MOBIUS Libraries

Interesting essay about the Internet from 1993.

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.

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.

"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 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.

What sounds like a cautionary tale about keeping libraries open in a time of slashed budgets and electronic resources becomes a concerning episode of institutional decline of libraries in the Philadelphia school system as some "libraries" have operated for years without staff and functioning as essentially a store room.

A brief article that raises some questions about the utility of training and "reskilling" as many people take classes and courses to demonstrate value to an employer rather than to learn or use the skills from the training. The result is wasted time and training that poorly fits the user or their job.