On Libraries and New Media, powered by Library Journal and School Library Journal
As processors of a low volume of small transactions, libraries are unlikely to count credit and debit card processing issues among their most pressing concerns. Yet many libraries may be unaware of their state of compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Enforced by the credit card industry, the standard helps ensure that payment data is protected from theft and fraud.
The Palo Alto City Library has made its statistical data available to the public via an open data platform recently implemented by the city. The city partnered with the cloud-based Junar Open Data Platform in order to increase public access to high value, machine-readable datasets generated by various service areas and departments, including the library. […]
The Brooklyn Public Library on Tuesday unveiled its Central Library’s Shelby White and Leon Levy Information Commons area—a new public space designed to complement the building’s history while pointing toward the library’s future. The 5,500 square foot area “is really what I consider the nucleus around which our future service delivery strategies will revolve,” Richard Reyes-Gavilan, BPL’s Chief Librarian, told a group of librarians gathered from throughout the region to preview the space last week.
Data-driven voter outreach has become a crucial component of modern political campaigns, and Wadsworth Public Library (WPL) recently illustrated that the analytics tools that underpin those efforts can also help libraries get-out-the-vote.
Patrons visiting the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) now have free access to the entire catalog of more than 1,500 instructional online training videos offered by Lynda.com, thanks to a new partnership announced last week. For the first time, the service will be deployed in a public library setting across a range of IP addresses, allowing SIBL to offer Lynda.com access on more than 60 workstations throughout the building, without requiring any login information.
An open source program created as part of an effort to make the U.S. redistricting process more transparent was awarded one of five inaugural Strata Data Innovation Awards at last month’s O’Reilly Strata Conference, a gathering of leading minds in the emerging field of “big data.” The web-based program, DistrictBuilder, was developed by the Public Mapping Project, an effort to engage the public in the redistricting process.
Self-publishing via libraries is a hot topic these days. Califa is partnering with Smashwords to allow order cialis overnight its patrons to self-publish. A few public libraries have brought in Espresso Book Machines and seen the demand for self-publishing dwarf print-on-demand. Jamie LaRue and David Weinberger call on libraries to be a platform for self-published […]
Over the past year , the Fayetteville Free Library (FFL) has enjoyed the successful rollout of its Fabulous Laboratory (Fab Lab), a Maker space that resulted from the library’s commitment to community engagement and innovation. During this time, the library’s staff have been honored to speak about the Fab Lab and to explain not only its success but also the variety of challenges and assumptions that most libraries will face when developing a similar space.
Over the past 40 years, public libraries have followed popular culture through the ever-more-abstract artifacts of the digital age, offering music and video in every format, public computers for Internet access, online branches, and downloadable content. Now, some libraries are following Maker culture back to things we can hold in our hands.
Maker spaces in libraries are the latest step in the evolving debate over what public libraries’ core mission is or should be. From collecting in an era of scarce resources to curation in an era of overabundant ones, some libraries are moving to incorporate cocreation: providing the tools to help patrons produce their own works of art or information and sometimes also collecting the results to share with other members of the community.
