You have exceeded your limit for simultaneous device logins.
Your current subscription allows you to be actively logged in on up to three (3) devices simultaneously. Click on continue below to log out of other sessions and log in on this device.
From LAist: This Wednesday, Dec. 11, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Hyde Park Miriam Matthews Branch will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the building’s opening, as well as the life and legacy of its namesake, Miriam Matthews. [Clip] Matthews’ accomplishments run the gamut from advocating for Negro History Week in the city – the precursor […]
From the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (via Military.com): The Hawaii State Archive is cataloging documents and records from the Pacific War Memorial Commission, chronicling how the state raised money to commemorate the Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack by Japan. [Clip] “We’ve always had these records, but we never really dove into them, ” said state Archivist […]
The article linked to below was recently published by DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly). Title Library Professionals: Instrumental in Black Digital Humanities Author Jina DuVernay Clark Atlanta University Gwinnett County Public Library Source DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly) Volume 18 Number 4 (2024) Abstract Librarians and archivists, particularly those whose work focuses on resources pertaining to the […]
From The Decoder: Ana Navarro-Cardenas claimed on X that President Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law Hunter deButts—a person who, according to Lopatto, never existed. Navarro-Cardenas is known as a commentator on CNN and The View. Esquire and other media outlets spreaded similar misinformation, stating that George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil and Jimmy Carter […]
Taylor Jenkins Reid returns with a 1980s set love story amid NASA's Space Shuttle program while YA author Renée Ahdieh makes her adult debut with a novel about young lawyer Jia Song and the wealthy Park family.
Winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards and shortlists for the Nero Book Awards are revealed. NYT releases its selections for the year’s best graphic novels and SFF. CrimeReads shares its picks for the best psychological thrillers of 2024. The Internet Archive has decided not to appeal its copyright case to the Supreme Court. Plus, Page to Screen and an interview with Jacqueline Woodson.
From the NY Public Library: Libraries & Well-Being: A Case Study from The New York Public Library, a new white paper published by a groundbreaking partnership between The New York Public Library’s Strategy & Public Impact team and the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project within The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, finds for the […]
From the Authors Alliance: Authors Alliance is pleased to announce a new project, supported by the Mellon Foundation, to develop an actionable p lan for a public-interest book training commons for artificial intelligence. Northeastern University Library will be supporting this project and helping to coordinate its progress. Access to books will play an essential role […]
Dow Jones/Factiva Dow Jones Negotiates AI Usage Agreements with Nearly 4,000 News Publishers (via Nieman Lab) Ethics Striking a Balance: Navigating the Ethical Dilemmas of AI in Higher Education (via EDUCAUSE Review) Impact Shaping AI’s Impact on Billions of Lives (via arXiv) UCLA An Upcoming UCLA Humanities Class Will Utilize AI-Generated Textbook and Assignments (via […]
Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits wins the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. The winners of the Christianity Today Book Awards and the longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize are revealed. Susannah Dickey’s ISDALwins the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize for poetry published in the UK or Ireland. Spotify Wrapped now includes audiobook listens; Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses was the most-streamed audiobook of 2024. Audiofile shares its lists of the best audiobooks of the year.
Statement From Internet Archive While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review. We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests. We thank the many readers, […]
From the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA): In a world of digital abundance, and over a million articles being published open access in 2023, vast quantities of scholarly outputs remain locked behind paywalls, and many scholars across the world are blocked by dominant models of open access publishing. Blockers include funding systems that uphold […]
The report linked to below was published by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) from the Computing Research Association (CRA). Title Future of Information Retrieval Research in the Age of Generative AI Authors James Allan University of Massachusetts Amherst Eunsol Choi University of Texas at Austin New York University Daniel P. Lopresti Lehigh University CCC Hamed […]
AI Training AI through Human Interactions Instead of Datasets (via Pratt School Engineering/Duke University) EBSCO Findings from EBSCO’s Natural Language Search Beta (via EBSCO Post) OCLC OCLC Publishes Research On Art Library Collaborations in Art Libraries Journal Tennessee Knox County Schools Receive List of Books To Ban From Libraries Under State Law (via WVLT)
Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson is the top holds title of the week. LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for patrons waiting to read this buzziest book.
