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At the Northampton (Pa.) Area School District Board of Education meeting July 19, the majority of the estimated 45 district residents in attendance expressed concern about the donation of books—including I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark and We Are Water Protectors—to the school district by The Conscious Kid nonprofit. After public comments that included calling the books “Marxist critical race theory,” the nine-member board agreed to table the donation.

Lehigh Valley (Pa.) Press, July 21
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Danielle Cooper writes: “In order to more fully realize streaming media’s academic potential, it is essential for libraries to come together, assess the broader streaming landscape, and create new strategies for licensing and managing streaming use. This intervention will be most effective if libraries can connect on this issue across institutional silos. To this end, Ithaka S+R is launching a new project this fall in collaboration with a cohort of libraries to share evidence about and strategies around streaming media licensing terms.”

Ithaka S+R, July 20
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Brewster Kahle (right) writes: “As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg’s invention hundreds of years before. By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better—smarter than paper. By using computers, we could make the library not just searchable, but organizable; make it so that you could navigate your way through millions, and maybe eventually billions of web pages. The first step was to make computers that worked for large collections of rich media.”

Internet Archive blog, July 21
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Edith Williams writes: “I admit to spending my summers reading through unread classics at a leisurely pace. But this summer, as someone who spends way too much time surfing the internet during the day for work and in the evening for research, I am going to give in to a good, summery book about surfing.”

Crazy Quilt Edi, July 20
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ALA members can register for the IFLA Virtual World Library and Information Congress, August 17–19, at the IFLA Member Rate of 85 Euros ($120), which is half the nonmember rate. Register as a member of IFLA using the ALA IFLA member code US-0002.

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
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Following community protests and a union complaint filed with the Illinois Labor Relations Board, the Niles-Maine District Library Board on July 21 refrained from making $1.5 million in budget cuts and instead opted to approve a compromise budget. It does not reduce current staffing or cut building hours; however, it does include several other cuts, including to programs, books and materials, and sending librarians and books to schools and nursing homes.

Chicago Tribune, July 22
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Archivist Mary Kidd writes: “Earlier this year, I read an article titled ‘Hail the Maintainers.’ The authors, writing on the rise of Silicon Valley, argue that too much value is given to innovation, rather than the labor involved in maintaining the technologies resulting from it. I drew parallels between this sort of technological maintenance labor that the authors described and the day-to-day tasks performed by library and archives workers, especially within and in support of special or research collections. Coincidentally, I read this article while involved in two projects where I developed calculator tools that can measure the impact of a single acquisition in terms of staff capacity and associated supplies, transportation, and labor costs.”

Acid Free Magazine, Issue 13