The preprint article (accepted manuscript version) linked below is scheduled for publication in the the April 2026 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy.
Title
Electronic Book Acquisition Strategies in Academic Libraries: A Review of the Literature
Authors
Rachel E. Scott Illinois State University
Michael A. Arthur University of Alabama
Source
via ISU ReD: Research and eData
Scheduled for publication in the the April 2026 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy.
Abstract
Electronic book (e-book) acquisition models have evolved over the decades they have been available to library customers. This review leverages findings from scholarly literature to document the proliferation and evolution of e-book acquisitions models, their strengths and weaknesses in various contexts, and their role in the collection development strategies of academic libraries. From firm orders and subscription packages to demand-driven and evidence-based acquisitions, engagement with e-book acquisitions models varies considerably based on factors such as library budget and staffing, institutional curriculum and programs, consortial affiliations, support for textbook affordability initiatives, and COVID-19 responses. The findings from this literature review suggest multiple acquisition models are frequently used in combination; librarians closely monitor e-book expenditures and use, regularly modifying acquisitions parameters; and e-book strategy is dependent on institutional goals, library budgets, consortial participation, and marketplace realities. Additionally, the increased availability of e-books and their acquisitions models have created opportunities for research that compares the efficiency and effectiveness of e-book purchasing models and draws on existing and evolving evaluative models to establish benchmarks for measuring success.
The performance and reliability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are closely linked to the quality and diversity of the data used in their training. While the technical aspects of model development often take centre stage, the underlying methods for sourcing and assembling training data are equally relevant. Different data collection mechanisms bring distinct advantages and challenges, not only for AI developers seeking robust and more representative models, but also for individuals whose data may be included. In practice, AI developers often employ multiple data collection mechanisms concurrently to build comprehensive training datasets. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for advancing trustworthy AI systems and for addressing privacy and data governance considerations in the development process.
Source: OECD
Accordingly, this paper maps and proposes a taxonomy of the principal mechanisms currently used to source data for training AI systems. This taxonomy aims to provide a basis for future analysis on the privacy and data governance implications of each mechanism.
The taxonomy organises these key data collection mechanisms into the following structure:
1. Data collected directly from individuals and organisations
• Provided and observed data: A growing volume of training data originates from data submitted by individuals or passively collected during their interactions with AI systems, particularly in business-to-consumer (B2C) settings such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated helpdesks. Additionally, some AI developers, such as social media platforms, may leverage data provided or observed from individuals across their broader portfolio to support AI model training.
• Voluntary data donations: Although still emerging, voluntary data contributions from individuals or organisations offer the potential to enrich training datasets with diverse, real-world information that may otherwise be difficult to access.
2. Data collected from third-party providers
• Commercial data licensing: Data licensing agreements with organisations offer another avenue for AI developers to access datasets. Data marketplaces and data brokers play a relevant role as data intermediaries in this ecosystem, offering access to a wide variety of third-party data.
• Non-commercial practices: AI developers may also obtain datasets through non-commercial means. Open data initiatives, encompassing both public and private sector data released under open licenses, are key sources for the development of AI models. Significant contributors in this context are dataset publishers who curate and organise datasets from various sources and make them freely and openly available. Given the need for large and diverse datasets to support AI training processes, data scraping has emerged as a widely adopted data collection mechanism to address these demands.
By developing this taxonomy, the paper offers policymakers and stakeholders a structured approach for policy discussions on privacy, data governance, and trustworthy AI development. The output underscores the complexity and variety of data collection mechanisms that AI developers rely on, noting that emerging approaches involving secure processing environments and tools such as Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) offer ways to improve the usability of these data collection mechanisms while safeguarding privacy and other rights and interests such as intellectual property. This taxonomy sets the groundwork for further analysis on how to balance the growing demand for AI training data (in terms of volume and variety) while also accounting for privacy and data governance aspects such as data quality and traceability.
New from Matt Dunn - The Armchair Detectives What's it about...?
"They might be over the hill but they’re far from six feet under and now there’s a murder to solve!
Meet Martin Maxwell. As a former government operative, at eighty-four-years young he always pictured a retirement sipping shaken-not-stirred martinis on a far-flung island. But in need of some care after a new hip, he finds himself at Twilight Lodge on the decidedly cloudy English coast.
From the outside, it’s a picture-perfect place to recuperate. But when popular resident Elsie dies unexpectedly, Martin suspects foul play. She’s the third death in less than two weeks and always had a clean bill of health. Armed with a walking stick and his trusty notebook and pen, Martin decides to investigate.
While nobody believes him – death is an inevitable part of care home life after all – Martin is convinced something sinister is afoot. With his wheelchair-bound sidekick and former nemesis Albie in tow, they begin questioning the residents. Soon they learn that there are several suspects in the frame.
When they discover Albie’s love interest Barbara is in the killer’s sights, Martin knows time is running out. Will Albie’s heart be broken forever, or can they battle the effects of old age and each other, outwitting a murderer before it’s too late?"
"An absolutely hilarious and heartwarming cozy mystery perfect for fans of Richard Osman, Robert Thorogood, Jesse Q. Sutanto and Only Murders in the Building."
"Matt Dunn is the author of numerous novels, including the bestselling The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook (which was shortlisted for both the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance), A Day at the Office, 13 Dates (shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Comedy of the Year), and At The Wedding (an Amazon Kindle #1 bestseller). He’s also written for various publications including The Times, Guardian, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Company, Elle, and The Sun. Previously, he’s worked as a professional lifeguard, fitness-equipment salesman, and most recently, an I.T. head-hunter (where his success in re-writing other people’s CVs made him think he might have a talent for fiction), but he prefers writing novels for a living."
The
Blacklock’s case (A-267-24) is coming before the Federal Court of Appeal on
Tuesday, October 7th, 2025, at 9:30 AM. One can observe it virtually
by registering here: https://www.fca-caf.ca/en/pages/hearings/upcoming-hearings.
Or one can also attend in person at 90 Sparks St. 10th floor in
Ottawa. Allow time to go through security.
·What the Government did was clearly fair dealing and did not infringe
copyright.
·CIPPC is right that “entering a valid and licitly obtained
password to access password-protected content does not “circumvent” a TPM”.
·CIPPIC is right that TPMs do not trump fair
dealing as a matter of law.
I would add now a couple of comments I made at the Legacy of CCH conferenceheld in Toronto on September 19-20, 2025 to the effect that:
·No animals and no TPMs were harmed by the Government’s
activity. No password was circumvented. The trial judgment, per Justice Roy, declared that “ the licit acquisition
and use of a password, if it is otherwise a technological protection measure,
does not constitute the circumvention of the technological protection measures
of the Copyright Act.” See: 1395804 Ontario Ltd. (Blacklock's Reporter) v. Canada (Attorney General),
2024 FC 829 (CanLII), <https://canlii.ca/t/k4zfr>.Justice Roy is a very careful judge, as I well know only too
well having lost an important decision on an unrelated matter before him, which
I unsuccessfully appealed. BTW, the FCA doesn’t overrule findings of fact or
mixed fact and law unless those findings entail “palpable and overriding error”.
See: Housen v. Nikolaisen, 2002 SCC 33 (CanLII), [2002] 2 SCR 235, <https://canlii.ca/t/51tl>
·As the Supreme Court of Canada declared in the landmark
ruling in CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, 2004 SCC 13
(CanLII), [2004] 1 SCR 339, <https://canlii.ca/t/1glp0>:
48 Before reviewing the scope of the fair dealing exception under the Copyright Act, it is
important to clarify some general considerations about exceptions to copyright
infringement. Procedurally, a defendant is required to prove that his or
her dealing with a work has been fair; however, the fair dealing exception is
perhaps more properly understood as an integral part of the Copyright Act than
simply a defence. Any
act falling within the fair dealing exception will not be an infringement of
copyright.
The fair dealing exception, like other exceptions in the Copyright Act, is
a user’s right. In order to maintain the proper balance between the
rights of a copyright owner and users’ interests, it must not be interpreted
restrictively. As Professor Vaver, supra, has explained, at p.
