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Via SLA – Free Webinar: “Devin Conathon of Liberty Mutual Insurance will provide an introduction to Large Language Models (LLM) and Generative AI. Devin is a data scientist with machine learning research and development experience. Join us to learn more from Devin about what Generative AI is and how it will impact the world around …
MIT Press: “With 322 participating libraries and new consortium agreements, the D2O publishing model has now opened access to more than 160 scholarly monographs and edited collections Thanks to the support of libraries participating in Direct to Open (D2O), the MIT Press will publish its full list (see below) of 2023 scholarly monographs and edited …
Mother Jones – Dashka Slater: “…The American Library Association reports that more than 2,500 books were challenged in 2022, a big uptick from the already astonishing 1,858 challenged in 2021, which was already five times the number challenged in 2019. Last year, some 41 percent of challenged books were by or about LGBTQ people, and …
Death of the physical library by Scott Locklin, July 28, 2023: “One of the unsung disasters of contemporary academic life is the death of the physical library. There are so many disasters in current year academia, I doubt as anyone else grouses much about this, but as a great enthusiast for the KNN algorithm, I will …
Editorial by Cory Doctorow: “Audible is a monopolist. The audiobook giant – a division of Amazon – controls more than 90 percent of the audiobook market in most commercially significant categories. Audible built that monopoly the old-fashioned way: by cheating. Audible is part of the Amazon conglomerate. Like all tech giants, Amazon’s growth strategy was …
The New York Times [free to read]: “The deals have become highly lucrative for the justices, including for those who used court staff members to help research and promote their books. Only three months into Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s first Supreme Court term, she announced a book deal negotiated by the same powerhouse lawyer who …
The Atlantic (read free link): Authors are at the mercy of people who don’t bother reading their work. “…The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible …
In Custodia Legis – Mitch Ruhl, a paralegal specialist in the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service. “One of the challenges for any researcher tackling questions of constitutional interpretation is knowing where to start. The Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation (or “Constitution Annotated”) serves …
Via LLRX – How book-banning campaigns have changed the lives and education of librarians – Nicole A. Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, at the University of South Carolina, identifies the significant and socially charged work of librarians who are defending the rights of readers and …
JSTOR Daily: How can contemporary biographers contend with the explosion of materials at their disposal? “It may be that the digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography and life writing than on any other branch of literature, perhaps any branch of the arts,” writes the scholar Paul Longley Arthur. The developments of …
The New York Times [free link] – to see this text scroll down the page: ” Large language models, or L.L.M.s, the artificial intelligence systems that power tools like ChatGPT, are developed using enormous libraries of text. Books are considered especially useful training material, because they’re lengthy and (hopefully) well-written. But authors are starting to …
Wired – free link: “Every new technology from the internet to virtual reality has tried to upend book culture. There’s a reason they’ve all failed—and always will…The tech world has long been convinced that it understands the desires of readers better than they do themselves. For years, VCs have promised to upend books and the …
