David Lankes on the way forward : Rebuilding the civic and educational structures that bring communities together

 

David Lankes

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January 9, 2021
(from Facebook)

On January 6th insurrectionists invade the Capital in Washington DC to attempt to subvert the will of the American people by attempting to overturn the presidential election. They did so after a morning, and indeed, months of instigation founded on misinformation, false grievance, and a climate that increasingly defines politics as a pursuit of power over the judicious use of power at the behest of the people.

It has taken me several days to begin to make sense of this, to get over my anger, and to affirm for myself a way forward. For me, as an information scientist; as a director of an academic program that prepares librarians and information professionals; as an author and speaker, the way forward is clear: we must rebuild the civic and educational structures that bring communities together.

This is not a shocking conclusion. One could even rightly say it is a self-serving one. After all, as a scholar, educator, and author I am invested in the success of these institutions. However, I am invested because I continue to see their value and positive transformational potential.

I am invested because I have seen when libraries break out of the artificial bounds of collections and neutrality, they become instruments of community cohesion. I have seen libraries host difficult conversations on race. I have seen libraries bring together a people on issues of immigration. I have seen libraries fight for the poor, and the incarcerated, and the all too forgotten in attempts to remove the alien nature of neighbors. From drag queen story hours, to human libraries, to simply providing a collection that captures the value and richness of the human experience, our public libraries must continue to weave together a fragmented social fabric one person, one neighborhood, one nation at a time.

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Defining Censorship Before Denouncing It ( Posted by Larry M. Elkin, CPA, CFP®)

  

January 12, 2021

Posted by Larry M. Elkin, CPA, CFP®

photo by Pixabay user LoboStudioHamburg

If the opinion editors at The New York Times decline to publish your cogent and insightful essay on a matter of great public importance, are they practicing censorship?

No. They are exercising editorial judgment, or maybe mere business judgment, depending on the pressures they feel nowadays to get audiences to engage with their content. It may be good judgment or bad judgment, but it is not censorship. Censorship occurs when the government restricts or compels expression under threat of penalties, which may be administrative, judicial or extrajudicial, such as directing a mob to your home. The New York Times is a privately owned, privately run platform, which its proprietors may offer to or withhold from contributors as they see fit. To demand they do otherwise would run afoul of the First Amendment’s press and speech freedom guarantees.

Read artcile: https://www.palisadeshudson.com/2021/01/defining-censorship-before-denouncing-it/

Presentation: Mayer (Majer) Herskovics, z"l: Survivor, Thriver, Influencer, YU Scholar

What: Fall kick-off event for the staff of Yeshiva University Libraries and AJL-NYMA

Subject: Outlining the process of fulfilling requests for retrospective theses and dissertations for the Yeshiva Academic Institutional Repository, YAIR. 

When: Presented Thursday, October 15, 2020 1PM via Zoom.

Libraries and Accurate Information about The Coronavirus [Library2.020]

Covid-19 | Libraries | Public Health Information

As designated essential disaster services, libraries are poised to serve a role in the national response to the Coronavirus and COVID-19. Some changes to libraries as a public gathering place may be temporarily required, but our mission of sharing information will likely continue unchanged. They will remain great resources to access credible medical information and connect to resources to help you and your community.

Libraries: Open for Information
Your local library is a great place to turn for information about COVID-19, the disease caused by the Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Not only are libraries a trusted source of vetting information, there is a long history of libraries as a destination for answers to health questions.

In the case of a public health situation like the COVID-19 outbreak, your local library is especially beneficial because it is local. In the United States, public health is addressed at a county level with statewide organizations. That means your local library is typically already connected to the local public health officials. Depending on local measures put into place, some changes to library programs may be required, but online services like medical databases, eBooks, digital audiobooks, will still be accessible with a library card allowing you to find credible information and even entertainment.

https://www.libraries2020.org/librariescoronavirus

Public Statement: Fair Use & Emergency Remote Teaching & Research

Copyright | Fair Use | Online instruction | Remote learning | Covid-19

Public Statement of Library Copyright Specialists: Fair Use & Emergency Remote Teaching & Research

Share this page: https://tinyurl.com/tvnty3a

March 13, 2020

This Statement is meant to provide clarity for U.S. colleges and universities about how copyright law applies to the many facets of remote teaching and research in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. We write this as copyright specialists at colleges, universities, and other organizations supporting higher education in the U.S. and Canada who work every day with faculty, staff, and librarians to enable them to make ethical and legal choices about copyright issues in online teaching.  

The United States is in a time of crisis. As of this writing, more than 200 universities and colleges have moved to remote teaching. These moves aim to promote public health by slowing the spread of the disease, while maintaining at least some of the important functions higher education plays in teaching, learning, and research. We have heard concerns that copyright may pose impediments to a rapid shift to remote instruction, or conversely, that copyright is not relevant. While legal obligations do not automatically dissolve in the face of a public health crisis, U.S. copyright law is, thankfully, well equipped to provide the flexibility necessary for the vast majority of remote learning needed at this time.

