Monthly Archives: October 2021

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Memories & History, Politics, Web & Technology

Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years?  | Time

By Brewster Kahle, October 22, 2021 1:21 PM EDT
Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. Member, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Internet Hall of Fame
Getty Images

When I started the Internet Archive 25 years ago, I focused our non-profit library on digital collections: preserving web pages, archiving television news, and digitizing books. The Internet Archive was seen as innovative and unusual.

Now all libraries are increasingly electronic, and necessarily so. To fight disinformation, to serve readers during the pandemic, and to be relevant to 21st-century learners, libraries must become digital.

But just as the Web increased people’s access to information exponentially, an opposite trend has evolved. Global media corporations—emboldened by the expansive copyright laws they helped craft and the emerging technology that reaches right into our reading devices—are exerting absolute control over digital information.

These two conflicting forces—towards unfettered availability and completely walled access to information—have defined the last 25 years of the Internet. How we handle this ongoing clash will define our civic discourse in the next 25 years.

If we fail to forge the right path, publishers’ business models could eliminate one of the great tools for democratizing society: our independent libraries.

Source: Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years?  | Time

Food & Drink, Memories & History, Pleasures, Times They Are A-Changing, Travel

The Dining Car Will Soon Return to Amtrak Trains | Southern Living

The throwback to a golden era of train travel will only be available for certain routes.

By Melissa Locker, Updated October 22, 2021

Credit: NBC / Contributor/Getty

Good news for people who like eating while in motion: Amtrak may be bringing back the beloved dining car.

That’s right, eating your Whataburger honey butter biscuit behind the wheel is no longer the most glamorous way to eat-on-the-go.

Back in the fall of 2019, Amtrak announced that it was getting rid of the classic dining car —the ones with china and flatware on a white tablecloth—in favor of pre-packaged options. This was before the pandemic, so they couldn’t use health and safety as an excuse to stave off the inevitable firestorm of criticism.

While Amtrak executives may have been looking to cut costs, people really love the romantic notion of dining off of fine china while rolling through the night. Cutting the full dining car experience transformed train travel from something elegant and nostalgic to utilitarian.

Luckily, Amtrak has realized the error of its ways. The Washington Post reports that six long-distance routes, including the Texas Eagle, on the leg that connects Los Angeles to San Antonio, and the Sunset Limited, which runs between New Orleans and Los Angeles will once again offer dining options for sleeper car customers “that harken back to the golden age of rail travel.” Sadly, folks traveling routes on the eastern side of the Mississippi will be stuck with decidedly unromantic ready-made meals served on plastic trays.

Source: The Dining Car Will Soon Return to Amtrak Trains | Southern Living

Books & Reading, Libraries, Pleasures, Times They Are A-Changing

How Memphis Created the Nation’s Most Innovative Public Library | Innovation | Smithsonian Magazine

You can play the ukulele, learn photography or record a song in a top-flight studio. You can also check out a book

By Richard Grant, Photographs by Ariel Cobbert

Cloud901’s maker space is equipped with such high-tech tools as laser cutters and 3-D printers. The workshop is open to all ages, not just teens. Ariel Cobbert

The Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, a building of pale concrete and greenish glass, rises four stories in midtown Memphis. Walking through its automatic doors on a weekday afternoon, I hear unexpected sounds, muffled but unmistakable, almost shocking in a library context: the deep, quaking bass beats of Memphis hip-hop, plus a faint whine of power tools cutting through metal.

It’s difficult to summarize the myriad changes taking place in American public libraries, but one thing is certain. Libraries are no longer hushed repositories of books.

Here at the Central branch in Memphis, ukulele flash mobs materialize and seniors dance the fox trot in upstairs rooms. The library hosts U.S. naturalization ceremonies, job fairs, financial literacy seminars, jazz concerts, cooking classes, film screenings and many other events—more than 7,000 at last count.

You can check out books and movies, to be sure, but also sewing machines, bicycle repair kits and laptop computers. And late fees? A thing of the past.

Source: How Memphis Created the Nation’s Most Innovative Public Library | Innovation | Smithsonian Magazine

Books & Reading, Film & Movies, Television

Inside ‘Wheel of Time,’ Amazon’s Huge Gamble on the Next ‘Game of Thrones’ | GQ

As legend has it, a few years back, Jeff Bezos demanded that his team at Amazon Studios create a fantasy epic that would put Game of Thrones to shame. Turns out, that kind of thing is even harder to do than it sounds. And more expensive than you can imagine. Inside the epic quest to bring Wheel of Time to life—and maybe change the face of global television forever.

