There's a "New Worldcat Coming Soon" banner at the top of the page, and a note on the OCLC homepage:
https://www.oclc.org/en/worldcat-org.html
Archived: https://archive.ph/1x8OY and https://web.archive.org/web/20220819231953/https://www.oclc.org/en/worldcat-org.html
It's pretty much the same for free public education. If it didn't already exist, it would never be allowed.
#internet #archive #internet-archive #copyright #monopoly #monopolies #books #publishing #publishers #freedom #liberty #free-culture #library #libraries #book-lending
information is power...
#information #libraries #power #demonology #pornography #satanism #vidcap #animatedgif
● NEWS ● #FAIR #Libraries ☞ Caleb Nichols on Defending Public Libraries https://fair.org/home/caleb-nichols-on-defending-public-libraries/
French studio Bruno Gaudin Architectes has completed a library clad in thin, grey bricks at the entrance to Paris Nanterre University.
Located in the town of Nanterre, west of the French capital, the brick-clad Contemporary International Resource Library marks the southern edge of the Paris Nanterre University campus.
The library was built on a triangular plot at the entrance to Paris Nanterre University
Occupying a triangular plot, the building comprises a pair of low-lying blocks that run along two sides of the site. An entrance hall is positioned at its main street-facing elevation.
Where the blocks meet, the library rises to three storeys as a colonnaded "wind tower", acting as a landmark for the library as well as a viewpoint that embraces and overlooks the urban landscape.
Windows facing the garden have an irregular placement
"The contemporary project is part of a chaotic environment, it faces transport infrastructure: railroads and Bus tracks, it runs alongside large-scale buildings: the University of Nanterre, large buildings from the 1960s, imposing office blocks," Bruno Gaudin Architectes told Dezeen.
"From this, emerges a sort of lantern/colonnade, a wind tower that opens up to the urban landscape, and gives the public building its place in a horizon of large scale buildings."
The building's concrete structure is exposed through the interiors
The team clad the exterior of the building in long, thin, handmade bricks. They explained that the brick was chosen for its textural rock-like look and hand-moulded qualities.
"The brick that we have chosen here for Nanterre is a beautiful object, it is moulded by hand, a process which leaves a particular imprint on the shape: the sharp edge cuts through the light," said the studio.
Light filters through the irregularly placed windows
Windows and openings have both a regular and irregular placement, which the studio described as a "musical rhythm".
Along the street facades, the fenestration follows a strict uniformed geometry, while the windows overlooking the garden have an asymmetrical arrangement with different-sized square openings that break with the uniformity elsewhere.
White concrete arches demarcate breakout spaces
The entrance to the library was marked by a large recessed opening, framed by skewed walls that lead visitors to the building's main doors.
Reading spaces were placed on the ground floor, exhibition spaces and teaching rooms on the first floor, and offices placed within upper floors of the taller volumes.
Spaces are organised around a large double-height lobby that exposes and highlights the building's concrete structure.
Vaulted, concrete columns run throughout the interior between glass walls that zone the library rooms, and create the illusion of an open-plan interior.
Bruno Gaudin Architectes wrapped the building in hand-moulded bricks
A wide staircase fitted with seating is placed at the centre of the lobby. It leads up to the first floor, towards exhibition rooms and breakout spaces beside a wall of the asymmetrically scattered windows.
Breakout spaces overlook the ground-floor lobby, zoned by a glass balustrade that wraps around the double-height space.
The colonnaded wind tower was designed to mark the building on the skyline
Elsewhere in France, Dominique Coulon & Associés added a curved glass extension to a library in a former French manor.
In Norway, Kengo Kuma and Mad Arkitekter designed a curved library that was dedicated to Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
The photography is byTakuji Shimmura.
Project credits:
Client: Rectorat de Versailles
Contractor: EPAURIF
Architecture: Bruno Gaudin Architectes
Scenography: Studio Vaste
The post Bruno Gaudin Architectes creates university library in France with colonnaded "wind tower" appeared first on Dezeen.
#education #all #architecture #france #bricks #universities #libraries
● NEWS ● #Techdirt ☞ Techdirt Podcast Episode 297: The Future Of #Libraries https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210907/13170347518/techdirt-podcast-episode-297-future-libraries.shtml
Ask any coder using #Node what their 80+ #dependencies do. Stealthily, it might “heart” a random HotPockets tweet. It might steal #bitcoin or #developer passwords. And more. These are real cases in very popular #libraries!
#infosec #security #coder #hacker #software #bug #complexity #program
To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. ...
And for the pedants (we love you!):
A final note on calling this a “National Emergency” Library. We lend to the world, including these books. We chose that language deliberately because we are pegging the suspension of the waitlists to the duration of the US national emergency. Users all over the world have equal access to the books now available, regardless of their location.