171: “User rights are not just loopholes. Both owner
rights and user rights should therefore be given the fair and balanced reading
that befits remedial legislation.”
(highlight
and emphasis added)
The jurisprudence and the factual record suggest that
Blacklock’s will lose the appeal. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the free version of CHAT GPT predicted when I
asked it on September 9, 2025about
the likely outcome of the appeal. BTW, this is a remarkably good analysis that only
took about two seconds and, interestingly, it twice cites to my blog – so it
must be right 😉.
Spoiler Alert: CHAT GPT predicts that the outcome will be:
Appeal
dismissed.
Federal
Court decision affirmed in all respects.
We will watch to determine if CHAT GPT was just as smart or
maybe even smarter than this non-practising lawyer/policy provocateur who is
NOT giving legal advice here.
Scientists don’t lack for questions they want answered—they lack hours in the day and tools they can trust to get those answers. Experimental logs live in spreadsheets; instrument readings arrive as CSVs; and results tables pile up across projects. Turning those structured files into answers takes time and often requires advanced programming skills to be done efficiently.
To fill the gap, we’re launching DataVoyager in Asta, our ecosystem for scientific research agents. Built to address the challenges scientists face in drilling down into structured datasets, Asta DataVoyager delivers data-driven discovery and analysis capabilities that allow you to make queries about structured files in plain language and get clearly cited, explainable answers with copyable code, clear visuals, and a concise, well-supported summary.
[Clip]
Users upload a dataset in CSV, Excel (.xlsx), JSON (.json/.jsonl), HDF5, TSV, or Parquet format and ask a question (e.g., “Which treatment arm shows the steepest improvement after week 6?”), along with an optional prompt to establish context (e.g., “use these units, measurement cadence, treatment conditions, and outcome variables”) so that Asta DataVoyager makes better initial choices.
Asta DataVoyager then outputs:
A crisp answer to the user’s question, written for scientists
Copyable visuals that make the finding understandable at a glance
Copyable code that reproduces the analysis
A methods section that documents assumptions, detailed reasoning steps, and statistical tests conducted—so users can cite the procedure or adapt it
Importantly, the output is structured and largely consistent across runs. That makes it easier to share with collaborators, copy to a lab notebook, or include in a preprint’s supplementary materials without much hand-reformatting.
In a new report documenting public school book bans over the 2024-2025 school year, PEN America cites alarming censorship pressures on school districts including: new federal efforts to restrict education that amplify rhetoric from state and local efforts to ban books; persistent attacks conflating LGBTQ+ identities as “sexually explicit;” and state-mandated bans or “no read” lists which prohibit specific titles statewide.
“Censorship pressures have expanded and escalated, taking on different forms – laws, directives, guidance that sow confusion, lists of books mislabeled as ‘explicit’ materials, and ‘do not buy’ lists,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, “A disturbing ‘everyday banning’ and normalization of censorship has worsened and spread over the last four years. The result is unprecedented.”
This unfettered book banning is reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1950s while the report notes: “Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country.”
Between July 2024 and June 2025, the fourth school year of the book ban crisis nationwide, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts.. For the third straight year, Florida was the No. 1 state for book bans, with 2,304 instances of bans, followed by Texas with 1,781 bans and Tennessee with 1,622. Together, PEN America reports nearly 23,000 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since 2021.
Source: PEN America
“No book shelf will be left untouched if local and state book bans continue wreaking havoc on the freedom to read in public schools,” said Sabrina Baêta, senior manager of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program. “With the Trump White House now also driving a clear culture of censorship, our core principles of free speech, open inquiry, and access to diverse and inclusive books are severely at risk. Book bans stand in the way of a more just, informed and equitable world. They chill the freedom to read and restrict the rights of students to access information and read freely.”
The report said these pernicious censorship trends are sabotaging the basic values of public education as district after district respond by removing books targeted by extremist groups who take anti-woke, anti-DEI, and anti-LGBTQ+ stances. Educators and school boards comply out of fear of losing funding, being fired or harassed, even being subjected to police involvement. This is especially true with state laws that are purposefully vague and instill fear and apprehension.
Source: PEN America
The top five banned books for the school year were: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess with 23 bans; Sold by Patricia McCormick and Breathless by Jennifer Niven with 20 bans each; Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo with 19 bans and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas with 18 bans.
Book bans continue to have a direct impact on a wide group of creative professionals in the literary sector. Throughout the 2024-2025 school year, book bans affected the works of almost 2,600 individuals, including 2,308 authors, 243 illustrators and 38 translators. The books that continue to be most frequently targeted typically contain themes related to race and racism, gender identity and sexuality, or depict sexual violence.
Stephen King, the bestselling horror, suspense and science fiction author, was the most banned author during the school year. Eighty-seven titles of King’s were banned, totaling 206 times. The next most banned author was Ellen Hopkins, author of young adult fiction including Crank, Burned, Impulse and Glass, who had 18 titles banned totaling 167 times. The top five banned authors also include Sarah J. Maas, the fantasy author known for her series Throne of Glass, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Crescent City, with 21 titles banned, totaling 162 times and Jodi Picoult, also a bestselling author who had 23 titles banned totaling 62 times. For the first time the top banned creators included popular Japanese manga artist Yūsei Matsui, whose 22 manga books in the Assassination Classroom series were banned a total of 54 times.
Four years into the contemporary book banning crisis, many communities and educators have been conditioned to expect book challenges and bans as part of the U.S. education system. However, public perceptions of book bans remain unchanged – most Americans oppose efforts to restrict books in public schools – and opposition to restrictions on the freedom to read are loud and growing. Coalitions of national, state, and local freedom to read advocates are raising awareness and organizing to push back on book bans, uplifting the need to protect and defend the freedom to read.
By publishing the report in advance of National Banned Books Week from October 5-11, PEN America hopes to ballast a strong defense of free speech and the freedom to read. The organization is encouraging readers, writers and the wider public to join students, parents, and librarians in speaking out on October 11 for Let Freedom Read Day – and continuing to speak out so that students can access stories that reflect their lives and those around them.
Archived crop and livestock reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture were set to transfer to a new government website on Wednesday with the agency’s existing online archive, hosted by Cornell University’s Mann Library, decommissioned, the USDA and a Cornell official said on Tuesday.
The USDA’s online Economics, Statistics and Market Information System, an archive of USDA reports dating to 1973, will move to the USDA’s National Agricultural Library.
[Clip]
USDA announced in April that it planned to migrate its report archives from Cornell’s Mann Library and onto an alternative platform as a way to “modernize its processes,” without detailing what that would entail.
I have just finished The Mabinogion Tetrology by Evangeline Walton, compiled novelizations of the Four Branches of the medieval Welsh Mabinogi. I highly recommend this work to fantasy fans who like tie-ins to traditional stories and don't mind a non-scholarly approach from a cultural outsider (Walton was American). It's a very "faithful" adaptation in that it takes virtually nothing out. The Four Branches themselves are just a few pages each, so Walton interpolates a lot, clearly from a 20th-century cultural standpoint (including idolization of "progress" and a surprising amount of Buddhism). One book was published in the 1930s, the others in the 1970s. The whole work is about 650 pages long, with the first three branches being novellas and the fourth a short novel. It is out of print but available as an e-book at Bookshop.org.
Speaking as a cultural outsider and lay reader myself, I think she does this quite well. Specifically, I think she does good work with the First Branch (The Prince of Annwn), and the Second (The Children of Llyr) and Third (The Song of Rhiannon) are among the most engaging and rewarding works I've read in a very long time! The Fourth Branch (The Island of the Mighty, a.k.a. The Virgin and the Swine), which was the first she wrote, is hit and miss for me but still worth reading. The whole work is generally quite feminist; I have no doubt was a huge influence on The Mists of Avalon.Spoilery review follows...( Read more... )
The American Library Association (ALA) expressed disappointment with today’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vote to end E-Rate support for library and school hotspot lending programs, which provided critical connectivity to millions of public library patrons who lack reliable internet access at home.
“We don’t yet know the full extent of what this vote means for libraries and schools and the communities we serve, but we do know that libraries were relying on sustainable E-Rate funding,” said Sam Helmick President of the American Library Association.
