CyberpunkLibrarian

FTA:

*Toronto Public Library (TPL) experienced the largest spike between 2022 and 2023: in 2023, the library had 2,334 incidents, up from 1,362 the year before — a 71 per cent jump, the data shows. TPL also reported a 529 per cent increase in the number of suspected overdoses between 2022 and 2023. *

FTA:

*Three weeks ago, waist-high cardboard boxes filled to the brim with books cluttered every aisle of this industrial Georgetown warehouse. Stacked in rows, the still-to-be-processed books packed 90 boxes at its peak.

Now, two months after a ransomware attack shut down many of Seattle Public Library’s services, library workers are celebrating: They’ve finally finished sorting and processing a backlog of thousands of borrowed books. *

FTA:

*Imagine that your local public library is inhabited by an undiscovered race of tiny people. They’ve hidden themselves in the racks, tucked behind books and magazines, amidst history and fiction, new media and old. If you’re lucky, you might spy them — or at least their tiny homes, which are filled with minuscule beds, microscopic stools, itty-bitty flowers and furniture fashioned out of found objects such as board game pieces and one-use spice bottles.

And these little folks need help. You have been cast as a “Teeny Tiny Beings Residential Specialist,” charged with finding the micro-humans new homes. It appears the librarians — giants, like us, at least to the microscopic persons — have been moving things around. *

FTA:

*The decision Thursday went against a judge who had advised the Oklahoma Board of Education not to revoke the license of Summer Boismier, who had also put in her high school classroom a QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books.

An attorney for Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, told reporters after the board meeting that they would seek to overturn the decision.*

FTA:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Public Library (CPL) on August 15 announced the launch of “Chicago Book-Wrapped,” a new popup initiative offering instant access to a curated collection of ebooks and e-audiobooks with no hold times or library card requirements during special events in Chicago. The initial collection was curated to celebrate the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and features ebooks and e-audiobooks such as Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey; former President Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream and Dreams from My Father; former First Lady Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry; as well as guidebooks for visitors; ebooks on Chicago history, architecture, and food; and much more.

FTA:

Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their research and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

FTA:

*On Sunday, the union representing 340 employees failed to reach an agreement with management.

Negotiations between Halifax Public Libraries and Local 14 of the Nova Scotia Union of Public and Private Employees have been ongoing since last October.*

Religion is a hell of a drug.

FTA:

“The Bible says, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,’” he said. “Well, when you have leaders that are not allowing the nation to be blessed of God, they’re not doing godly things, you need to replace them, get rid of them, get them out of office, put people back in there that will. You’ve got schools where they’re fighting over allowing homosexual, LGBTQ material to be utilized to groom children. … There needs to be people that will take up and sue anybody that is allowing that sort of thing to go on in our school districts and in our libraries.”

This one is for the library automation nerds like me. For the unfamiliar, Lyngsoe makes and sells material movement systems like check-in and sorting systems. Some of these are fairly simple things like a sorter with bins on either side and items are shunted into bins based on whatever criteria the library decides. Other systems can ferry library materials to different floors of the library and deposit them in the proper locations for a faster return-to-shelf time.

Oh those sad, sorry publishers. It'll be so hard on them if they can't make as many billion dollars per year off publicly funded research. How will they ever survive on less than $19 billion?

FTA:

Although open-access advocates and library groups support the move, opponents argue the new policy will limit researchers’ ability to maintain control of their published work—and cut into the $19 billion academic publishing industry’s profit margins.

Seems to me that there might have been a better way to handle this.