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Jonathan Zittrain writes: “The absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge.”
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Kahron Spearman writes: “People are trolling a Minneapolis-area police department for a tweet reporting alleged ‘thefts’ at a Little Free Library in Bloomington, Minnesota. You read that correctly: Thefts were being reported at a neighborhood book depot in which the books are supposed to be free to take.”
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A bookshop chain in Hungary has been fined for selling a children’s story depicting a day in the life of a child with same-sex parents, with officials condemning the picture book for featuring such families. The picture book, Micsoda Család!, is a Hungarian translation combining two titles by US author Lawrence Schimel and illustrator Elīna Brasliņa: Early One Morning, which shows a young boy’s morning with his two mothers, and Bedtime, Not Playtime!, in which a young girl with two fathers is reluctant to go to sleep.
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The Public Library of the Year award is presented every year to a newly built public library that combines functional architecture with creative IT solutions and includes digital development with local culture. Systematic is the main sponsor of the award, which comes with $5,000 (€4,200). An international jury of IFLA members chose this year’s five finalists: Marrickville Library, Australia; Deichmann Bjørvika–Oslo Public Library, Norway; Het Predikheren, Belgium; Ningbo New Library, China; and Forum Groningen, the Netherlands. The winner will be announced during IFLA’s annual congress, held online August 17–19.
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, July 5
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Stanwood (Wash.) Library Circulation Supervisor Marlene Moodie heard an unusual knocking at the library’s front door June 22. She and a coworker investigated and found a duckling desperately tapping its beak on the door frame and window, signaling that at least eight ducklings were trapped in the access well that houses ventilation pipes and leads to the library’s crawl space. With some help from city workers, the ducklings were rescued and are now recovering at a nearby wildlife care center.
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Greg Landgraf writes: “Though the ongoing pandemic prompted ALA to hold its 2021 Annual Conference and Exhibition virtually June 23–29, there was no shortage of enthusiasm or curiosity among the more than 9,100 attendees who gathered online to hear from speakers and authors and share their experiences.”
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Sally Stieglitz writes: “What does it mean to be the keepers? This idea was explored through different lenses at the Association of Jewish Libraries 2021 Digital Conference, held online June 27–July 1. Shalom Sabar, professor of Jewish art and folklore at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, opened the conference by asking, ‘What do we put in our museums? What treasures of cultural heritage are worthy of preservation for the future?’”
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Brenda Peynado writes: “I remember my local library as a sea of books—borderless, a drowning by story that I entered into every Saturday and emerged afterwards from its delicious depths having been visited equally by mermaids, heroes, childhoods, and histories. My favorite short story collections are as multi-genred and vast as the library of my youth. They’re wild rides through time and space.”
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On June 25 ALA announced the distribution of $1.25 million in emergency grants to 34 libraries through the ALA COVID Library Relief Fund. Grantees representing academic, public, school, and tribal libraries will receive grants between $30,000 and $50,000 to support library services and operations. The ALA COVID Library Relief Fund represents a significant nonfederal grant opportunity for libraries. A complete list of grant recipients and project proposals are available at ALA’s COVID Library Relief Fund website.
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Emma Banks writes: “On a spring evening in 2019, Robin Will arrived at the Q Center, an LGBTQ+ community space in north Portland, with two heaping armfuls of scrapbooks from Jerry Weller, the late activist who helped spearhead the 1970s movement for gay liberation in the Pacific Northwest. Will was meeting up with four other community elders, all of whom witnessed the movement firsthand and many of whom appear in the photos tucked into the books as friends or co-conspirators of Weller. Slowly, the group began to chip away at a monumental task: identifying everyone pictured in the pages, preserving their legacy for generations to come.”
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Over three meetings held during the 2021 Annual Conference and Exhibition Virtual June 28–29, ALA Council passed two resolutions to begin work on the Forward Together organizational restructuring process—one establishing a task force to review ALA’s core values, and one regarding the membership and structure of round tables. Resolutions to add a ninth principle to the ALA Code of Ethics and to achieve carbon neutrality for ALA conferences also passed, but a motion regarding an immediate change to the Library of Congress subject heading “illegal aliens” was referred to the Committee on Legislation.
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Sallyann Price writes: “Barack Obama addressed the closing session of ALA’s 2021 Annual Conference and Exhibition Virtual June 29. The talk marked a return to Annual for the former president, who was the conference’s opening speaker in 2005. Interviewed by Lonnie Bunch III, the first African American secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and introduced by ALA President Julius C. Jefferson Jr., Obama talked about A Promised Land (Crown, November 2020)—the first of two memoirs spanning his paradigm-breaking presidency—and the role of libraries in shaping the story of American democracy.” Read all of American Libraries’ Annual coverage at The Scoop.
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