“ALA is both disappointed by the FCC’s takebacks and discouraged by the lack of due process, which left no opportunity for staff, patrons and library advocates to give input on the draft order. For years, we have engaged in the rulemaking process with good faith, partnering with the FCC to fulfill their mandate to make reliable, high-quality broadband available nationwide. And today, the Commission openly voted to snatch back the opportunity to offer more Americans, especially in rural areas, the high-speed internet access to do the business of life online – pay bills, make telehealth appointments, fill out school applications – after the library closes.”
The coalition emphasized that library hotspot lending programs proved indispensable for families, small businesses, and veterans. In Appalachian Ohio, the Brown County Public Library’s hotspot program allowed homeschool families to join virtual classes, entrepreneurs to run mobile businesses, and veterans to participate in telehealth appointments and certification testing.
Although disappointed by today’s outcome, ALA and its partners will continue to advocate for policies that expand broadband access and support libraries and other community anchor institutions.
In case I haven't worn you all out nattering about Earthsea yet, here's some more. On Friday when I finished the Cycle I went online, as one does, and discovered that last year there was published a graphic novel edition of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series. So naturally this weekend I had to run out and buy it and read it all at once. The art was done by Fred Fordham and the project was overseen by Le Guin's son, Theo (she having passed away in 2018).
Theo, like Le Guin herself, was trepidatious about any visual representation of Earthsea, after decades of white character designs; white, middle-aged actors; and general tom-fuckery when it comes to representing Le Guin's work. It wasn't until Theo saw Fordham's work in To Kill a Mockingbird that he first considered it might be worthwhile to consider a graphic novel adaptation of his mother's work, and so here we are.
Fordham appears to have been the right man for the job--this graphic novel edition of A Wizard of Earthsea captures the characters as Le Guin may have envisioned them when she wrote. Theo in his forward acknowledges that one of the beautiful things about how the characters are described in Le Guin's work--enough to give an idea of their appearance, but also vague enough that readers can all use their own imaginations to some degree--becomes limited when creating an "official" visual representation of those characters. So he considers Fordham's designs just one of many possible looks for these characters, but one that cleaves to his mother's original descriptions.
His expressions neatly capture the shift in Ged's attitude over his schooling at Roke, from the proud, angry boy who first arrives to the sobered, haunted young man who departs.
Nearly all of the wording in the book is lifted directly from the original novel, which means Le Guin's original hard-hitting dialogue and beautiful descriptions of Earthsea survive to accompany Fordham's gorgeous scenic illustrations. He really captures the moody atmosphere of some of the book's darker moments, while also creating some truly stunning vistas of the ocean, which of course is a considerable part of the world for the characters of Earthsea (who live in an archipelago). I particularly enjoyed some of the rainy scenes--felt just like home here in the PNW!
He also does a great job making Ged and the Lookfar feel small on some of Ged's journeys. Looking at it some of these full-page spreads, you really feel that Ged is just one young wizard on his own in a vast and unknowable world.
If I had any issues, it's only that some of the palettes run quite dark, so that a few panels can be almost impossible to distinguish unless you're looking at the book directly under a light source, and that there is some occasional visual awkwardness (not sure how to describe this--maybe Fordham used a 3D rendering tool and it shows?)
Overall, I was delighted with this, and I really hope Fordham and Theo press on to do Tombs of Atuan as well--I would love to see Tenar and Atuan rendered as well!
Tom’s first guest today is Dr. Carla Hayden. She was named the 14th Librarian of Congress in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama. Prior to her nomination, she led Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library for 23 years. In July, she was appointed as a senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Dr. Hayden was one of the first casualties of the Trump Administration’s reworking of the leadership of cultural institutions, the military, and agencies throughout the government. The President fired Dr. Hayden without explanation in May, five months after he took office.
[Clip]
The 73 year-old Dr. Hayden was the first African American and the first woman to serve as the Librarian of Congress. President Trump also fired, in the first few months of his term and without explanation, Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman on the National Labor Relations Board, and Gen. C.Q. Brown, Jr. the second African American to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Dr. Hayden is being honored by the Pratt on Friday night, where she will be presented with an award named after her, in recognition of her long career in public service. She will receive the Carla D. Hayden Award for Distinguished Public Service at the Mr. Pratt Presents Gala on Friday, October 3, where she will be in conversation with the businessman and philanthropist David Rubenstein.
Journal of the Copyright Society
Libraries and Collections, and the Annual Review of Selected Copyright Cases Volume 72, Issue 3; 2025
72 J. Copyright Soc’y 593
Recent Developments In Copyright Law: Selected Annotated Cases
Thomas Kjellberg, Joelle Milov, Dasha Chestukhin and Jaime Berman with Allison Furnari, Paige Geier, Justin Karasick, Sarah Sue Landau, John Miranda, Raphael Nemes, Reema Pangarkar, Emily Stein and Lyndsey Waddington
This is a guest post by Sahar Kazmi, a public affairs specialist in the Office of the Chief Information Officer. It also appears in the September-October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.
In a page among the Library’s Jonathan Larson Papers, the visionary composer and playwright mused: “… if I want to try to cultivate a new audience for musicals I must write shows with a score that MTV ears will accept.”
Larson’s collection is not the largest in the Library’s Music Division, but among the roughly 15,000 items included within it are scripts, personal writings, programs, correspondence, recordings, lyric sheets and even floppy disks that provide an intimate look into the mind of a generational artist.
Larson, who also was a lyricist and performer, once wrote that “creating rock operas” was his “true calling.” Although he died tragically young in 1996 (he was 35 and was felled by a sudden aortic dissection), the contemporary themes and style of his works — modern, introspective, political — have continued to inspire creators and audiences alike.
“I am striving to become a writer and composer of musicals…” a page from one of Jonathan Larson’s notebooks. Music Division.
His most well-known musical, the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Rent,” has been staged around the world and was adapted into a 2005 film featuring many of the original Broadway cast. But it is an earlier project — Larson’s semiautobiographical musical “tick, tick … Boom!” — that influenced the 2021 Lin-Manuel Miranda film of the same name.
As his collection demonstrates, Larson’s “tick, tick … Boom!” was constantly evolving. His papers feature numerous iterations and evolutions of the musical’s script, which began as a one-man rock monologue called “30/90.” Promotional materials show that Larson later staged the show under the title “Boho Days” before settling on its final name.
Miranda, who earned international acclaim for his groundbreaking musical “Hamilton,” played Larson in a 2014 revival of “tick, tick … Boom!” His movie fleshes out Larson’s story with insights from his papers and adds songs from the collection that did not appear in the composer’s original versions of the show.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Steven Levenson and Jennifer Ashley Tepper in the Library’s Music Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.
Miranda was joined by scriptwriter Steven Levenson and theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper in a 2017 visit to the Library as part of the research for the film.
Tepper’s experience with the Larson Papers is extensive. As the creator of “The Jonathan Larson Project,” which completed its off-Broadway run earlier this year, Tepper began her research with the collection nearly a decade ago. In days spent poring through his written materials and listening to hours of recordings of Larson performing his own songs, Tepper discovered notes, reflections and ideas that revealed the depth of the artist’s passion and vision.
Tepper called her experience with the Larson collection “the adventure of a theatre historian’s wildest dreams.”
“The Jonathan Larson Project” originally began as a concert of Larson’s music in 2018, transforming over the years into a full-scale stage musical. It features around 20 lesser-known Larson songs, including music never before performed as part of a show, songs cut from “tick, tick…Boom!” and “Rent” and songs from unproduced shows, like Larson’s musical adaptation of “1984” and an original sci-fi musical called “Superbia.”
Leonard Bernstein in his home studio in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1988. Photo: Joe McNally. Prints and Photographs Division.
The expansive papers and manuscripts of another legendary Broadway figure, the renowned Leonard Bernstein, also were recently the subject of study for two films about the conductor-composer. Bernstein’s Broadway bona fides include “On the Town,” “Candide,” the short-lived “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” and the inimitable “West Side Story,” which itself received a modern film adaptation in 2021.
His more than 400,000-item Library collection includes materials not just from his professional life, but personal letters, recordings, scrapbooks, photographs and physical objects.
