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John Amundsen writes: “Hundreds of people from the Digital Public Library of America’s nationwide network of libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations came to Chicago April 20–21 for DPLAfest, a series of presentations and workshops focused on digitization and access to collections. Several presentations highlighted efforts to document, preserve, and share digital collections on social justice and community engagement. Others focused on inclusion, community, and outreach.”...
AL: The Scoop, Apr. 25 |
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The Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library and librarian Steven Woolfolk (right), who was arrested in 2016 during a public event, are receiving two ALA awards for defense of free speech. ALA has awarded the Paul Howard Award for Courage, given biannually for “unusual courage for the benefit of library programs or services,” to KCPL. Woolfolk, the library’s director of public programming, will receive the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians. But city prosecutors have filed two new charges against Woolfolk....
Kansas City (Mo.) Star, Apr. 21; AL: The Scoop, Oct. 3, 2016 |
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Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication that aims to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign. Wales intends to cover political issues as well as science and technology. Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on....
The Guardian (UK), Apr. 24 |
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Mike Caulfield writes: “On April 11, Facebook rolled out the largest media literacy campaign in history. Unfortunately, most of what it contained was bad advice. Facebook is using the checklist approach to news literacy: Look at an article and then see how closely the article displays the attributes of a fake story. Evidence has shown that this model does not work. We actually already trained a generation of students with variants of this method. Sometimes we called it CRAAP. And it failed for a number of reasons.”...
Medium, Apr. 12; Facebook Help Center; Gettysburg (Pa.) College Musselman Library’s Evaluating Information page |
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Kerry Maeve Sheehan writes: “Why are advocates for major media and entertainment companies pushing Congress to rush through a bill that would make the US top copyright official—the Register of Copyrights—a position appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate? Unfortunately, it is likely because the new appointment process will increase the ability of the incumbent copyright lobby to influence the Copyright Office, to the detriment of consumers, creators, and innovators.”...
The Hill, Apr. 24 |
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James Somers writes: “It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf, lost in a vast warehouse. What’s standing between us and a digital public library of 25 million volumes? What would it take to make the books viewable in full to everybody? You’d get in a lot of trouble, but all you’d have to do is write a single database query.”...
The Atlantic, Apr. 20 |
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Pat Peters writes: “When I became a librarian years ago, I thought that I would be fully prepared for any challenge that might come my way. As I selected materials for my collection, I would sometimes think about the reasonable challenges I might expect for a given item. Sometimes it was easy. Other libraries had received challenges for similar items, and I was pretty good at extrapolating. We were ready at my library! And then some really strange complaints hit us totally out of left field.”...
Intellectual Freedom Blog, Apr. 25 |
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Heather Terrell writes: “In 2016, my library decided to expand our blog from a repository of new titles lists and the occasional notice of a change in policy to a content-rich space for library users to get to know staff, learn more about services, find topical book reviews, read about recent developments, and, yes, also to find the new titles lists they love. To start the process of revamping our blog space as a virtual living room of ideas, we went through a process that took about a month in total.”...
LITA Blog, Apr. 21
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Jenna Grodzicki writes: “My students love research. Give them an exciting topic, and they’re off! But what they love even more is creating presentations to share what they’ve learned. Of all the programs we’ve used this year, their favorite by far has been Pixton. Pixton is an online comic-strip maker, a way to create highly visual presentations. Students can choose a background, add characters that are fully posable, and insert speech bubbles. It can be used to share information on a variety of topics, and it is very user friendly.”...
Knowledge Quest blog, Apr. 25
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Elissa Redmiles and two other doctoral students conducted a survey of 3,000 US internet users to determine where they received advice about online security and privacy. The findings were published as Where is the Digital Divide? A Survey of Security, Privacy, and Socioeconomics. One finding: 13% received advice from teachers or librarians, and of those only 8% had an online safety problem later, compared to nearly half of the 38% who received advice from family or friends....
TechRepublic, Apr. 21
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Neil J. Rubenking writes: “Stealing and selling credit card numbers, renting out botnets to spread spam—these are penny-ante operations. The real money is in ransomware, and it is a growing threat. When your essential files or business documents are encrypted, locking you out of them, chances are you will at least consider paying a considerable price to get them back if you don’t have them backed up. Ransomware is on the rise, but so are techniques to defeat ransomware attacks.”...
PC Magazine, Apr. 24; Apr. 13, 2016
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Posing with a statue of a giant grasshopper on April 23, former President Bill Clinton tweeted that his presidential library, the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, had been bugged. The statue is part of an exhibit called “Xtreme Bugs” at the facility. Clinton said he was inspired to hold the exhibit over Earth Day weekend after reading biologist Edward O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, which concludes that some insects are the world’s most successful species “because they are the greatest cooperators.”...
WPTZ-TV, Plattsburgh, N.Y., Apr. 23
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