Friday Video: Cory Doctorow and Edward Snowden: Dystopia, Apocalypse, And Other Sunny Futures | LIVE From The NYPL

Posted in Politics & Law, Tech, video Tagged with: cory doctorow, edward snowden, nypl

NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Division Moving Image Archive

“A virtual space for dance enthusiasts and researchers alike to browse, search, compare, and comment on dance videos and images – then share their discoveries with others!”

Posted in Libraries Tagged with: archive, dance, nypl

William Gibson at the NYPL

Includes a reading from his next novel!

Posted in Books Tagged with: author, library, nypl, science fiction, william gibson

New York Public Library Launches Public API Developer Tools

The New York Public Library is one of the landmarks of the city and provides a copious amount of digital and tangible content. Today, the library has announced that it has released a series of API tools that developers can use to tap into the big data and develop custom interfaces.

Read the full article @ goodereader.com.

Posted in Libraries, Tech Tagged with: API, nypl

The Underground Library

Miami Ad School Student Project: A Simple Solution to help New York’s Empty Libraries
(The creators of this idea are students who have no affiliation with the New York Public Library or any public library. This is purely speculative work that was developed as part of a class assignment.)

Now that the internet is available almost anywhere, people are able to do “instant research” to learn about anything on their smartphones. The New York Public Library wants to remind New Yorkers that they are still a valuable resource, and a free service.

NYPL wants to take your usual subway ads and make them into something fun and entertaining. They want to give New Yorkers something productive to do on the subway instead of their everyday people watching.

New Yorkers will be given a free digital book sample to read on their way to work. Once finished they will be informed of the closest libraries so they could finish their story.

Underground Library is a fictional student campaign, thought up by Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez, three Miami Ad School students. This video explains how the campaign would work if it were adopted by the client.

Agency: Miami Ad School
Art Directors: Keri Tan & Max Pilwat
Copywriter: Ferdi Rodriguez

Posted in Libraries, video Tagged with: nypl

New York Public Library Blocks The Pirate Bay

NYPL uses filters. Fine. I’m not going to have that argument. But it looks like they block “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing” as a category. Why? 

A spokesperson for the library confirmed to TorrentFreak that they use blocking software to restrict access to these websites. This is done to protect Internet users from seeing inappropriate or illegal content.

“In an effort to protect patrons from inappropriate content or malicious activity and comply with existing laws, NYPL uses filtering software to prevent access to identified websites that offer potentially illegal or malicious content, as well as those that may cause harm to Library technology,” TorrentFreak was told.

Sorry, but the way I read that last bit, in order to do that you should just pretty much block the Internet as a whole as any Web site could contain" “potentially illegal or malicious content”.

Read the full article @ TorrentFreak. (Unless you’re at the NYPL then you can as they’re blocked too.)

Posted in Libraries, Tech Tagged with: bittorrent, censorship, filters, nypl