Bernstein is best recognized for his musical contributions, but his lifelong commitment to civil rights and work as a humanitarian were a major focus of Douglas Tirola’s 2021 documentary “Bernstein’s Wall.” The film weaves audio and images of the artist’s activism around societal issues — concerns about McCarthyism, civil rights and the war in Vietnam — with footage highlighting his personal life and musical genius.
Library staff helped the documentary team find and select images from the collection, including photos from Bernstein’s childhood and wedding — some of which appear in the finished film. Even more detail on this topic can be found in the Library’s collection, which holds materials documenting the many engagements and fundraising efforts Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, undertook for a range of causes.
The 2023 biographical drama “Maestro” from Bradley Cooper also drew many insights from the Library’s Bernstein Collection. The film’s team examined photos of Bernstein’s suits, a ring, his glasses and even re-created the musician’s “MAESTRO1” license plate for the movie. The Library has shared more about the “Maestro” team’s research process online and in the March/April 2024 issue of the Library’s magazine.
In cases like these, a line from the eighth Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam rings especially true: “A book used is fulfilling a higher purpose than a book which is merely preserved.” It remains a powerful mission to share the Library’s unparalleled collections so their stories can be interpreted through new voices and told to new generations (even if they don’t watch MTV anymore).
US-based library consortia provide an essential collaborative framework that enables academic institutions to achieve preservation, access, innovation, and educational goals that would be impossible individually. The report reveals that library consortia are stepping up as critical bulwarks against resource scarcity and service disruption among their members. Interviews with consortial leaders highlight both the urgent challenges they face—vendor consolidation, shrinking institutional capacity, and political and financial pressures—and the opportunities they see for bold collective action.
Key themes explored in the report include:
Providing a safety net: How consortia are helping members survive budget cuts and staffing shortages.
Cultivating mission-driven communities: Acting as conveners, connectors, and capacity-builders as well as service providers.
Building resilient open infrastructure models: Sharing governance, risk, and expertise across institutions.
Embracing interoperability: Ensuring access to knowledge while resisting vendor lock-in and consolidation.
The report also identifies five high-potential avenues for collective investment in open infrastructure—hosting, building, sponsoring, training, and cultivating—that could transform how libraries support open at scale.
The School Reader: Second Book by Charles Walton Sanders
A book concerned chiefly with reading. Vocabulary words listed before each story, poem, or bit. Interesting for the view of what they used to teach children. Views of science and of character.
Authors Mallory N. Blasingame
Taneya Y. Koonce
Annette M. Williams
Jing Su
Dario A. Giuse
Poppy A. Krum
Nunzia B. Giuse
Affiliation: Vanderbilt University Medical Center (All Authors)
Source
via medRxiv
DOI: 10.1101/2025.09.24.25336199
Abstract
Objective: To compare answers to clinical questions between five publicly available large language model (LLM) chatbots and information scientists. Methods: LLMs were prompted to provide 45 PICO (patient, intervention, comparison, outcome) questions addressing treatment, prognosis, and etiology. Each question was answered by a medical information scientist and submitted to five LLM tools: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, and Grok-3. Key elements from the answers provided were used by pairs of information scientists to label each LLM answer as in Total Alignment, Partial Alignment, or No Alignment with the information scientist. The Partial Alignment answers were also analyzed for the inclusion of additional information. Results: The entire LLM set of answers, 225 in total, were assessed as being in Total Alignment 20.9% of the time (n=47), in Partial Alignment 78.7% of the time (n=177), and in No Alignment 0.4% of the time (n=1). Kruskal-Wallis testing found no significant performance difference in alignment ratings between the five chatbots (p=0.46). An analysis of the partially aligned answers found a significant difference in the number of additional elements provided by the information scientists versus the chatbots per Wilcoxon-Rank Sum testing (p=0.02). Discussion: Five chatbots did not differ significantly in their alignment with information scientists’ evidence summaries. The analysis of partially aligned answers found both chatbots and information scientists included additional information, with information scientists doing so significantly more often. An important next step will be to assess the additional information both from the chatbots and the information scientists for validity and relevance.
Clogged toilets, trade unions and Google researchers: this is the saga of the Scarlett Letters Now, the bookshop is a husk, almost entirely empty apart from...
That's a wrap, folks! Today I concluded the entirety of the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula Le Guin for the first time. The final book in this series is The Other Wind, but the collected volume I have also includes after that a few short stories by Le Guin set in the Earthsea universe as well as a lecture she gave at Oxford on gender and the Western archtype of a hero. Seemed best to lump these all together for this review.
I was emotional about this book from the start, and I can only imagine it was moreso for those who had been familiar with Ged and Tenar for decades before this book was published. The Earthsea Cycle begins with A Wizard of Earthsea in Ged's childhood, before he's even discovered his propensity for magic, and here at the start of The Other Wind, he is a man in his seventies, puttering about his old master's house and waiting for his wife and daughter to come home. We've gotten to see Ged throughout his life--as a child, apprentice, wizard, archmage, goatherd (take 2), old man--and this continuity and journey really got to me.
At the end of the previous novel, Tehanu, the mantle of hero is passed on narratively from Ged and Tenar to their adopted daughter, Tehanu, but it's here in The Other Wind that Tehanu really comes into herself. Given Tehanu's past trauma, the way she clings to Tenar and Ged makes sense, so it was very rewarding to see her grow into herself here and eventually claim the power she was told by the dragon Kalessin she possesses at the end of Tehanu.
As with Tehanu and Tales of Earthsea, women play a much more central role in The Other Wind. Our noble king, Lebannen, who came into his own in the third book of the original trilogy, is really blown hither-and-thither by the women of the book, who are the real plot-movers. Tehanu, the youthful rising power; Tenar, the wizened heroine; Irian, the free woman who's embraced the power Tehanu shares; Seserakh, the foreign princess who brings Kargish knowledge of dragons; these are the real players of the game. The kings and wizards who follow in their wake exist to help them carry out the plot.
As with all the Earthsea books, Le Guin focuses her fantasy without centering violence. The great plot of The Other Wind essentially boils down to righting an ancient wrong, and it is resolved through shared knowledge and cooperation. On the whole, the book feels quite positive and we leave Earthsea for this final time on a sweet and hopeful note.
The conclusion itself feels perfect: Ged and Tenar on Gont, talking of nothing, in the end. Who else but Le Guin would have concluded her epic fantasy series with her male hero explaining how he'd kept up the house in his wife's absence? The pair go for a walk in the woods, and that's where the overarching plot of Earthsea ends, beautiful in its simplicity.
If I had a complaint about Le Guin's writing, it's that she sometimes stows key elements of the plot in opaque dialogue between characters, which comes up a little here, but not as much as in Tehanu.
After The Other Wind come a few short stories by Le Guin set in the world of Earthsea. These are fun little tales, none longer than fifteen pages, which have nothing to do with any of the characters we know, until the final one. If you like the worldbuilding of Earthsea, these will be a great addition. The final one, for reasons I won't spoil, had me getting choked up even though I suspect from the opening paragraphs what was happening.
I had such fun exploring Earthsea and while I wish I had gotten into them when I was younger (because I know how much I would have enjoyed them as a teen!) I'm still glad to have found them now (and I can just envision the daydreams I would have spun about my own female mage OC if I had known about these books then...) I know I'll revisit Earthsea and the adventures of its heroes again, although I'll stick to the paper versions--I've heard nothing good about any of the attempted screen adaptations! It truly feels like this has been a journey, and what an enjoyable one its been.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is having a profound impact on higher education. In the 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition, GenAI was included—either explicitly or implicitly—in all six of the key technologies and practices anticipated to have significant impact on the future of teaching and learning:
AI Tools for Teaching and Learning
Faculty Development for GenAI
AI Governance
Shoring Up Cybersecurity
Evolving Teaching Practices
Critical Digital Literacy
Considering this sweeping impact, we assembled a global panel of experts to envision their preferred future of GenAI in higher education and create an action plan to get to that future.
Rather than reacting to change as it comes, we can play an active role in creating the future we want to see. No matter where you sit at your institution, you’ll find actionable advice in the report.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works.