By Zach Baron. October 19, 2021

To create the world inhabited by the show’s vast collection of characters— including the fanatical Whitecloaks— Amazon spent millions of dollars erecting enormous sets outside Prague.

Not long ago, this quarry, 40 kilometers outside Prague, held a carefully built fake town called the Two Rivers. Then, a few days back, the producers and set dressers of Amazon’s The Wheel of Time burned it down. The town’s inn, an intricately rendered two-story building, is now blackened, its left side plunged into spiky rubble: Smoke machines give the impression that it is still smoldering. There are holes in roofs, artfully destroyed beams. Every house—interior and exterior—has been charred enough so that it shows on camera.

The actors who wander the Two Rivers are made up to match. Rosamund Pike, who starred in Gone Girl, is smudged with soot. Rain has begun to come down in earnest, pooling in the muddy streets and making the extras and the stuntmen shiver. Michael McElhatton, who played Roose Bolton on Game of Thrones and is playing a character called Tam al’Thor on The Wheel of Time, sits on a stump in the middle of it all in a big down jacket, staring at nothing in particular.

It’s November 2019, and the production—comprising hundreds of, and on some days nearly a thousand, people—is filming the end of the first episode of what everyone hopes will be a television show that runs for, well: six seasons? Eight? A show that will be as epic and sensational and ubiquitous as Game of Thrones once was.

Source: Inside ‘Wheel of Time,’ Amazon’s Huge Gamble on the Next ‘Game of Thrones’ | GQ

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Memories & History, Web & Technology, Weblogs (Blogs)

Using Wayback Machine for Research | The Signal | Internet Archive | Library of Congress

October 26, 2012 by Butch Lazorchak

The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group at the Library of Congress.

The 2006 Library of Congress website displayed in Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

Prompted by questions from Library of Congress staff on how to more effectively use web archives to answer research questions, I recently gave a presentation on “Using Wayback Machine for Research” (PDF).

I thought that readers of The Signal might be interested in this topic as well. This post covers the outline of the presentation.

The Wayback Machine that many people are familiar with is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is an NDIIPP partner and a Founding Member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

Their mission includes creating an archive of the entire public web; the Wayback Machine is the interface for accessing it. While the Internet Archive has been primarily responsible for the development of Wayback Machine, it is an open source project.

Internet Archive also devised the name “Wayback Machine;” it is a reference to The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show’s homophonous “WABAC” Machine, a time machine itself named in the convention of mid-century mainframe computers (e.g., ENIAC, UNIVAC, MANIAC, etc.). The contemporary Wayback Machine thus appropriately evokes both the idea of traveling back in time and powerful computing technology (necessary for web archiving).

Source: Using Wayback Machine for Research | The Signal

Current Affairs, Food & Drink, Pleasures

Good coffee has become my go-to gift: I want you to have something delicious to start your day | Salon.com

I look forward to making cups of coffee for overnight visitors when reality allows for that again

By Ashlie D. Stevens, Published October 19, 2021 4:30PM (EDT)
White cup of coffee on old wooden table (Getty Images/Strannik_fox)

Once during an interview, when asked for his definition of paradise, Johnny Cash replied simply: “This morning, with her, having coffee.”

It’s a strikingly beautiful phrase, though one that lost its initial impact on me after repeated exposure during a back-to-back-to-back series of trips to Nashville (home of both The Johnny Cash Museum and the Country Music Hall of Fame), where it was printed on everything from coffee mugs to throw pillows in area boutiques and cafés.

For that reason, I didn’t think much about that phrase again until last year. A little background on the coffee front: I’d been a beat reporter at the local NPR affiliate in Louisville, Ky., for several years.

The station was in a central corridor of the downtown area and less than two blocks from a miniature deli called Nancy’s Bagel Box. Daily coffee from there was non-negotiable because of proximity. I didn’t think about whether it was “good coffee,” I suppose — but it went down easy and powered me through early morning editorial meetings.

Source: Good coffee has become my go-to gift: I want you to have something delicious to start your day | Salon.com