Librarians are lifelong learners. And we’re always on the look out for exciting professional development opportunities. Fortunately for us, there are a great many amazing, free webinars being offered each month from a variety of sources, there’s bound to be something for everyone.
READ MORE: Free Live Webinars for Librarians | OEDB.org.
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a two-volume novel following the four March sisters through their adolescence and young adulthood, was first published in the late 1860s. Almost 150 years later, the book remains remarkably popular; in fact, the unassuming tale is one of the ten most beloved books in America, according to a poll released recently by Harris International…
…Modern readers would not be alone in finding Little Women a bit fusty. The author herself notoriously described her children’s stories as “moral pap for the young.” She wrote the books not for artistic reasons, but to pay the bills. Yet it can’t be denied that her stories have spoken to generations of readers. Maybe because there are some genuinely good lessons for living in there — as well as some sneaky progressivism, endearing characters, and funny stories of everyday life. All in all, Little Women may not be perfect, but most of us could learn a great deal about how to live today from this old-fashioned novel…
READ: 13 Essential Lessons Little Women Can Teach You About Living Well | HuffPost Books
Yahoo has released a massive data set of Flickr images and videos that are free to share under their copyright licenses. Yahoo believes the data set, which comprises 99.3 million images and 0.7 million videos, is one of the largest public multimedia data sets ever released. The data set, which promises to be a boon to computer vision researchers, contains metadata including title, description, camera type, and tags. About 49 million of the images are also geotagged. Yahoo is collaborating with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to provide compute resources through the lab’s supercomputer to help researchers analyze the data.
via 100 Million Flickr Images for Download | Center for Data Innovation
CallMeIshmael.com is a fascinating and fantastic new way to celebrate books. The concept is simple:
Read More: Your New Favorite Storytelling Website Is All About Books | BuzzFeed
It looks like a team of Georgia Tech researchers is in the business of making wondrous, high-tech gloves — their most recent one, for instance, can teach you Braille even if youre doing something else. Similar to the piano-teaching glove they designed years ago, this new pair has vibrating motors on each knuckle that buzz in different patterns to correspond with preset Braille phrases.
Read More: High-tech gloves can teach you Braille even if you’re distracted | Engadget
Flames of childhood passion often die. How many astronauts and ballerinas are among us? Yet some talent is so profound that even early efforts signify genius. The tiny, hand-lettered, hand-bound books Charlotte and Branwell Brontë made as children surely qualify. Measuring about 2.5 by 5 centimeters, page after mini-page brims with poems, stories, songs, illustrations, maps, building plans, and dialogue. The books, lettered in minuscule, even script, tell of the “Glass Town Confederacy,” a fictional world the siblings created for and around Branwell’s toy soldiers, which were both the protagonists of and audience for the little books.
READ MORE: The genesis of genius | Harvard Gazette.
Sometimes a device comes so close to being perfect that you’d be forgiven for not realizing that with just a single tweak, it can become, in actual fact, perfect. The Kindle Paperwhite is such a device, as an e-reader that Amazon has crafted so well that you pretty much never need look beyond for anything better. But while a regular book ends up with wrinkly pages after being caught in a surprise downpour on the beach, the Paperwhite fizzles – unless you get the Waterfi-treated Kindle Paperwhite.
The Waterfi version is shipped in the original Kindle packaging without any outward appearance of having been modified. It looks and feels like a Kindle, albeit a slightly heavier version, and interacting with its touchscreen is the same as you’d find with an unmodified version. But because of Waterfi’s special treatment process, its Kindle Paperwhite is completely waterproof – submersible to above 200 feet in either fresh or salt water, for any length of time.
READ MORE: This Waterproof Kindle Paperwhite Is Humanity’s Greatest Achievement | TechCrunch
One of the most unique and little-noted features of the dead-tree reading platform is its smell. A crisp new edition of Pride and Prejudice is scented a whole lot differently than the musty, middle-aged printing still being read in many a high school English class today.
But what causes these smells? A UK chemist and teacher who runs the blog Compound Interest, an exploration of everyday chemical compounds, went to investigate and came up with an infographic to explain the matter.
Read More: What Makes Old Books Smell Like Old Books? | Co.Exist | ideas + impact
The U.S. Navy General Library Program NGLP last month announced the release of its new Navy e-Reader Device NeRD, which comes preloaded with 300 titles including popular fiction, recent bestsellers, and content from the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program. The new e-ink readers were designed by preloaded digital content provider Findaway World perhaps best known in the library world for its Playaway and are the first devices to feature Findaway’s new “Lock” ereader security solution.
These preloaded devices do not have wifi connectivity or accessible data inputs or outputs, and are designed to be manipulation free. This design adheres to the Navy’s security protocols, which include restrictions on many types of personal electronic devices with rewritable media or recording capabilities on board ships. In an earlier interview during the request for information stage of the project in 2012, Nilya Carrato, program assistant for the NGLP told LJ that preloaded, manipulation-free devices would also help ensure that titles are not accidently deleted during long deployments, and that sailors would not use their personal credit cards to add content to the devices.
via U.S. Navy Launches NeRD, a Security Enhanced E-Reader | The Digital Shift.
Canadians concerned about their online privacy have a new way to find out whether their telecom provider is collecting information about them — and sharing it with third parties like government entities.
The new tool, developed by some of the countrys top privacy experts, makes it easier for Canadians to force their provider to disclose their practices.
“What were trying to do as researchers is identify what kind of data telecommunications companies in Canada collect, obtain, and process, and disclose to third parties,” said Dr. Christopher Parsons, a fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs Citizen Lab.
“But we also wanted to make it easier for Canadians individually to engage in the same sort of action.”
Known as “Access My Info,” the web tool helps create a formal letter which, under Canadian privacy law, telecom companies are legally obliged to respond to within 30 days, the website offering the tool says.
Canadians requesting the information fill out a few basic details about themselves and their telecom provider, and can do so confidentially, the website says.
Read More: Access My Info Tool Lets Telecom Subscribers Know If Theyve Been Spied On | HuffPo
infophile 