Topic: LibrariesThe project is "a fundamental rethinking of what a research library in this century in an academic institution is supposed to do," Catherine Murray-Rust, Georgia Tech's dean of libraries, told Business Insider. Under the new renovations, students will be able to borrow library books the same as always. Only now, when they find a book in the digital catalog and scan their library cards, the book must be delivered from the storage site five miles away from campus. From Why […]

Topic: LibrariesYet I have come to suspect these punk derivatives signal something more than the usual merry-go-round of pop culture. These punks indicate that something is broken in our science fiction. Indeed, even when they reject it, these new subgenres often repeat the same gestures as cyberpunk, discover the same facts about the world, and tell the same story. Our hacker hero (or his magic-wielding counterpart) faces a huge system of power, overcomes long odds, and finally makes the […]

Topic: LibrariesFrom 1976 until his death in 2013, Georg P Salzmann collected about 12,000 books that had been banned – and burnt – by the Nazis for being ‘un-German’. His father – a Nazi – had shot himself in 1945, when Georg was a teenager. What became known as the Library of Burnt Books was sold to the University of Augsburg in 2009 – and is now open to the public. Stumpf describes the first book that Salzmann bought, as well as how one author […]

Topic: LibrariesThe entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resigned Thursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work. Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be […]

Topic: LibrariesIt’s a tale as old as time, or, at least, the internet: None of us are reading any more, the physical book is dead, Amazon has killed the independent bookstore, and it’s all only going to get worse. But this year, the story looks like just that—a fiction. We are buying books—especially the kind with physical pages—and we’re doing so, increasingly, in well-loved indie bookstores. From Book sales — Quartz […]