Category «Libraries»

This village was a book capital. What happens when people stop buying so many books?

Washington Post: “REDU, Belgium — Nearly 40 years ago, books saved this village. The community was shrinking fast. Farming jobs had disappeared and families were moving away from this pastoral patch of French-speaking Belgium. But in the mid-1980s, a band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries

The most popular US library books of 2021

“Libraries have had an interesting year. Ebooks were on the rise even before 2020, but pandemic-related closures and a supply chain crisis certainly gave them a boost. But even if ebooks are popular, people are still physically returning to their beloved libraries. “Now that all of our buildings are open, digital circulation has begun to …

Subjects: Libraries

The Best Books of 2021

Kottke.org – Jason Kottke: “Like last year, I had a lot of trouble reading this year and even more difficulty regularly visiting good book stores, with months-long stretches without both. So, I went into compiling this post with a (fairly) clean slate and it was exciting to learn about what’s been good this year. I …

Subjects: Knowledge Management, Libraries

Reading About Libraries and Librarians

Reading About Libraries and Librarians By Karin Wulf. “One of the constants in scholarly communication is the importance of understanding the full system of knowledge production. Whether you are a researcher, work in a library or in publishing, or in one of the myriad places deploying the myriad skills needed to create and share knowledge, …

Subjects: Knowledge Management, Libraries

National Archives Releases New Group of JFK Assassination Documents

“In accordance with President Biden’s directive of October 22, 2021, the National Archives today posted 1,491 documents subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act).  Released documents are available for download. The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, established by the National Archives in November 1992, consists of …

Subjects: Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

Leave fact-checking to the fact-checkers

NiemanLab: “The Washington Post does it. So do The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, and The Daily Caller: fact-checking. In fact (no pun intended), fact-checking is so successful/important/sought after/self-reproducing (take your pick) that in 18 years, the number of fact-checking organizations has grown from one in 2003 to 349 worldwide in 2021, according to …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

Law as Code: 
Introducing AustLII’s DataLex AI

Mowbray, Andrew and Greenleaf, Graham and Chung, Philip, Law as Code: 
Introducing AustLII’s DataLex AI (November 16, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3971919 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3971919 “AustLII, as a provider of free access to legal information, has a distinctive approach to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) which is called ‘DataLex’. This article introduces that approach, and …

Subjects: AI, Government Documents, Legal Research, Legislation, Libraries

The 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century

GQ: “For the past couple decades, we’ve felt that the best books being published—the most riveting, the most richly rendered, the most likely to last—are the works of literary journalism. You know the books we mean: books built on robust reporting and impossible-to-invent characters; books featuring sweeping plots and cinematic scenes (but true); books drawn …

Subjects: Libraries