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Caroline Leavitt and Christina Ianzito write: “Lights on! Doors locked! It can be fun to fray your nerves when the source is fictional (or is it?!). We asked some booksellers and other bibliophiles to recommend their all-time favorite scary stories. Here are 20 of them.” -
Richard Byrne writes: “Recently, YouTube made some changes to the way that the caption editing process works. Those changes are for the better as they’ve made it easier to adjust the correlation between timestamps and your edited captions. In the following video I demonstrate how to edit the captions and adjust the timing of the captions on your YouTube videos.” -
The Chronicling Resistance Project is a new archival effort to document more than 300 years of resistance history in Philadelphia by collecting letters, photographs, reports, scrapbooks, and other materials from civil, women’s, and LGBTQ rights struggles. An artistic response to the 2016 presidential election’s impact on minority communities, Chronicling Resistance—recently awarded a $600,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—aims to uplift people who are underrepresented in US archives. The curated materials eventually will be housed in an exhibit at Philadelphia Free Library’s Parkway Central branch. -
Red paint was smeared on doors and windows of Austin (Tex.) Public Library’s Central location on Cesar Chavez Street early October 26. City officials said the on-duty security guard discovered the vandalism at around 5 a.m. and said the act happened around 2 a.m. The culprits also wrote anti-voting sentiments on the walls of the library, but staff members were able to cover it up with brown paper in the early daylight hours. -
Schools nationwide are struggling to recover unreturned library books, seven months after the coronavirus pandemic shut down buildings and displaced students. A Morris County (N.J.) schools superintendent recently issued a plea to parents after more than 1,100 school library books in his K–12 district went missing. In Osceola, Florida, school officials announced last month that they were seeking 37,801 overdue books worth an estimated $756,020. An AASL survey in September found that 54% of school districts were bracing for a collection loss of up to 10%. -
Each year, American Libraries tracks dozens of library referenda across the country, using the ballot box as a means of tracking support for public and school libraries. Because next week’s presidential election is expected to generate high voter turnout, some communities may be pushing harder than usual to get local referenda in front of taxpayers, even as the ongoing pandemic lends uncertainty to, well, everything. To get the ball rolling, here we present library referenda that have appeared since last year’s roundup. -
Claudia C. Breland writes: “In my 10 years as a professional genealogist, working with hundreds of clients and thousands of records, I have learned a lot about judging the quality of a source. Genealogists know that the closer a record is to the event in question, the more likely it is to be accurate. Original documents with primary information are best; sources with secondary information need to be explored further. Sometimes you will have several sources that record the same information—but on digging deeper, you might find that the information is in fact, incorrect.” -
The Sharjah International Book Fair and ALA announce the first Sharjah Virtual International Forum, November 10–12. Registration is free for librarians, library workers, and exhibitors who register for the Forum, which will be available in English and Arabic. The Forum and the recording will be available through December 2020. As many other conferences have been canceled or moved to an online platform due to the global rise of cases and travel restrictions, the 7th Sharjah International Library Conference is being postponed until May 2021 and will be held in conjunction with the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival. -
When returning books to Worthington Park Library in Columbus, Ohio, Julie Travis hit her hand on the inside of the book drop and dislodged the diamond in her wedding ring. Unfortunately, the bin inside had to be quarantined for seven days because of the pandemic, but Travis was fine with the news. “She took it like a champ,” Library Manager Jeff Regensburger said. “I mean, it’s 2020. Of course someone is going to lose their diamond in a giant bin of books. Of course they are.” Library staffers reunited patron and gem as soon as the bin could be opened. -
Two weeks ago, Barnes & Noble systems were hacked in a ransomware attack, affecting some customer information and retail store functions. While most systems were fully operational within a few days, the company’s Nook e-reader is still having problems, according to both readers and authors. -
Matt Binder writes: “As the 2020 US presidential election inches closer, much of the discourse around misinformation has centered on Facebook and Twitter. However, there’s one popular platform that’s been missing from the conversation: Wikipedia. The popular online encyclopedia has become more trusted over the years, yet anyone can edit it. A platform like that should be ripe for misinformation. Yet, the site’s army of volunteer editors have kept the site mostly free from ‘fake news.’ And Wikipedia has already taken some action to maintain the integrity of the site before the election.” -
Halloween is here, and all things spooky and scary are being honored—especially in the worlds of literature and libraries. On Episode 55 of the newly named Call Number with American Libraries, we speak with Matt Ruff, author of Lovecraft Country, and Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger, curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle at New York Public Library, about the collection’s materials on Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.
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