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Duluth (Minn.) Library Technician Dan Buckanaga was emptying the return bin at the Duluth Public Library last week when he spotted an oddity. “I thought it was a book on disc,” he told the West Central Tribune. It was a standard 8mm movie on a reel, a media format created in the 1930s. It came with a sticky note: “Sorry, checked this out when I was 14 and we moved. It is 40 years overdue but better late than never.”
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On November 18, the National Book Foundation presented its National Book Awards for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature in a virtual ceremony hosted by author Jason Reynolds. Listed here are the winners and finalists in each category, with excerpts from the winners’ Booklist reviews (where available).
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Kelly Jensen writes: “Burbank, California, once a sundown town, is in the midst of a particularly challenging book challenge in its sprawling school district. Five novels which had been classroom staples, including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, The Cay, and Newbery Award winner Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, were challenged by parents in early September. All of the books, except for Huck Finn, were required classroom reading. All of the parents raising the challenge, except one, are Black.”
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The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is Douglas Stuart for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain. Based on his own life, the book tells the story of growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1980s with a mother struggling with addiction. The book was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and shortlisted for the National Book Award.
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Newberry Library President and Librarian Daniel Greene writes: “At the Newberry, we believe deeply that historical context should inform how we respond to contemporary crises. This includes examining the library’s own history and investigating institutional complicity in structural racism. Confronting this painful history, we hope, will help us build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive Newberry. With this aspiration in mind, this blog post looks at the Newberry’s signing of restrictive covenants for properties it owned during the 1930s and 1940s.”
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NYPL Supervising Librarian Anne Rouyer writes: “Like many people I have found myself loving the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit. A show about an orphan girl in Kentucky in the 1950s who becomes obsessed with the game of chess and becomes a prodigy at a very young age in a game dominated by men. As soon as I finished the series, I wanted non-fiction books about chess, chess history, obsession and young prodigies. This is a selection of what I found.”
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Jennifer Davis writes: “The Law Library collects and preserves legal materials for American law, foreign law, and sovereign Indigenous nations. Many governments, including Indigenous national, tribal, and community governments, are transitioning from print to solely digital formats for publishing their laws. To further these collection and preservation aims, the library has created the Indigenous Law Web Archive, a collection of constitutions, codes, executive orders, and court forms and information of sovereign Indigenous governments and courts of 578 federally recognized nations, communities, and tribes in the United States, as well as some Indigenous legal information from Canada.”
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Digital Projects Librarian Virginia Dressler writes: “I have been captivated by the Right to be Forgotten since I first heard about the concept at a panel presentation at the annual ASIST conference in 2015, both as a practitioner who manages open digital collections, but also as a selectively private person when I’m off the clock. I relate this most directly to takedown requests that I have dealt with over the past 12 years of working in digital libraries.”
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Devin Coldewey writes: “Buying someone a gadget is a time-honored tradition, but these days it can be particularly fraught, considering you may buy them a fitness tracker that also monitors emotions, or a doorbell that snitches to the cops. Mozilla has put together a helpful list of popular gadgets with ratings on just how creepy they are.”
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Librarian’s Library columnist Allison Escoto writes: “Recent years have seen a resurgence in widespread activism throughout the country. These titles are helpful resources for librarians seeking to understand—in both theory and practice—the role of libraries in a time of increased social activism.”
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On November 17 ALA announced the six books shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The award recognizes the best books written for adult readers and published in the United States during the previous year. The two medal winners will be announced online on Thursday, February 4, at the Reference and User Services Association’s (RUSA) Book and Media Awards at 3 p.m. Central.
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Alison Flood writes: “It is the great white whale of science fiction: an anthology of stories by some of the genre’s greatest names, collected in the early 1970s by Harlan Ellison yet mysteriously never published. But almost 50 years after it was first announced, The Last Dangerous Visions is finally set to see the light of day.”
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