Twitter rips awful Forbes take about replacing libraries with Amazon

Amazon | Bookstores Public Libraries

Libraries are amazing and bad takes in Forbes are not.

By Marcus Gilmer

UPDATE: July 23, 2018, 1:48 p.m. EDT As of Monday afternoon, it appears as if the story has been pulled from Forbes without a note or any other reason. The story has also been removed from Mourdoukoutas' author page. I've reached out to Forbes for details but, for now, you can read a cached version of the story here and an updated version that was briefly on the site is here (via Wonkette).

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There are bad takes, and then there's the take by Forbes contributor Panos Mourdoukoutas (who also serves as Chair of the Department of Economics at Long Island University) that local libraries should be replaced by Amazon book stores.

Among the reasons Mourdoukoutas offers are: libraries don't have as many public events as they used to because of school auditoriums; people go to places like Starbucks to hang out and work and read now instead of their library; and because technology makes physical books obsolete. Read more...

How to Stream Thousands of Free Movies Using Your Library Card | NY Times

Movies | Library Card | Free Streaming

by Monica Castillo

Aug. 24, 2017UPDATED Aug. 31, 2017

From top: “The Great Beauty,” “I Am Not Your Negro” and “Tower.”Janus Films; Magnolia Pictures; Kino Lorber

Watching is The New York Times’s film and TV streaming recommendation website and newsletter. Sign up for the latter here.

Stream thousands of movies, including hundreds of Criterion Collection titles, for free? And all you need is a library card? Surely, it can’t be this simple, right?

It is. More than 200 public library systems in the United States have teamed up with the streaming platform Kanopy to bring some 30,000 movies to library cardholders, free of charge. Kanopy’s emphasis is on documentaries and international films, all of which can be streamed on your computer, through a Roku box or on iOS and Android phone apps.

Be careful not to plan a mega binge-watch just yet, though. Each library imposes its own limit to the number of free movies a single cardholder can watch each month, from three to 20 titles per card, a spokeswoman for Kanopy said. Once they’ve registered their library cards with Kanopy, viewers can keep track of how many movies they have left in the upper right-hand corner of the onscreen interface. The limit for New York Public Library cardholders is 10 free movies a month, while Brooklyn Public Library allows six. Outside of New York, the Los Angeles Public Library, for example, has a 10 movie limit. Read more...

A Library Card Will Get You Into the Guggenheim (and 32 Other Places) | NY Times

Museums | Library card | Access | Culture

A performance of Shaun Leonardo’s “Primitive Games” at the Guggenheim, one of 33 New York City cultural institutions that will participate in the Culture Pass program.CreditVincent Tullo for The New York Times

By Andrew R. Chow | July 16, 2018

Do you have a New York City library card? If so, you can now go to the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim and 31 other prominent New York cultural institutions for free.

These institutions, which also include the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and MoMA PS1, have partnered with the New York City libraries to launch Culture Pass, an initiative designed to encourage underserved communities to take advantage of the city’s cultural bounty. Library cardholders of the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Library will be able to reserve passes to these venues for free, albeit once a year.

[Learn how to stream movies for free with your library card.]

“Some people are intimidated by museums,” Linda Johnson, president of the Brooklyn Public Library, said in a phone interview. “They shouldn’t be shut out of all the wonderful cultural offerings that are available to New York City dwellers.” Read more...

Teaching with Primary Sources: How can we do research with political cartoons? | Brooklyn Public Library

Politics | Cartoons | Information literacy | Research Skills

by Jen Hoyer | Jun 20, 2018 

 

 

 Brooklyn Connections is the education outreach program in the Brooklyn Collection. It focuses on cultivating 21st Century learning skills in students and supporting teachers on the incorporation of archives materials into curricula. This blog post is part of a series from the Brooklyn Connections team, sharing skills and ideas for using archives primary source material in the classroom. Using primary sources in the classroom shows us that we can access history through many different formats as long as we are grounded in historical thinking. 

The Brooklyn Connections team loves engaging with teachers for regular Professional Learning events, and our recent workshop at Plymouth Church gave us an opportunity to learn about the role that this institution played in Abolition and Civil War-era Brooklyn. While exploring the Brooklyn Collection for primary sources that we could share, we were excited to find political cartoons about our subject. We wanted to share some of our ideas on how students can learn to work with political cartoons. We think that using political cartoons in the classroom is an engaging and exciting starting point that shifts away from textbooks and classroom lectures while still scaffolding the same historical information. Read more...

Visiting an Experimental, Do-It-Yourself Library in Brooklyn

Books | Libraries | Innovation | Organization of Knowledge

July 9, 2018  By Phillip Pantuso

Only 1% of children's books have BAME main characters – UK study| the Guardian

Diversity | Race issues  | Picture books | UK | Children & teenagers

Research finds that of 9,115 titles published last year, only 4% featured BAME characters

‘Stark and shocking findings’ … a student browses in her school library. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

 

Only 1% of British children’s books feature a main character who is black or minority ethnic, a investigation into representations of people of colour has found, with the director calling the findings “stark and shocking”.

In a research project that is the first of its kind, and funded by Arts Council England, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) asked UK publishers to submit books featuring BAME characters in 2017. Of the 9,115 children’s books published last year, researchers found that only 391 – 4% - featured BAME characters. Just 1% had a BAME main character, and a quarter of the books submitted only featured diversity in their background casts.

This compares to the 32.1% of schoolchildren of minority ethnic origins in England identified by the Department of Education last year.

“It is a stark and shocking figure when you see it in print,” said Farrah Serroukh, who directed the project for the CLPE and presented it to publishers on Monday. Read more...