MOBIUS Libraries

A cautionary story about something that has come up before, namely relying so strongly in machines that when a human needs to intervene they either don't know what to do or end up making what should be a fixable situation into a disaster. Examples given include airline pilots who respond wrongly to a warning from the airplane, and hunters who had a GPS fail and don't know how to find their way home without it.

A Berkeley port of Scratch, a tool for teaching kids to program with puzzle piece like functions/operators/etc.

An interesting project that intends to combine Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM) with Art to make STEAM and thus make these programs accessible to more students. While it has practical use at the pre-school and elementary level I can't see much use it would be for higher levels of education.

A plausible explanation on how the Great Library collapsed not in one fell swoop as is often believed but decayed gradually from budget cuts and mission creep until at the end it was a shadow of what it was.

"A wide range of academic research across the country, from sophisticated biomedical experiments at the National Institutes of Health to undergraduate political science essays, was being interrupted Wednesday as the federal government shutdown continued for a second day -- with no clear path to a resolution. In addition to forcing the closure of government buildings where research is conducted -- such as the Library of Congress and presidential libraries -- the shutdown was also cutting off access to myriad electronic resources on which many researchers depend."

A little out of date, but an examination of how the recent partial government shut down affected research, both in physical libraries and online research.

The social worth of libraries and the need for reading and inspiration is examined, in particular I found it interesting how the private prison industry determined it's future cell needs by the percentage of the population that was illiterate.

An interesting about scientists deliberately holding back information on a new Botulism toxin, which still raises issues on censorship--other researchers who may have a valid need for this research won't have all of it, and where is the line drawn between dangerous information and only potentially so?

An Australian announcement of a study about the cultural impact and relevance of libraries, due in May 2014.

An author recounts a success story and what had to be done to self publish a casebook. Unlike fiction or repackaged public domain material this was a large book, 870 pages and nearly 40 megabytes in size. The author also did not used Amazon but Scribd and Gumroad as publishers.

The San Diego library is opening a new library; the article laments how half the books have not been used in the last year, and taxpayers still had to pay to move them, but considering some recent research numbers these statistics are actually fairly high.

An interesting about the unique environment in Iceland where writing is very popular and 1 our of 10 people will publish a book.

This is very cool! I imagine some libraries in MO are watching this to see if it is successful.

The Bexar County Bibliotech Library shows both the optimism but also the problems of an all-digital. 10,000 books is a very small collection, and the library is using a vendor's platform app to supply materials. As one of the people in the article mentioned, this was also done before in 2002.

An article that describes a problem but really offers no solutions. I would also describe the experience as not of a walled garden library but the attempts to make access available with copyright and software limitations, versus all material being only in print and physically having to go to a library that owns it to access it.

I don't know if this is a hopeful sign or not, as the only reason this stopped was public outcry, and the need for books is not just for research.

I'm not too sure if this should be taken as a good or a bad sign for the Kindle. On the one hand it increases the promotion and awareness of it, on the other Amazon seems to be trying too hard to promote the Kindle, and I wonder when the point of market saturation will be reached.

An interesting article, however it ultimately repeats what writers have been saying for some time, that the book itself is no longer the primary method for delivering information, and what libraries should focus on is specialized collections of information. However this article seems to look at primarily unique collections of rare or historical documents, which would be of little use in a discipline that relies on current information.

Textbook prices have increased several times more than inflation, and it's been an issue for years about new textbooks being required every year with little or no difference. This initiative is largely happening from university bookstores that are trying to stem costs by letting students rent textbooks for large enrollment classes. While a good idea, it seems to only be fighting a flood of costs, in particular as publishers move to electronic textbooks that have the access controlled by them.

Some of the examples of how literary fiction can end up as libel cases; three of the aspects for libel is the statement has to cause harm to someone, it should be obvious to the reader who it is, and the statement need to be untrue. The examples include people who resemble someone in a story, either intentionally or in the case of one author someone he'd met only briefly and likely the character similarities were unintentional. Several questions are raised, especially in how much a real person can be portrayed in fiction, specially if that portrayal is one interpretation of that person, and what to do if the resemblances are coincidental.