Fair Use

Copyright law in the United States is made to support teaching, research, and learning. This stems from its Constitutional purpose, which is “to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts.”^[1] One critical feature of copyright law is fair use,^[2] a flexible users’ right that allows the use of copyrighted works without permission. It accommodates a wide variety of circumstances, including new and rapidly evolving situations. In the words of one of our colleagues, April Hathcock, “fair use is made for just these kinds of contingencies.”

To analyze whether a particular use is fair, courts balance four factors. The “heart of the fair use inquiry” lies in the first factor – the purpose and character of the use.^[3] Courts favor uses where the purpose is to benefit the public, even when that benefit is not “direct or tangible.”^[4]

Even under normal circumstances, courts favor educational uses because of their broad public benefits.^[5] While there are no fair use cases squarely addressing copying to help minimize a public health crisis, the other wide variety of public benefits cited by courts leads us to believe that this purpose would weigh extremely heavily in favor of fair use. For example, in the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust case,^[6] the court made it clear that providing access to persons with disabilities was a strong public interest that weighed heavily in the fair use assessment. Similarly, other courts have found that allowing reproduction of the Zapruder film documenting Kennedy's assassination was in the public interest,^[7] and allowing redistribution of leaked internal memos about problems with electronic voting machines also favored fair use.^[8] 

The benefit to the public in providing remote coursework is obvious when it enables teaching to continue in the face of social distancing measures or quarantine, or when access to physical library materials is impossible. The public benefit of these measures is without a doubt of at least equal importance as in these cases.

The second factor examines the nature of the work used—is it more factual or creative, published or not? In cases like this, the second factor “has rarely played a significant role in the determination of a fair use dispute.”^[9] For remote teaching in the COVID-19 situation, the analysis should be the same. Read more....

How to be a better online teacher [Chronicle of Higher Education] : Advice guide by Flower Darby

Online teaching | Online instruction | Distance learning |Pedagogy

Whether you’ve taught online a lot or a little, chances are you didn’t enjoy it as much as teaching in person. Maybe you didn’t experience that fizz after a particularly invigorating face-to-face class. Indeed, according to a 2017 Educause survey, only 9 percent of academics prefer to teach “in a completely online environment.” That means a whopping 91 percent of us don’t. And I suspect that a good majority of that 91 percent would prefer to teach anywhere but online.

Clearly, many academics don’t see the value of online courses or of trying to become a better online teacher. Almost none of us set out to be great online teachers when we decided to go to graduate school. We’ve spent years in campus classrooms, but we don’t have the same depth and breadth of experience in the online classroom, as either students or teachers. Most of us don’t know how to teach online or how to get better at it — and we may not be motivated to learn. Even more likely, we may not feel like we have time to learn.

Read article:

https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/advice-online-teaching

You’re a Researcher Without a Library: What Do You Do?

Research | Libraries | Access | Free resources

Investigating solutions for frustrated scholars, nonprofits, independent learners, and the rest of us.

Jake Orlowitz

Nov 15, 2017 · 15 min read

The world of publishing is evolving frantically, while it remains frustratingly fragmented and prohibitively expensive for many. If you’re a student who just left your academic library behind only to discover you are now locked out of the stacks; a startup researching water usage in Africa and keep hitting paywalls; a local nonprofit that studies social change activism, but all the latest papers cost $30 per read… This article is for you.

https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/youre-a-researcher-without-a-library-what-do-you-do-6811a30373cd

Video Conference | Chat reference

Read article from PCMAG

Smithsonian Open Access: 2.8 Million Images Are Yours to Use

Antiquities | Judaica | Codex

Lost 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible found on dusty Cairo synagogue shelf

While attempting to document Egyptian synagogues, an Israeli historian stumbles upon a massive, well-preserved 616-page codex that was written in 1028 

By AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN 24 February 2020, 3:58 pm

In July 2017, Israeli historian Yoram Meital stumbled upon a handwritten 1028 CE biblical codex that was lying abandoned on a dusty shelf in a Cairo synagogue. Wrapped in simple white paper of the sort one finds on tables in cheap eateries, at 616 pages, the Zechariah Ben ‘Anan Manuscript is one of the era’s most complete and preserved examples of the “Writings,” the third and concluding section of the Hebrew Bible. It had been lost to scholars for almost 40 years.

Discovered by Meital in the Karaite Moussa Der’i Synagogue, the Zechariah Ben ‘Anan Manuscript (ZBAM) was previously documented in various publications by modern biblical scholars, from a 1905 Jewish Quarterly Review article by leading expert Richard Gottheil through to microfilms of the manuscript done by a team of Israelis from the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts in June 1981.

The scholars left notes within the texts, and even published their findings. Then, as the Jewish community increasingly lost its members, the priceless manuscript, too, disappeared.

Read more....