“This is a fair settlement,” Alsup said, though he added that distributing it to all parties will be “complicated.” About 465,000 books are on the list of works pirated by Anthropic, according to Justin Nelson, an attorney for the authors.
[Clip]
Alsup’s main concern centered on how the claims process will be handled in an effort to ensure everyone eligible knows about it so the authors don’t “get the shaft.” He had set a September 22 deadline for submitting a claims form for him to review before Thursday’s hearing to review the settlement again.
Alsup declined to approve the settlement earlier this month and asked the parties to answer several questions. Alsup will decide whether to give the settlement his final approval after notifying affected authors and giving them a chance to file claims.
Plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson said in a statement that Alsup’s decision “brings us one step closer to real accountability for Anthropic and puts all AI companies on notice they can’t shortcut the law or override creators’ rights.”
“We are pleased the court has granted preliminary approval of the settlement,” Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in response to an AFP query.
“The decision will allow us to focus on developing safe AI systems.”
U.S. District Judge William Alsup initially expressed some reservations about Anthropic’s offer, including concerns over how to ensure authors would be properly informed. Alsup ultimately approved the settlement after “several weeks of rigorous assessment and review,” according to a release.
Alsup will consider final approval of the settlement once the notice and claims processes are complete, the release said.
The suit – Bartz v Anthropic – was first filed on 19th August 2024 by three authors and included broad class action copyright claims against Anthropic over AI training. On 23rd June, Judge Alsup of the District Court for the Northern District of California issued an order indicating that copyright infringement claims related to Anthropic’s mass copying of books from illegal shadow libraries could move forward to trial and, on 17th July, he certified the class for these piracy claims, which by class definition includes publishers as well as authors.
However, on 25th August this year, the parties jointly submitted a statement of potential settlement to the court. Alsup must approve the entire proposed settlement before it can take effect, and additional details of the settlement will be fleshed out under the court’s supervision.
Not just for working. Use it for thinking, for reconnecting, writing or creating. The library is a sanctuary where your mind slows down, even though the...
I have a job again! \^o^/ This means I am back on the audiobook train and today I wrapped up Road to Ruinby Hana Lee, book 1 of the Magebike Courier duology. This is a low fantasy dystopian novel located in a place called the Mana Wastes, where protagonist Jin works as a courier transporting goods between protected cities. Jin runs a lot of odd jobs for various clients, but her most lucrative by far are Prince Kadrin and Princess Yi-Nereen. Jin has been ferrying love letters between them for three years--while hiding the fact that she's fallen in love with both of them. But everything changes when Yi-Nereen decides to run away and asks Jin to help her.
First, don't let the hokey title put you off. I started this one a bit warily, but it turned out to be quite a lot of fun! The worldbuilding is pretty light, but the novel seems aware of that and doesn't overpromise on that front. What is there serves its purpose well. It's not anything particularly novel, but not every book needs to be.
Jin, Yi-Nereen, and Kadrin are all wonderful protagonists; each of them has a distinct personality, perspective, and motivations, and I really enjoyed all of them. I was rooting for them the whole book and it was great to watch their various interpersonal dynamics unfold. If you're a fan of stories about mutual pining, this one is definitely worth checking out. However, if that's not really your speed, I didn't feel like the book spent too much time harping on about feelings we all suspect or know are requited. The romance element is definitely there, and it's a significant motivator for all three of them, but there's plenty else going on in the book too.
The book avoids falling prey either to the Charybdis of black-and-white morality where everyone who stands in the way of the protagonists is evil, or to the Scylla of "everyone is friends if we just talk things out," which is a relief after some recent reads. There's definitely a sliding scale of antagonism here, with some characters who are obstacles but not necessarily bad people, and others who run much darker.
I also enjoyed the presence of the "Road Builders." Jin and her peers inhabit the Mana Wastes, a treacherous desert wasteland where little survives and almost none of it without human intervention. They sustain themselves with "talent"--magical abilities common among humans, but becoming less common by the day--and travel along ravaged roads built by some culture who came before, about which Jin and her peers know very little. These are the "Road Builders" and are, I believe, strongly hinted at to be us. Lee keeps them a pleasant mystery humming in the background of everything else going on.
There were a couple contrivances near the end to aid a dramatic conclusion, but nothing so egregious I wasn't willing to continue to play ball with the book. Similarly, I'm on the fence about where this book leaves the relationship between the main trio, because it feels a little too much like Lee felt it was a necessary hook into book 2, but I'll reserve judgement until I've actually read book 2. And perhaps it's better that everything doesn't wrap up too neatly here.
On the whole, I had a lot of fun with this book and I will definitely read the next one.
The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) honors University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries for having the best website in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) for 2025. This is the third library to ever receive the award, which was created to recognize the creativity and the ways libraries are providing easy access to Federal Government information on their websites. The library has digitized many Federal Government documents and archived web pages that might otherwise have been lost and made them accessible to the public on its sleek and easy-to-navigate website.
“UNT Libraries is a trailblazer in digital preservation and a partner GPO is beyond lucky to have,” said GPO Superintendent of Documents Scott Matheson. “We thank them for their long-standing contribution to helping GPO deliver on its vision of an America Informed. On behalf of GPO, congratulations to UNT Libraries on this award.”
“We are thrilled to receive this designation,” said University Librarian and Vice Provost Sian Brannon. “The University of North Texas Libraries Government Information Connection is a long-standing, highly-used service and our FDLP website serves as an easy-access gateway to Federal information from multiple agencies. I am thankful for the dedication of our Government documents employees and the phenomenal efforts they put in to ensure our constituents are able to get the information they need.”
When Stephen Sondheim first visited the Library of Congress in May 1993, the Music Division arranged for a private show of its treasures with the intention to knock his socks off. The subtext, of course, was to convince him that the Library would be the ideal home for his manuscripts.
At that time, Sondheim already was considered one of the most important figures in the history of musical theater. He was the lyricist behind “West Side Story”; the creator of “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd”; the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and multiple Grammys and Tonys; the man who, in receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom years later, would be credited with reinventing the American musical.
So we covered a small room with music manuscripts and other material from our collections: papers from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and collaborators Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodgers; manuscripts by his private composition teacher, Milton Babbitt; works by composers and songwriters he admired, like Bartók, Berlin, Kern, Porter, Rachmaninov, Ravel.
We knew we’d succeeded when, looking at George Gershwin’s manuscript for “Porgy and Bess,” Sondheim began to cry. In a thank you letter, he wrote: “I’ve not stopped talking about what I saw at the Library since.”
Not long after, he agreed to leave his manuscripts to the Library in his will. Then, in February 1995, tragedy struck: a fire in Sondheim’s home in Manhattan. Though much was lost or damaged, the manuscripts miraculously were spared. Singe marks outlined where they sat in cardboard boxes on shelves — literally seconds from going up in flames.
A collection of Sondheim music. Music Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.
The fire prompted Sondheim to make his first donation to the Library. That June, the Library received his vast record collection, approximately 15,000 LPs. Sondheim was an omnivorous collector of both classical and serious contemporary music recordings, many of them obscure, a surprising number of Scandinavian and South American composers. The collection was accompanied by his meticulously maintained (though also singed) hand-typed card catalog.
Over the years, Sondheim maintained connections to the Library.
He and collaborator John Weidman conducted research here, watching original films of vaudeville performers as they were writing their musical “Bounce.” He sat for a series of interviews — 6.5 hours’ worth are available on the Library’s website. He helped persuade friends and colleagues like Arthur Laurents and Hal Prince to also give their papers to the Library. In 2000, the Library celebrated Sondheim’s 70th birthday in the Coolidge Auditorium with a memorable concert that featured Broadway stars Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Marin Mazzie, Debra Monk and Brian Stokes Mitchell.
Now, more than 30 years after that first visit and four years after his death, the Sondheim collection has arrived at the Library and is accessible to researchers. It’s extraordinarily rich, with 5,000-plus items like music and lyric sketches and manuscripts in Sondheim’s clear, careful hand.
