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“This new Public Case Access site was created as a result of a collaboration between the Harvard Law School Library and Ravel Law. The company supported the library in its work to digitize 40,000 printed volumes of cases, comprised of over forty million pages of court decisions, including original materials from cases that predate the …
Financial Times (read free): “…Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Stunning numbers of people with years of schooling are effectively illiterate. Admittedly, nostalgics have been whining about new media since 1492, but today’s whines have an evidential basis. To quote this month’s Ljubljana Reading Manifesto, signed by publishers’ and library associations, …
Scientific American: “Artists and writers are up in arms about generative artificial intelligence systems—understandably so. These machine learning models are only capable of pumping out images and text because they’ve been trained on mountains of real people’s creative work, much of it copyrighted. Major AI developers including OpenAI, Meta and Stability AI now face multiple …
Popular Information: “Scholastic, the popular publisher of children’s books, is a big business. It is a publicly-traded company with a market capitalization of $1.15 billion. Its CEO, Peter Warwick, collected a total compensation of $3,300,361 in 2023, and at least four other executives were paid over $1.3 million. Since 1981, Scholastic has hosted book fairs …
The next Help! I’m an Accidental Government Information Librarian webinar is scheduled for October 18 from 3:00-4:00pm (Eastern). Session topic: Reporting on the World of Government Information – a panel presentation from the editors of “Government Information Landscape and Libraries”. Hosted by Jim Church (UC-Berkeley), Kay Cassel (Rutgers University) and Kate Tallman (University of Colorado …
Brewster Kahle – The Guardian: “The US library system, once the model for the world, is under assault from politicians, rightwing activists and corporate publishers. Book bans are at record levels, and libraries across the country are facing catastrophic budget cuts, a fate only narrowly avoided by New York City’s public libraries this summer. In …
USAToday: “…It’s impossible to know how many book-ban attempts have been inspired by BookLooks.org, which adds new reviews weekly […The site launched in 2022 to showcase a book-rating system that has also been used by right-wing political activist group Moms for Liberty.] But in one researcher’s national database tallying more than 3,000 challenges to library …
PopSci: “Recording an audiobook is no easy task, even for experienced voice actors. But demand for audiobooks is on the rise, and major streaming platforms like Spotify are making dedicated spaces for them to grow into. To fuse innovation with frenzy, MIT and Microsoft researchers are using AI to create audiobooks from online texts. In …
Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription req’d]: “…There’s Explainpaper, where one can upload a paper, highlight a confusing portion of the text, and get a more reader-friendly synopsis. There’s jenni, which can help discern if a paper is missing relevant existing research. There’s Quivr, where the user can upload a paper and pose queries like: What …
“Sage has launched a new collection of free-to-read research highlighting the effects of academic censorship on democracy, social-emotional learning, higher education, and more. Banned books symbolize the clash between censorship and academic freedom. The suppression of banned books undermines the core principle of academic freedom, where scholars should explore diverse ideas without fear. This freedom …
Open Culture: “In this striking image, you can see an early experiment in making books portable–a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle. According to the library at the University of Leeds, this “Jacobean Travelling Library” dates back to 1617. That’s when William Hakewill, an English lawyer and MP, commissioned the …
The Atlantic – Use our new search tool to see which authors have been used to train the machines. This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. I wrote in The Atlantic about how the data set, …
