March 2011
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Jane Goodall's Archive Comes to Duke →
“Almost every day since July 1960 someone has been watching the chimpanzees in what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania, making careful notes of their every action from dawn to dusk.
Begun by Jane Goodall and carried forward by generations of the world’s leading primatologists, this irreplaceable collection of data from 50 years of uninterrupted study is now being curated and...
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Odds stacked against libraries as cities feel... →
The title doesn’t do this article justice. More than just another “oh no, libraries are in trouble when demand is increasing!” article, I thought it was interesting that this one addressed the other options of people who lose a library. In short: there aren’t many. Neighboring libraries can’t always take on patrons from areas where a library closes, especially not...
Free Rice →
wheretheducksgo:
My friend showed me this website and this is the gist of it:
You’re given a word and multiple choice meanings for it, and for every word’s meaning you get correct, ten grains of rice are donated to the fight against world hunger. So while building your vocabulary, you are also helping combat world hunger.
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Glennor Shirley, head librarian for Md. prisons,... →
“Miss Shirley has weathered deficits during previous recessions as lawmakers diverted money away from prisoners toward law-abiding citizens — a constituency, she knows, that is prone to ask, ‘Why give money to murderers to read when people can’t get jobs?’
… Miss Shirley says library users tend to be better behaved and more focused on their future, even if, like Heslop,...
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19th century law may save London libraries →
“Councils hoping to sell off libraries in a bid to plug funding deficits could be prevented from doing so by an obscure 19th century law.
Up to 100 libraries in the capital could be affected by the Literary and Scientific Institutions Act of 1854. It requires councils to return any profits to the original owners from a sale of a donated library or museum.”
(via LISNews)
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'Miss Marple' Rant: Jennifer Garner is Not a... →
“If you caught the early edition, you learned that Disney has scored the movie rights to ‘Miss Marple,’ and that Jennifer Garner will both star and produce a big-screen adaptation. Since Garner is not yet 40, this feature will bring Marple’s age down and make it ‘contemporary.’ The story will be written by Mark Frost, the man once responsible for ‘Twin...
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“Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together,...”
– Charles Yu— How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (via reneabies)
“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there...”
– Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (via libraryland)
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“If you take a book with you on a journey, an odd thing happens: The book begins...”
– Cornelia Funke, Inkheart (via libraryland)
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From the Library: And Then There Was Oracle →
zenodotus5:
This is the first article I’ve found to note the significance of Barbra Gordon’s transformation into Oracle to the image of librarians. Most things I see talk about how Batgirl is a librarian as her day job. In Oracle, the two are melded together. Information Literacy as superpower!
EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS ARTICLE.
While the decision to paralyze Barbara Gordon was certainly a...
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Amanda Hocking Sells Book Series to St. Martin’s... →
Ms. Hocking’s legions of fans were so shocked by the news earlier this week that she was shopping her books to traditional publishers that she felt compelled to explain herself on her blog.
“I want to be a writer,” she said. “I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.”
Kind of an eye-opening...
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“Some months back, I gave thought to becoming a skeleton in a medical school...”
– Mary Roach, Stiff (via anatha-)
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OED grows a heart as graphic symbol for love is... →
“Once the sole preserve of tacky tourist T-shirts, the heart symbol – as in I ‘heart’ New York – has become the first graphical entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in its 127-year history.
The entry is one of several controversial phrases among 45,436 new definitions in the latest online edition of the OED.
Others include the text message abbreviation OMG, meaning ‘oh my God’, ‘Wags’,...
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“People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of...”
– Neil Gaiman (via estincelle)