For the song “Putting It Together” from “Sunday in the Park with George” alone, there are five annotated script pages, 61 pages of lyric sketches, 18 pages of music sketches and an 80-page “fair copy” of the completed number — 164 pages for one song.
The Library’s Sondheim collection has much of his handwritten work, showing his creative process. Photo: Shawn Miller. Music Division.
The collection includes songs that were never used or were cut from shows or were written for shows that never materialized, such as a proposed film musical, “Singing Out Loud,” and “Muscle,” a one-act musical that originally would have been paired with “Passion.” There are three boxes of non-show songs, much of it specialty material such as birthday songs he wrote for friends like Bernstein and Prince.
Most thrilling, perhaps, is what Sondheim’s manuscripts reveal about the craft of composition, both music and lyrics. For Sondheim’s most famous song, “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music,” the first step appears to have been a one-page interior monologue discussing the character Desirée’s thoughts and feelings — her subtext.
It reads in part:
“We’re having a parallel experience — & I can’t convince you … I didn’t want to marry you. I’m getting what I deserve, but I didn’t kill anybody. Who did I hurt? Me. I want to right it all before it’s too late. Serves me right. I thought I wanted to rescue you — & myself. But how can you rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued? … How do you make somebody want something?”
There is “Not a Day Goes By” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” where it’s sung in two versions — as a torch song and a love song. As the lyric begins to coalesce in the sketches, we get to these lines where Sondheim has a partial lyric but also considers alternate possibilities (in the sketches, the words shown here in brackets are penciled above the words they follow):
“That I just can’t keep
Thinking + sweating and burning [shaking raging] + crying
And thinking [hurting] + reaching [hoping] and waking + dying.”
In addition to the above lines, in the left margin of this single page he lists more than a dozen alternate words to consider for the release: “trembling,” “circling,” “fiercer,” “rougher,” “viler.” Though verbs and adjectives are comingled here, one discovers in the final versions of the song that the torch song uses only verbs, the love song just adjectives.
The sense it leaves is that, in Sondheim’s mind at least, we humans like to think about and grade the quality of our love but that suffering is physical.
As researchers begin to delve into the evidence of Sondheim’s creative genius, other realizations and discoveries wait to be mined from the treasures of the Stephen Sondheim Collection. These anticipated discoveries will lead to new productions of Sondheim’s classic and lesser-known shows, inspire future generations of performers, teach Sondheim’s craft to aspiring songwriters and demonstrate how Sondheim’s songs are timeless.
Sondheim remains front and center in the American cultural consciousness, and it is fitting that his legacy finds a home at the nation’s library in time for America’s semiquincentennial.
A Very Bookish Murder is the third entry in Dee MacDonald's series
I like to have a cozy book when I've had a long day and just want to 'escape' with some amateur sleuths. Maybe I can solve the whodunit before the last page is turned? (I didn't!)
MacDonald has a lead character in Ally McKinley that is clever, curious and likeable. There are a number of supporting folks from the village. Queenie from the village makes me laugh. And Ross is lovely. I feel like I am catching up with old friends. Ally is offering her B&B group of writers attending a retreat. (I also want to own Ally's historical building.) All is good until.....I'm sure you know what happens next.....make a cuppa and enjoy.
Aged 18, Dee arrived in London from Scotland and typed her way round the West End for a couple of years before joining BOAC (forerunner of BOAC) in Passenger Services for 2 years and then as a stewardess for 8 years. She has worked at the BOAC when they had the franchise.
Dee has since relocated to BOAC, where she spent 10 years running B&Bs, and only began writing when she was over 70! Married twice, she has one son and two grandsons.
After several months of discovery and development, the HathiTrust Resource Sharing project has launched a pilot with nine participating member libraries. The first new service from HathiTrust since the launch of Emergency Temporary Access in 2020, HathiTrust Resource Sharing will expand access to in-copyright materials in the collection for use in interlibrary loan (ILL) and document delivery. Through this service, ILL staff at HathiTrust member libraries in the United States will have the ability to log in and securely access digitized in-copyright content held in their print collections, allowing them to fulfill requests for chapters or articles for their patrons or other libraries.
From September to December, libraries participating in the pilot will utilize HathiTrust Resource Sharing in their lending operations and report their findings to the HathiTrust team through regular meetings and focus groups. Outcomes from the pilot will inform refinement of technical infrastructure, policies, and workflows to ensure member libraries in the future can seamlessly integrate HathiTrust Resource Sharing into their local lending practices.
Susana Noriega-Edmond, Brown University Library’s Manager of Resource Sharing and Rockefeller Stacks Maintenance, says, “We are very excited to participate in this pilot, as it offers our patrons faster, more seamless access to collections and strengthens our collaborations with HathiTrust and partner libraries.”
Libraries Participating in the Pilot
Brown University
Cornell University
New York Public Library
University of Michigan
University of California – Berkeley
University of Chicago
University of Massachusetts – Amherst
University of North Dakota
The Ohio State University
Jennifer Vinopal, Associate Director of HathiTrust and project sponsor, says, “This is the first Strategic Vision initiative focused on expanding in-copyright access to the collection, which is a top priority for our members. We’re grateful to the libraries that have agreed to participate in the pilot. Our goal is to learn from their experiences and to create a resource sharing service to help members deliver ILL materials more quickly and efficiently.”
HathiTrust Resource Sharing will initially only be available to HathiTrust member libraries in the United States due to variations in international ILL processes. A future phase will explore expanding the service to member libraries located outside the U.S. Currently, only libraries participating in the pilot may utilize the service. A phased rollout to all eligible HathiTrust member libraries will begin in early 2026.
The University Libraries’ On the Books initiative is expanding its scope and exploring how artificial intelligence can make it easier to find and use materials from the archives.
A $765,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation will support three case studies using AI to improve access to materials related to groups historically underrepresented in institutional collections. Previous grants from the Foundation allowed the University Libraries to investigate text mining and machine learning as a way to identify discriminatory language in historical statutes.
“The Mellon Foundation’s generous support continues to help us apply new technologies to archival documents, and to advance our understanding of them as a result,” said Vice Provost for University Libraries and University Librarian María R. Estorino. “Using AI ethically and responsibly to make collections machine readable opens up research possibilities that go far beyond what an individual scholar or archivist could ever accomplish alone.”
Archives like Wilson Special Collections Library are a rich resource for learning about our past. But many archival materials are hard for users to locate and contextualize because they lack the transcriptions, descriptions or metadata that would make them easily searchable.
Each case study in On the Books: AI-Assisted Collections brings together library experts and users to address this challenge. The Library team is working with two historians, as well as community stakeholders and other scholars, to find responsible and ethical approaches to using AI in the archives.
Historian Antwain Hunter researches firearm use by Black Americans in the antebellum South. He will work with a team to find relevant materials and transcribe them using AI, making them easier to use and access.
Historian Monica Martinez is an expert in civil and human rights. She will help with the development of textual datasets created from Texas statutes, which will then be used to identify Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws.
Community partners and scholars will help the team develop processes for using AI to create descriptions and metadata for historical photos of Black Americans’ everyday lives. That data will make it easier to find and understand those photos — especially for users with visual impairments.
“All of these projects build on the same idea that has driven On the Books from the beginning,” said Head of Digital Research Services Amanda Henley, who is leading the project. “We want to identify thoughtful ways of using technology to expand access to information about communities that have historically been overlooked in archival records.”
“This kind of work is only meaningful when it can be put to use,” says co-PI Matthew Jansen. “That’s why working with scholars is so important. We hope the real-world lessons from this project will eventually make it easier for other archives and researchers to use similar generative AI techniques with their own collections.”
Sanders' Rhetorical, or Union Sixth Reader by Charles Walton Sanders
An advanced work of elocution.
Perhaps chiefly useful now for its selections and the light they cast on the era. It has several on the importance of the Union. It boasts of a wide variety, to fit young readers, and it does feature both prose and poetry on many different topics, fiction and non-fiction. I think it has more biographical essays than the earlier books in the series.
(Though it was amusing to read the side note that people used to eat a dish of fried dough known as a doughnut.)
