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The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey. Article Online August 20, 2025. Open access. iScience. Reading has a wide range of benefits for literacy, employment, and health as well as promoting cultural understanding. However, previous monitoring of reading in the US has been inconsistent, with some studies demonstrating …
“What Do Librarians Look Like? Stereotyping of a Profession by Generative AI” SAGE Publications. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. ISSN0961-0006. eISSN1741-6477. Online August 16, 2025. eLocator09610006251357286 “This study aims to investigate the presence of bias in the visual representation of librarians generated by ChatGPT across three different library settings: school, public, and academic. It …
Indicator: “Hilke Schellmann, an assistant professor of journalism at New York University, tested AI tools for summarization and research. Four LLMs were tasked with summarizing local government meetings. They performed well when asked to generate short summaries but were “surprisingly poor” at longer overviews. Schellmann also tested four summarization tools by asking them to generate …
The Hill – “More than 750 current and former staff members of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are calling on Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to stop “spreading inaccurate health information” and do more to protect public health professionals in the wake of a shooting at the headquarters of the Centers for …
The newly launched Eclipse Atlas website contains “over 2,000 historic and modern eclipse maps dating from 1654 to the present” as well as maps & guides for future eclipses. “Eclipse Atlas is a passion project of Michael Zeiler to celebrate the beauty of historic eclipse maps and to serve as a gallery of his eclipse …
Wired – no paywall – “For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad? Parents, educators, and fellow penmanship advocates have been lamenting the end of handwriting for years. Email began edging out cards and letters decades ago. Then smartphones hit the market, and our reliance on paper …
Coalition for Independent Technology Research: “A report on the struggle to keep public-interest technology research alive and the growing Coalition working to protect it. What’s At Stake – Understanding how technology shapes society shouldn’t be dictated by corporate agendas or political interests. It should be driven by and for the public, because without independent research, …
The Atlantic – Our picture book was pulled from library shelves in Florida [no paywall]: The argument being used to defend the ban threatens the right to read. By Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. “In 2023, our book was one of thousands pulled from library shelves around the country, and as we write, an evolving …
Tara Calishain – “Do your Internet research tasks include a lot of date-based searching? I find that date-based searching helps a lot when searching historical (and man do I feel weird saying that about stuff that happened just a couple decades ago) events, companies, people and information. The results you’ll find when searching for something …
Open Culture: “You could say that we live in the age of artificial intelligence, although it feels truer about no aspect of our lives than it does of advertising. “If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI,” says Yuval Noah Harari in the new Big Think video, even if the …
American Prospect – The Trump administration’s war on reality will make it meaningfully difficult to understand the health of the economy in the coming months. If data is either not being collected or is no longer reliable, now that Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as punishment for weak jobs …
Dean Blundell – “The Smithsonian is not one museum, and it isn’t a partisan project. It’s the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex: 21 museums, the National Zoo, and a network of research centers. Created by Congress in 1846, it receives federal support but is governed independently, with a public mission to collect, conserve, …
