(19 May 2022) With the enforcement of the Act Partially Amending Japan’s Copyright Act (Act No. 52 of 2021), the NDL is now able to transmit digitized versions of out-of-print or otherwise difficult-to-obtain materials to individuals via the Internet. In making this revision of the law, legislators were responding to advances in digitization and networking…
(16 May 2022) From the National Library of New Zealand: The surveys and reports paint a clear picture of the current state of school libraries in Aotearoa New Zealand including: the nature of the school library workforce and how it might change trends relating to school library collections and resources, including funding for these…
(21 Apr 2022) Founded three decades ago, arXiv is now home to more than 2 million open access scholarly articles by researchers in disciplines ranging from computer science to economics. With its ambitious mission to provide an open platform where researchers can share and discover new, relevant, and emerging science, arXiv’s popularity has continued to…
(6 May 2022) A unique cafe in Japan has been drawing attention in recent weeks. The Manuscript Writing Cafe offers little by way of food or drink (just self-service coffee or tea), but what it does offer is concentration and motivation for writers struggling to finish their work. Patrons pay a small hourly fee and…
(28 April 2022) A virtual symposium taking place 17-19 May 2022, organized by University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Library, aims to examine the complicated histories of cultural heritage collections, the expropriation of artifacts through colonialism and looting, the ethics of ownership and restitution, and decolonization in libraries, archives, and museums. Repatriation has increasingly become…
(4 May 2022) A few years ago, Dunedin woman Ruth Arnison came across an unusual idea for a library – little, brightly painted cupboards full of books free for anyone to take, borrow or donate. She called them Lilliput Libraries, and placed 10 around the city – wondering whether they’d be used. Fast-forward eight years…
(10 May 2022) The American Library Association, the American Federation of Teachers and more than a dozen other organizations have formed a coalition to fight the nationwide wave of book bans and challenges. Unite Against Book Bans also includes the publishers Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, the Authors Guild and the National…
(4 May 2022) A group of scholarly publishers is launching a major new website to explain research about pandemics and infectious diseases to the public, policymakers, media, and other audiences within and beyond academia. COVID and Beyond: Living with Pandemics has been sponsored by Kudos, Impact Science, the American Chemical Society, AIP Publishing, De Gruyter, Hindawi,…
(9 May 2022) Video-sharing app TikTok has been credited with making reading “cool again” among teenagers, through the hashtag #BookTok. Most BookTok posts are playful short videos, no longer than a minute, that match book images to popular soundtracks. BookTok is a community of TikTok creators who post videos celebrating their love of books and reading.…
(28 Apr 2022) The Institute of Advanced Medicine and Dentistry (IPPT) of Universiti Sains Malaysia became the first university in Malaysia to introduce a Metaverse Spatial Library that offers a variety of digital environments connected to the virtual world without computers. Vice-Chancellor of USM Prof Datuk Dr Faisal Rafiq Mahamd Adikan said it has introduced…