TILT #66 — Who are we, who were we?
Remember when burning books was for the supposedly virtuous? No, me neither. Credit to Steve Lawson for digging up this old icon so that we could all be simultaneously horrified by and reflective about it.
In other New York history news, the New York Municipal Archives have digitized and made available a photo of every building in New York’s five boroughs, circa 1940. Here’s the story of how they did it and an image from Staten Island.
I finally figured out a great way to show my talk slides+notes that doesn’t involve people having anything but a browser (mobile or not). My recent talk for the Library Association of Singapore (from the comfort of my own home) was called “Future-proofing the library through the empowerment divide” and is sort of a speed run through my digital divide and future proofing talks (i.e. engaging people to get online before they need to be online because of disaster or misfortune). Here’s a link to an HTML page with slides and notes that was auto-generated from my Keynote slides using a tool called Keynote Extractor.
Your digital divide fact for this newsletter: one in five teens can’t always finish their homework because of digital divide issues with black teens 2.5 times more likely to have these issues.
Project Naming is an initiative by Library and Archives Canada to work with Indigenous peoples to engage in the identification of their archival photographs. They use Facebook, among other tools, to try to identify people, locations, and events.
Libraries and their collections which you might enjoy
- The world’s only sourdough library
- Libraries in Vermont that lend showshoes (mentioned here before but ‘tis the season)
- LOC periodical: Automation at the Library of Congress : inside views. Turn to page 31 (image 45) to read about what they considered “romantic claptrap” in 1986.
- This airport free library created by Fletcher Free Library in Burlington Vermont. “Fly Away With a Book. Land a Book On The Shelf!”
Some copyright and copyright-adjacent news.
- GITenberg is a prototype that explores how Project Gutenberg might work if all the Gutenberg texts were on Github. It’s now live.
- This woman posts field hockey matches online so umpires can learn from them. Then she started getting takedown notices. Then she started fighting back.
- Turns out community reading events by libraries actually increase sales of books, and now we have the data.
Books I’ve read and enjoyed since the last newsletter. Reviews on my booklist site.
I started a bit of a Twitter firestorm talking to people about the books they HATED. Not too late to add to that thread. I also like this idea: Books I Will Never Read.
Inside the world of competitive book sorting, from Atlas Obscura who I sometimes suspect of pandering to librarians, but then I realize they just love libraries and know other people do too!
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s available in more-accessible format your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