Oprah selects Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These for her book club and launches a new podcast. Read with Jenna picks Mary Oliver’s Devotions. Joya Chatterji wins the Wolfson History Prize for Shadows at Noon. Best of 2024 booklists arrive from The Atlantic, The Guardian, NYT, LitHub, Bill Gates and ELLE. LibraryReads and LJ offer read-alikes for Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson. Netflix nabs film rights to Callie Hart’s fantasy romance Quicksilver, and Alan Moore’s The Great When will be adapted for television.
A stand-alone fantasy from Tan’s world of the Celestial Kingdom provides all of the beautiful worldbuilding and heart-wrenching emotions of her previous books.
This quirky, humorous romance is well-written and plotted, and readers will quickly fall in love with its interesting characters. Fans of Olivia Dade’s “Spoiler Alert” series will especially fall for this superfan homage from Danan.
From the Library of Congress: The Library of Congress has named Rachael Stoeltje as the new chief of the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, which includes the Library’s Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, beginning in January 2025. Stoeltje will oversee the state-of-the-art facility where the Library of Congress acquires, preserves and provides access to the […]
Dave explores NotebookLM’s podcasting feature. NotebookLM is an AI system from Google that lets you create a workspace around documents that summarizes, creates study guides, and much more. One of the features is creating an “Audio Overview” that transforms your notes and documents into a two person podcast. Dave was impressed, see what you think.
From Science: Last week, the Indian government announced a giant deal with multiple publishers that will allow an estimated 18 million students, faculty, and researchers free access to nearly 13,000 journals, including some top-tier ones, through a single portal. Under the One Nation One Subscription scheme, which kicks in on 1 January 2025, India will […]
The NYT announces the 10 best books of 2024. Reese Witherspoon selects City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim for her December book club. The Last One by Rachel Howzell Hall is GMA’s pick. Target’s pick is Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet by Samantha Allen. Liza Minnelli’s forthcoming memoir, due out in 2026, will be adapted for television. Peter Mackay has been named Scotland’s national poet, and Kate Beaton wins the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. Marian Keyes’s “Walsh Sisters” books will be adapted for TV in Ireland and the UK. Plus, Oxford University Press selects “brain rot” as its word of the year.
The full-text article linked to below was recently published by Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). Title Open Access Journals Lack Image Accessibility Guidelines Authors Kaitlin Stack Whitney Rochester Institute of Technology Julia Perrone Kent State University Willard Library of Battle Creek Christie A. Bhalai Kent State University Source DOI: 10.1162/qss_a_00338 Abstract In recent decades, there has […]
From the Library of Congress: The Library of Congress has released a groundbreaking online collection of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt Records, making one of the most poignant symbols of the AIDS epidemic in the United States available to a global audience. As the largest communal art project in the world, the AIDS Memorial Quilt […]
From Digital Science: New analysis suggests that open data practice is now on the edge of becoming a standard, recognised and supported scholarly output, globally. As part of the latest in the State of Open Data series, produced by partners Digital Science, Figshare and Springer Nature, direct author-sharing practices have been analysed from a funder, country and institutional […]
Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth leads holds this week. People’s book of the week is Trial by Ambush: Murder, Injustice, and the Truth About the Case of Barbara Graham by Marcia Clark. Jon Ransom wins the Polari Book Prize. LJ's Best Books 2024 arrives,NYT names 100 Notable Books of 2024, and NPR releases their 2024 Books We Love. Costco announces it will stop selling books year-round in stores. Plus, LJ’s December starred reviews.
Sea dwellers, fortune tellers, tricksters, faeries, roving robots, and other fantastical creatures inhabit the pages of these out-of-this-world novels.
These volumes’ lyric and reflective lines cry out against oppression, war, and annihilation and praise the complexity and absurdity of human existence.
As much as LJ editors love to read, we also hold deep admiration for book and cover design. Each year we gather to debate how image, text, and color help create the mood of a book and invite readers into the story. These 10 choices represent the standout covers from our best books and highlight trends in jacket design, arresting imagery, and just how important the aesthetics of book art can be.