TL;DR: sometimes changing record / field separators can be exceptionally useful.
I've been wrestling with document conversions, from PDF, of what's really a set of structured data.[1] The tools for actually getting text out of PDFs has ... improved markedly over the years. The Poppler library's tools in particular.
But you've still got to manage the output. And what I'm getting has semantic columns, spaces, indents, text, unicode, lions, tigers, bears... All structured within multi-paged documents.
Awk's default processing model is to read a line of input at a time, and break that into fields based on whitespace.
But ... you're not limited to this.
There are a set of arguments and internal variables which can change all of this, as well as some ... suprisingly useful functions. The gawk(1) manpage and Gnu Awk User's Guide are especially helpful
Most useful to me are the RS and FS variables, and the split(s, a \[, r \[, seps\]\]) function.
RS defines the record separator. By default, that's a newline, but if what you're working with is more senisibly thought of as a page of data, well, you can set it to the "\f", that is the form-feed character (hex xOC, octal 014).
FS defines the field separator, a space (" ") by default (hex x20, octal 040). Here, it's more sensible to think of each line as an individual record.
Simply by setting these two values, suddenly I'm reading a full page of text at a time, automatically splitting that into fields consisting of a single complete line each, and setting useful values such as NF, ("number of fields"), now "number of lines" on the page.
If you've ever found yourself wanting to scroll backwards and forwards through a record ... well, now you can.
The split() function was the next realisation I had. In the LCSH file, "columns" are separated by, some testing confirms, two or more space characters. More or less.
(There are all matter of special cases in the data, but getting basic structure set ... helps a lot.)
The arguments to split(s, a \[, r \[, seps\]\]) are:
" \{2\}" works for me here.The square braces mean that some of those arguments are optional -- if not supplied, 'r' is the default field separator, and the separators themselves are discarded.
So suddenly I've got the means to access a page of lines which I can split into columns and keep track of the gaps between them, as well as counts of pages, lines, columns, gaps, lengths of columns and gaps, and All That Other Jazz which makes figuring out the Pieces to the Puzzle possible.
Since the entire LCSH collection is about 760,000 entries, getting a script to do this is Much Easier (and faster, and more replicable) than Trying to Do This by Hand.
I suspect this isn't an especially well-hidden secret, but I'd been finding lots of nothing looking for ways of rescoping the text-extraction problem. Reframing the data as "lines in page" rather than "text on lines" makes the concepts, and opportunities, of working with the data vastly more tractable. Often the trick to solving a problem is one of framing it the right way, and that's exactly what I'm able to do here.
I suspect the notion could be expanded to the point of inhaling complete files in a single fell swoop, which is a frequently-applied method in Perl. I don't need to do that yet, but should I need to ... the option seems to exist: set RS to EOF (decimal / hex / octal 4 / x04 / 004). Which I may yet play with.
Notes:
#LCC LoCCS #LCSH #LoC #Libraries #Classifications #Ontologies #awk #gawk #TextExtraction
As the days grow shorter, one might feel a strong urge to find a warm place indoors and cozy up to a good book. As much as our world hurtles toward digitized information, physical books remain popular, useful, and revered items. We share, use, collect, and read billions of books every year, and we house our most treasured ones in libraries, in some of the most remarkable architecture around the world. And for those who cannot access these amazing buildings, there are volunteers who fill the need as they can, creating mobile libraries to bring books to people in remote places. Today, a visual feast—glimpses of libraries big and small, new and old, from across the globe.
Library in Muyinga, Burundi
Improbable Libraries, which documents unusual and visually striking libraries from across the globe, was Johnson's shot at bringing "the fun and entertaining side" of libraries back into a conversation that's become dominated by doom and gloom about their finances. "Both my parents are librarians," he explained, "so it's always been at the back of my mind." And despite the rise of eBooks, he believes that "in a world which is becoming gradually more virtual, physicality will become increasingly valued."
The Sir Duncan Rice Library at the University of Aberdeen
William Hakewill's traveling library
Soneva Kiri resort children's library, Thailand
The inner dome of the Soneva Kiri library, constructed from bamboo
The Bookbike of Tucson, Arizona
A Little Free Library in New York City
Dangling book homes at the Librairie Urbaine in Lyon, France
A popup library on Bondi Beach in Australia, courtesy of IKEA
The Children's Mobile Library of Mongolia, operated by author Jambyn Dashdondog
Marta Wengorovius' One, Two, Many library/art project fits just one reader
Raul Lemesoff's Weapon of Mass Instruction looks like a tank, but only delivers free books in Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Kansas City Public Library, Central Branch, in Kansas City, Missouri
The People's Library of the Occupy Wall Street protests, New York City
