just another manic monday
just another manic monday
“From 1982 to 2017, the share of Americans with bachelor’s degrees who had read even one work of literature (a novel, short story, poem, or play) in the past 12 months fell 22 percentage points (from 79.7% to 57.7%).” % who have read lit 1982 vs. 2017:
The percentage of American adults who have read a book in the last year has fallen to its lowest level ever, 53%. Most of that decline is due to a sharp drop in readers under the age of 55.
Of course my local Little Free Library has a copy of Practical SGML
“Data Beyond Vision: experimental physical representations of humanities data” (via @suttonkoeser, who led the team that made these models)
The Digital Library Federation 2019 Forum schedule is now up and there’s still time to register—hope to see some of you in Tampa in October.
The Apollo 11 command module looks pretty cool in the lobby of my library. (Thanks, Smithsonian, for your 3D scans for AR use.)
Wally Grotophorst analyzed DNS queries to see how many academics were routing around paywalls for scientific journals by using Sci-Hub. The results, as the saying goes, will surprise you.
Wondering what my fellow Micro.bloggers make of Darius Kazemi’s “Run Your Own Social”
Also note that most government records are already digital, as I explained in my piece on the Obama presidential library: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc…
That’s a fairly bold transition to electronic records that some may have been missed during the quiet holiday week last week. And it’s not just paper; after Dec. 31, 2022, NARA won’t accept anything analog from government agencies. It will all be digital after that.
Under a new directive from the Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives and Records Administration, all U.S. government records will have to be digital (or digitized if they are analog) by Jan 1, 2023. NARA will no longer archive paper.
For a deeper dive into the Touch This Page exhibit and these tactile systems (including the many raised fonts that competed with Braille), you can listen to my interview with Sari Altschuler on the What’s New podcast: whatsnewpodcast.org/touch-thi…
The latest 99% Invisible podcast covers tactile reading systems for the visually impaired from the Touch This Page exhibit we hosted at the Northeastern University Library, and that my colleagues Sari Altschuler and Waleed Meleis worked on.
Does anyone else’s dog gnaw on its own foot when a chew toy isn’t available?
Spoiler alert on the Hydro-Pneumatic-Pulsating-Vacuo Engine
Yes please, I want to read this proposed book by @robotnik on the most notorious fake perpetual motion machine of the 19th c., John Keely’s Hydro-Pneumatic-Pulsating-Vacuo Engine, but for now, his good and fun article in Technology & Culture will do.
This summer we’re rebroadcasting a few of the What’s New podcast episodes in which there have been significant developments since their original air date, each with a new segment providing a brief update. First up, our episode on Facebook and privacy.
I cannot believe the New York Times app got rid of swiping between sections. What a bad and unnecessary change.
My puppy has become an extra large praying mantis
Send someone an e-postcard from the largest collection of postcards in the United States, thanks to the Newberry Library
From the excellent Apollo 11 exhibit at the Houghton Library, the first published photograph of the Earth from space, taken by the 1947 equivalent of a GoPro stuck on a V-2 rocket.
Been thinking a lot about this too since receiving my personalized story from @robinsloan’s AI. The lingering question is not whether AI can produce plausible sentences; it can. The question is whether, as chess AI eventually did, it can produce surprisingly beautiful text moves.
“Recently, I used an AI trained on fantasy novels to generate custom stories for about a thousand readers…”—@robinsloan on how he did it, and more importantly what the autogeneration of genre fiction might mean for readers and the concept of a library.
The first in a series of posts by @msmollyebrown @NU_Archives about the incredible Boston Globe collection (https://globe.library.northeastern.edu) we have acquired, including millions of photographs that few have ever seen: librarynews.northeastern.edu