The autumn is upon us in the Northern Hemisphere. We’re back at work after the summer break, the new school year has begun, and we’re once more getting up early, or at crack of sparrow’s song (or, more humorously, crack of sparrow’s fart,or simply crack of sparrow’s) to get ready for the day. ‘What fresh hell is this?’ we hear you cry as you wrap up warm because it’s nobbling (a Welsh word to describe very cold weather). Well, while we can’t eradicate the back-to-school blues, we hope you’ll find some of the selection of new words below shortsome (a chiefly Scottish term for ‘enjoyable, lively, or entertaining, especially so as to give the impression that time is passing quickly’). Hopefully you’ll discover something new about already familiar terms, encounter some hidden gems (something or somewhere that has importance, value, or beauty, but is not immediately obvious or widely known), and perhaps be surprised by some of their origin stories. Let’s get crackalacking.
Earlier this year, an episode of the BBC competition programme Race Across the World brought new attention to one of several new Welsh English additions in this update—the word poody. When two of the show’s contestants used poody in an interview, they were astonished when the producer didn’t recognise the term. This exchange illustrated a common experience—sometimes we need to go outside of our own linguistic circle to realize that words that we thought were universally understood are unique to the language variety that we speak.
Our earliest example of poody dates from 1986, when it is used colloquially with the meaning ‘to have a fit of sullen or petulant ill temper; to sulk’. It is an example of a reborrowing, or ‘boomerang word’—a word that has been borrowed from English into another language and then borrowed back into English. Poody comes from the Welsh pwdu ‘to sulk’, which itself comes from the English word pout combined with the Welsh verb-forming suffix -u. A later noun form,referring to a fit of sullen or petulant ill temper or a childish sulk, is now used chiefly in the phrases in a poody and to have a poody.
Other loan words from Welsh in this update include various greetings and polite expressions, including diolch (thank you), nos da (good night), croeso(welcome), and shwmae (hello, hi).
If you frequently consume lunchables (food items suitable for lunch, especially pre-packaged food products) with your lunch hooks (originally and chiefly a U.S. term for hands or fingers) at your desk during the working week, we have a word for you: al desko. A humorous alteration of the term al fresco (itself first borrowed into English from Italian in the 1730s), it’s chiefly used to describe eating lunch at an office workstation, but it can also be used more generally to refer to any action carried out at one’s desk that would more typically be done elsewhere. Other additions in the newly revised desk range include deskfast (a blend of desk and breakfast referring to at-desk eating), desk rage (an aggressive outburst of anger or frustration in the office), and desk worker (a nineteenth century alternative to office worker, sometimes used to imply a lack of practical knowledge or experience of the field in which someone works).
Shifting attitudes to our own mortality are reflected in the addition of death doula, a person who provides (non-medical) practical and emotional support to a dying person and their family. Also found as end-of-life doula, these terms from the mid-2000s repurpose the word doula, more typically used of a person assisting at a birth. The adjective end-of-life is also new to the OED this quarter, and our research to-date suggests—surprisingly—that its use with reference to the breakdown or failure of a product predates reference to death itself by 35 years.
Another range of words recently revised are those relating to binge. Although binge-watch and binge-watching were added to the OED several years ago, this update has added several synonyms to this cluster in the form of binge-view and binge-viewing. The term binge viewer, although rare before the twenty-first century, turns out to be the earliest of these televisual terms, making its first appearance in 1980. Even earlier is binge-reading, recorded first in a 1978 letter from Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence to another writer, detailing a period of ‘gloriously frivolous’ indulgence of her addiction to the Nero Wolfe detective novels of Rex Stout. Bingeable was originally applied in the 1980s to food and drink that could encourage overindulgence, and then from 2010 to forms of entertainment that encourage viewers, readers, or listeners to binge.
The hype range of words has also been fully revised for this update, and alongside new entries for hype man (a performer with a hip-hop or rap act who interacts with and excites the audience with call and response exchanges) and hyperpop(pop music with a highly energetic sound, specifically a playful or ironic subgenre of electronic dance music with a deliberately tacky, saccharine, or cartoonish aesthetic), are hype cycleand hypebeast. Hype cycle, first recorded in 1983, refers to a period of intense publicity or public or mass media interest surrounding an event or the launch of a new product (and the subsequent negativity when the hyped thing fails to live up to expectations). Hypebeast started out as an embodiment of the hype cycle: a notional creature, entity, or culture which thrives on or generates intensive publicity or attention. These days, it’s more likely to be used to refer to an ardent and ostentatious follower of trends in fashion and street culture and streetwear, always ready to show off their new trainers to their followers on social media.
Our next word is far from fashionable or trendy, certainly if you’re a poorly pet. It’s the protective plastic cone secured around the neck of an animal, especially a cat or a dog, so as to prevent it from licking, biting, or scratching a wound, surgical stitches etc.—otherwise known as the cone of shame. This humorous phrase was popularized by the 2009 Disney Pixar film Up!, and its golden retriever star Dug’s lament ‘I do not like the cone of shame…’. Although our illustrative quotations reflect a spike in usage in the year of Up!’s release, our researchers also found evidence that the phrase was already in use in x.com, then Twitter, in 2007. The earliest name for the cone of shame seems to have been the historically evocative (though not particularly accurate) Elizabethan collar, and our new entry contains evidence stretching back to 1900.
For the win – Typically used after the name of a person to indicate confidence in them or expectation of their ability to succeed, and more generally to express approval, dates from this century, with a first quotation from 2004.
That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in a few months with another update. In the meantime, let’seat that ‘to do’ list for breakfast(or for lunch, dinner, etc., meaning to completely or easily overcome or defeat someone or something), shall we?
Despite the noble efforts of the organizers, there were a
couple of disappointments. The Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, who wrote the CCH
decision and who was expected to speak at the beginning of the conference, cancelled
just prior to the event. Another was the absence of David Vaver, perhaps the
most widely read and cited author and authority of the Canadian copyright law academy.
“The Panel Recordings will be available soon! Stay tuned!”
As an affiliate
of Access Copyright, from whom I annually receive enough for a nice lunch for
one or a rather modest lunch for two, I also get Access’s Updates. Here’s the latest from September
2025. Note this passage towards the end:
Access Copyright and
Copibec Make Joint Submissions for Federal Pre-Budget Consultations
Access Copyright, in
collaboration with Copibec, the reproduction rights organization for
Quebec, participated in
the pre-budget consultations undertaken by the Standing Committee on Finance
and the Department of Finance in advance of the tabling of the 2025 federal
budget this fall.
In both submissions, our organizations made four recommendations, reflecting
the growing importance of implementing a regulatory framework for the fair and
responsible development of Generative AI (GenAI) in Canada as well as the
continuing need to repair the educational marketplace for published works.
Our recommendations are:
·That compliance with the Copyright Act be
an obligation of any normative framework concerning GenAI.
·That no exceptions for text and data mining
be introduced to the Copyright Act.
·That transparency requirements for AI
training be included in any normative framework concerning GenAI.
·That the government amend the Copyright Act to clarify fair
dealing for education, make tariffs set by the Copyright Board of Canada
mandatory and enforceable, and ensure statutory damages are available to all
collectives.
(highlight added)
These
recommendations do not belong in a budget. Budgets are for important fiscal
announcements that deal with financial issues affecting Canada as a whole. They
are not for the purpose of hiding and deflecting attention from self-serving senseless
lobbying efforts aimed at enriching narrow corporate interests and burying such
initiatives deep in omnibus legislation where they can escape adequate
parliamentary scrutiny.
Justin Trudeau
shamefully resorted in 2022 – contrary to his explicit promise to the contrary –
to using the budget process to hide bad copyright legislation amidst and omnibus
legislation. See Oops! He Did It Again: Budget 2022 Hides Copyright Time
Bomb By Throwing Parliamentary Scrutiny Under the Omnibus Bus.Trudeau caved then to the
copyright content crowd. Let us hope
that PM Mark Carney will NOT repeat that shameful error in the budget expected
on November 4th, 2025. The unexpected, early, and regrettable
departure of David Lametti as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister removes
a potentially highly principled and expert source of wise advice.
