thoughts turn to beach reads, we’re thinking about some nontraditional choices. We asked our NYPL experts: ‘What’s your recommendation for a long, dense, serious beach book?’”...

NYPL blogs, Aug. 5

How to keep your hard drives off life support

Monitoring S.M.A.R.T. dataBen Kim writes: “In an age of increasingly affordable flash storage, hard drives are slowly disappearing from enthusiast rigs and mass-market laptops alike. Although SSDs are markedly faster than their platter-based counterparts, hard drives are still useful for long-term storage, archival, and massive media libraries that don’t require fast read/write speeds. Fortunately, it’s not all that hard to maintain HDDs since they’re a lot like all your other computer components.”...

Maximum PC, Aug. 6

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