The Internet Archive Is Making Wikipedia More Reliable [WIRED]

Wayback Machine | Wikipedia | Fact-checking

The Internet Archive Is Making Wikipedia More Reliable

by Klint Finley 11.013.2019

 

 

PHOTOGRAPH: ALEXANDER SPATARI/GETTY IMAGES

 

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia is the arbiter of truth on the internet. It's what settles arguments at bars. It supplies answers for the information snippets you see on your Google or Bing search results. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research.

The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Anyone can check out those citations to learn more about a subject, or verify that those sources actually say what a particular Wikipedia entry claims they do—that is, if you can find those sources.

It's easy enough when the sources are online. But many Wikipedia articles rely on good old-fashioned books. The entry on Martin Luther King Jr., for example, cites 66 different books. Until recently, if you wanted to verify that those books say what the article says they say, or if you just wanted to read the cited material, you'd need to track down a copy of the book.

 Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive, you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library. (Some groups of authors and publishers have challenged the archive's practice of allowing users to borrow unauthorized scanned books. The Internet Archive says it seeks to widen access to books in “balanced and respectful ways.”)

So far the Internet Archive has turned 130,000 references in Wikipedia entries in various languages into direct links to 50,000 books that the organization has scanned and made available to the public. The organization eventually hopes to allow users to view and borrow every book cited by Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal being to digitize every book ever published.

“Our goal is to be a library that’s useful and reachable by more people,” says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine service.

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Open and Shut?: Interview with Kathleen Shearer, Executive Directo...

Open and Shut?: Interview with Kathleen Shearer, Executive Directo...: In October 1999 a group of people met in New Mexico to discuss ways in which the growing number of “eprint archives” could co-operate.   ...

Institutional repository | Scholarly Communication | Faculty authors | Student research

Yeshiva Academic Institutional Repository [YAIR]: A spotlight on our collections

By Libraryblog On January 15, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Cover for latest issue of Women in Science 2018-2019. YU Office of Admission credit is given on back cover of the issue. This publication is used to promote Stern College for Women and its various programs and achievements in over 7 fields, including Biology, Chemistry, Mathematical Sciences, Physics, and Psychology.

In May of 2018, Yeshiva University Libraries launched YAIR, the official institutional repository, of Yeshiva University. The plan had been in the pipeline for several years. With the adoption of a new strategic plan, plans were quickly put into place. At the helm was Head of Library Web and Digital Services Hao Zeng, who chose a cost-effective, open source platform, D-Space, to host scholarly output of both faculty and students. Stephanie Gross, Scholarly Communication Librarian, took on the outreach and processing of material to be posted. Teamwork has been essential and has included collaboration with staff from Archives as well as Metadata Services.

The collection began primarily as an open-access showcase for both faculty publications and student theses and dissertations. The idea behind making all work open access is to allow scholars and researchers across the globe to read intellectual and creative output by Yeshiva University’s community without charge. As the project has progressed, other repository collections have been created. For instance, back issues of student publications have been scanned, annotated and posted. Some have been out-of-print (and out-of-view) for over decades. This summer, these publications were added: The Azrieli Papers, Gesher, Nahalah, Chronos, The YU Clarion, Derech HaTeva, Kol Hamevaser, The Orthodox Forum, Science and Ethics, The Exchange (SSSB), Horeb, Kol, Kol Hamevaser, Perspectives in Psychology, Prism,  Ten Da’at and Yeshiva University Undergraduate Research Abstracts. Consultations with faculty advisors and department chairs have provided positive feedback. Just recently, faculty members from the Sephardic Studies faculty as well as the Belz School of Music expressed interest in contributing articles and book chapters to the repository.

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Audiobooks: The rise and rise of the books you don't read [BBC Culture]

Audiobooks | Trends | Reading

Audiobooks are having a moment. As they soar in popularity, they are becoming increasingly creative – is the book you listen to now an artform in its own right, asks Clare Thorp.

• By Clare Thorp

6 January 2020 

llustrated poetry collection The Lost Words was brought to audio in the form of recordings made in the British countryside (Credit: Penguin)

 Back in 1878, shortly after he had invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison hit upon an idea. Leaning over his new machine one day he recited the words: “Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.” As he created the first ever audio of the spoken word, Edison dreamed that the technology might one day allow a whole novel to be recorded. Fast forward nearly 150 years, and he’d be pretty impressed to find more than 400,000 audiobooks available to download straight into his pocket.

 

 Audiobooks are in the midst of a boom, with Deloitte predicting that the global market will grow by 25 per cent in 2020 to US$3.5 billion (£2.6 billion). Compared with physical book sales, audio is the baby of the publishing world, but it is growing up fast. Gone are the days of dusty cassette box-sets and stuffily-read versions of the classics. Now audiobooks draw A-list talent – think Elisabeth Moss reading The Handmaid’s Tale, Meryl Streep narrating Charlotte’s Web or Michelle Obama reading all 19 hours of her own memoir, Becoming. There are hugely ambitious productions using ensemble casts (the audio of George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo features 166 different narrators), specially created soundscapes and technological advances such as surround-sound 3D audio. Some authors are even skipping print and writing exclusive audio content. Read more...