From Oxford University Press: Oxford University Press (OUP) has named ‘brain rot’ as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024, following a public vote that saw more than 37,000 people worldwide have their say. ‘Brain rot’ was one of the six contenders shortlisted by OUP’s language experts to reflect some of the moods and conversations that have shaped the past year. Selected […]
The preprint linked to below was recently shared on arXiv. Title Suspected Undeclared Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Academic Literature: An Analysis of the Academ-AI Dataset Author Alex Glynn University of Louisville Source via arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2411.15218 Abstract Since generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT became widely available, researchers have used […]
The election is over, and the reactions are emotional and raw. America is still as divided politically and socially as the day before. What’s in store for us as individuals, families and communities? What might the next few years look like for libraries and librarians and those who use and rely on library resources and service?
Frampton (Her Adventures in Temptation) starts a new series with this Victorian-set novel that stresses friendship, being true to oneself, and finding appreciation.
Thompson fuses lyrical reflections on his childhood with a thoughtful exploration of economic and cultural exchange to create a poignant meditation on labor, family, and the many ways in which global and personal endeavors intertwine, often unexpectedly. A visually rich, emotionally resonant work of true ambition and sophistication from one of the most sensitive storytellers currently working in any medium or genre.
The glimpse inside the opulent world of a Russian oligarch is fascinating, with international intrigue ripped from the headlines. Creating compelling apprehension, this suspenseful thriller keeps readers off-balance and unsure whom to trust. Finder achieves a perfect one-sitting read.
The penultimate volume of the “Moonfall” series, after The Cradle of Ice, has some exposition lag, but the fast pace of its action sequences will keep epic fantasy readers engaged.
Fawcett delivers a perfect new entry in this series, which will enrapture readers with fantastic worldbuilding. A great pick for those who are fans of both Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons and Jane Austen novels.
New York Times publishing-industry correspondent Harris excels at depicting middle-aged people reckoning with their earlier choices and struggling with how they want to live the rest of their lives. Recommended for most fiction collections.
This quirky, humorous romance is well-written and plotted, and readers will quickly fall in love with its interesting characters. Fans of Olivia Dade’s “Spoiler Alert” series will especially fall for this superfan homage from Danan (Do Your Worst).
Wang writes a quiet, introspective novel of relationships, family obligations, and resentments that build over time and what makes a family. Highly recommended.
Lenker (It Happened One Fight) writes a romance novel that also embraces the real struggle of women in the 1930s who wanted a career outside the home. The story balances the trials and tribulations of love, longing, and ultimately, success.
Blake’s (The Atlas Complex) command of morally gray characters and grim humor creates a dramatic, Succession-esque novel about a powerful, dysfunctional family.
Fans of Killers of a Certain Age will enjoy the return of the four senior assassins whose escapades from the past and present are intermixed in a fast-paced, humorous adventure. The books stand out for their wit and unlikely friendships.
Readers who crave a love story between characters with personal and professional goals beyond romance will find Holiday’s (Canadian Boyfriend) measured, thoughtful novel deeply satisfying.
This novel pays homage to the classic with a fresh point of view that will please Gatsby fans and mystery readers. Both Gigi and the novel are clever and breathe new life into one of the definitive novels of the 20th century.
In creating an origin story for the legendary thief, Epstein deftly addresses Oliver Twist’s longstanding “Fagin problem,” not by sanitizing or disowning him, as other adaptations have done, but by lending him a humanity that Dickens’s caricature did not. It’s a lively, finely drawn reimagining and a deeply reverent corrective of a literary monument.
This refreshingly irreverent, fast-paced, and often delightfully silly series is perfect for fans of superhero epics, Love and Rockets–style underground graphic novels, retro storytelling, experimental art comics, and quirky comedy.
There is no shortage of pathos in the heartbreaking stories of Peter’s clients or the accounts of abuse experienced by Ann’s retreat guests. But Haslett’s (Imagine Me Gone) melancholy novel finds some resolution and ends on an uplifting note for its asylum seekers, troubled women, mother, and son.
