“Baker’s brave defense of her community’s right to read is a testament to the vital role librarians play in upholding free speech and creative expression in the face of censorship.”
Last year on Mastodon we featured this story from the BBC about Gladstone's Library, the U.K.'s only residential library. Fediverse folk were so enthusiastic that when we discovered the library is offering scholarships to be taken in 2024, we had to share the information (see the second link in this post for all the details).
On June 11, 2024, I announced the shutdown of our Mastodonbook.net server and the migration of our project to Mastodon.social. That process is now complete.
If you are looking for Mastodonbooks members or would like to share your book-related posts, please join our group at: https://a.gup.pe/u/mastodonbooks
A photo shared by Israeli soldiers and media on Thursday shows a soldier holding a book while a fire burns behind him in the Al-Aqsa University library, one of the largest libraries in the Gaza Strip.
I've got some audiobook credits before I cancel my account (just not worth it when the #library is there 🥰). Could someone recommend some good audiobooks?
What I am looking for:
✔️Cozy mysteries or cozy horror
✔️If romance, nothing 🌶️ because I can't listen to sex scenes being narrated to me without giggling like a middle schooler.
✔️Female main character = bonus
✔️POC protagonist = bonus
✔️YA or New Adult recs okay
Oh just fabulous. 🙄 AI-generated personality tests in job applications have arrived. Just helped a library guest apply for a job and the test was incomprehensible from beginning to end. Of course the local outfit had outsourced the application process to a third party company, who had outsourced the personalty/morality tests to yet ANOTHER company. This ordeal was for a job as a JANITOR. #library#librarian#AI@librarians
Today in Labor History May 14, 1771: Utopian-socialist Robert Owen was born on this day in Wales. In the early 1800s, he made a fortune in textiles. However, he tried to run his mills on higher principles than greed. One of his reforms was to offer prices at his company store that were only slightly higher than their wholesale cost. This was in marked contrast to his competitors, who paid their workers only in scrip and charged exorbitant prices at their company stores. In 1810, Owen implemented the eight-hour workday for his employees. And in 1817, he came up with the slogan, “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” He also provided free schools for the children of factory workers.
In 1824, he travelled to America and invested his fortune in an experimental socialistic commune at New Harmony, Indiana. It only survived for two years. However, it changed many aspects of American culture. Residents created the first public library and public school system open to both boys and girls. The town also became an important center of scientific research in the mid-1800s.
I'm looking to borrow (it's $200 and I'm not buying it) a copy of an extremely niche book from a law school library for a week or so. It's called "Cybersecurity and the Courthouse: Safeguarding the Judicial Process".
…The bill in CT, pending before an #education cmte, is 1 of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit #BookBans or forbid the #harassment of school & public librarians…. Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, & 2 have become #law….
But the #library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly #RedStates that aim to restrict which #books#libraries can offer & #threaten#librarians w/ #prison or thousands in #fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, 3 of which have become #law…. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last 3 yrs across 10 states.
A pack horse librarian delivering books in rural Kentucky in 1938. During the Great Depression, the Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in which the librarians, who were often called "book women" or "book ladies," delivered books to remote parts of Appalachia.
Can anyone recommend some things to read about how people (in any culture) used to find information among manuscript miscellanies when those miscellanies didn’t have tables of contents? Anything in English, French, #Armenian, or Turkish would work. @histodons@medievodons@librarians#manuscripts
One of the amazing things about working with collections at #LambethPalaceLibrary is that you can take yourself up to the stores to see a figure featured in a volume.
In this case it is the decoration featuring Grosseteste in our MS522 described in Dennis Duncan's Ind x, A History of the.
what the fuck do we do. theyve destroyed communication in gaza. they keep bombing. we don't even know how bad it is. if it was that bad when the world was watching. Jesus.
A broad coalition of human rights organizations is calling for a Congressional investigation into Big Tech and Publishing’s overreaching control of the content, reader data, and existence of digital books. Join in and contact your representatives now!