The Access
Copyright and Copibec proposal to make tariffs mandatory and enforceable with
statutory damages is drastic, indefensible, and contrary to very longstanding
legislation and Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Trying to
sneak this into the budget process is indefensible and, indeed, extremely
offensive. And I’m not using the word offensive in the strategic sense of
aggressive but rather in the more fulsome sense of disgusting and deplorable.
Charleston Hub is pleased to announce that, effective today, Liblicense-l, a long-running, distinguished mail group and archive in the library and scholarly communications space, will be joining its family of resources. For nearly 30 years, Liblicense-l has connected libraries, publishers, academics, and many other members of the information community with announcements and discussion about fundamental issues in the evolving digital landscape of scholarly communication.
Liblicense-l will be live on its new platform on September 22, 2025, following a brief publishing hiatus. Current subscribers will be seamlessly migrated, and list management instructions will be made widely available. As part of this process, the Liblicense-l mail archive and the long-standing companion website will be refreshed under the Charleston Hub, with details to be announced.
Liblicense-l was founded in January 1997 at the Yale University Library, to promote awareness of and foster discussion surrounding the global shift from print to digital dissemination of scholarly information. It has flourished ever since, tracking the evolution of new developments in technologies and business models. In November 2011, Liblicense-l and its website migrated to the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), who have ably supported this enterprise for the academic community for nearly 15 years.
Leah Hinds, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub commented, “We are pleased to welcome Liblicense-l and its website to the Charleston Hub, which includes The Charleston Conference and its offshoots, plus a growing portfolio of activities and resources that bring together and support the global academic library community. In turn, these gain strength within Annual Reviews, a nonprofit organization that synthesizes and integrates knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society.”
Ann Okerson, Liblicense-l’s Founder and long-time Moderator, said, “We’re absolutely delighted to find such a congenial and appropriate home with the Charleston Hub and Annual Reviews. This collaboration opens new opportunities for all parties, especially our readers and contributors. Liblicense-l staff are also deeply appreciative to CRL for years of dedicated partnership.”
Research suggests nearly half of all tasks in the information services sector could be transformed by AI. This isn’t a distant future scenario—it’s happening now. What can we do to shape the impact of AI on libraries and library workers?
The free Futurescape Libraries AI Toolkit will help you and your colleagues plan, develop policies and operations, and position your organization to thrive in the AI landscape.
The toolkit was developed with early financial support from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and ongoing support from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). Keith Webster, the Helen and Henry Posner Jr. Dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University and a professional futurist, created the toolkit for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and CNI as a means to explore scenario-specific strategies and activities that libraries can undertake to prepare for various AI-influenced futures.
The Futurescape Libraries AI Toolkit integrates the ARL/CNI AI Scenarios along with priorities trialed and refined by strategic thinkers working in the research library field during a Strategic Implications forum in December 2024.
Research library leaders who want to integrate the ARL/CNI AI Scenarios into planning activities—such as annual operating plans, strategic reviews, or cross-institutional conversations—will find this toolkit useful.
Organized into flexible modules, the toolkit offers structured activities to help library leadership teams, staff, and external stakeholders:
Explore future possibilities
Test current strategies
Identify opportunities and vulnerabilities
Build readiness for long-term change
Scenarios don’t predict the future, they prepare us to navigate uncertainty. Scenarios help us move from reactive to proactive positions, from defensive planning to strategic leadership. Use the Futurescape Libraries AI Toolkit to strategically engage with AI and shape the future.
Pioneering actor, author, and activist George Takei has been named honorary chair of Banned Books Week, which will take place October 5 – 11, 2025. Takei will be joined in leading the annual event by youth honorary chair Iris Mogul.
“Books are an essential foundation of democracy,” said Mr. Takei. “Our ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ depends on a public that is informed and empathetic, and books teach us both information and empathy. Yet the right to read is now under attack from school boards and politicians across America. I’m proud to serve as honorary chair of Banned Books Week, because I remember all too well the lack of access to books and media that I needed growing up. First as a child in a barbed-wire prison camp, then as a gay young man in the closet, I felt confused and hungry for understanding about myself and the world around me. Now, as an author, I share my own stories so that new generations will be better informed about their history and themselves. Please stand with me in opposing censorship, so that we all can find ourselves — and each other — in books.”
Mr. Takei is recognized as an award-winning actor, outspoken civil rights activist, social media icon, and New York Times–bestselling author. He has leveraged his popularity as a star of the Star Trek franchise and a social media influencer to advocate for several causes, including the rights of Japanese Americans and LGBTQIA+ individuals.
His award-winning New York Times bestseller “They Called Us Enemy” (Top Shelf Productions, 2019) uses both words and images to depict Mr. Takei’s childhood as one of 125,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned in concentration camps by the U.S. government during World War II. This graphic memoir has been targeted by censors multiple times since publication, most recently in Monroe County School District in Tennessee, where it was among nearly 600 titles removed in an attempt to comply with the state’s vaguely-worded Age-Appropriate Materials Act.
Mr. Takei’s latest acclaimed graphic memoir “It Rhymes With Takei” (Top Shelf Productions, 2025), which Publishers Weekly described in its starred review as challenging “Americans to look to how past humanitarian injustices speak to current political debates,” has not appeared on banned books lists yet. But the memoir’s depiction of Mr. Takei’s life as a closeted gay man and decision to come out at the age of 68 will likely meet resistance in places where state and local laws target the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ materials in schools and libraries. In addition to Mr. Takei, youth honorary chair Iris Mogul will also raise awareness about censorship threats throughout Banned Books Week. Ms. Mogul is a Florida teen who started a banned books club in her community after the state implemented laws that resulted in the removal of hundreds of books about race, history, and sexuality from schools. Ms. Mogul continued her advocacy work as a student leader in the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Student Advocates for Speech and received an honorable mention from the Miami Herald Silver Knight Awards in May 2025..
Since 2021, the American Library Association and PEN America have tracked a sharp escalation in the attempts to ban books, with thousands of unique titles targeted annually. Books by or about LGBTQIA+ individuals and people of color make up nearly half of those titles. The majority of book censorship attempts now originate from organized movements. According to ALA, pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members, and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries in 2024.
Since it was founded in 1982, Banned Books Week has drawn attention to attempts to remove books and other materials from libraries, schools, and bookstores. Now in its 43rd year, the theme for Banned Books Week 2025 is “Censorship is so 1984. Read for Your Rights.” George Orwell’s cautionary tale 1984 serves a prescient warning about the dangers of censorship, and this year’s theme reminds us that the right to read belongs to all of us, that censorship has no place in contemporary society, and that we must defend our rights.
Let Freedom Read Day, a day of action, will be observed on October 11. Everyone is encouraged to take at least one action to fight censorship — all you need is 5 minutes! For information about ways to participate and resources, visit bit.ly/LetFreedomReadDay.
Visit BannedBooksWeek.org for information about events, ways to participate, and promotional materials. Follow Banned Books Week on social media (@BannedBooksWeek on Bluesky, Facebook, and X, @banned_books_week on Instagram) for the latest updates.
About George Takei
George Takei is a civil rights activist, social media superstar, Grammy-nominated recording artist, New York Times bestselling author, and pioneering actor whose career has spanned six decades. He has appeared in more than 40 feature films and hundreds of television roles, most famously as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek. He has used his success as a platform to fight for justice on a wide range of issues, particularly those facing the Japanese American and LGBTQIA+ communities. His advocacy is personal: during World War II, Takei spent his childhood unjustly imprisoned in United States incarceration camps along with 125,000 other Japanese Americans. He also spent the first 68 years of his life closeted, finally coming out as gay in 2005 to become a tireless advocate for marriage equality. His books include the autobiography To the Stars, the award-winning graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, and the children’s picture book My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story. In 2025, he reunited with the team behind They Called Us Enemy for a new graphic memoir reflecting on his life on both sides of the closet door, titled It Rhymes With Takei.
About Iris Mogul
Originally from Miami, Florida, Iris Mogul is determined to resist censorship from her state’s legislators and around the country. As a high schooler, Iris started a banned books club in her community after the state passed laws to remove hundreds of books about race, history, and sexuality from schools. She continued her advocacy work as a student leader in the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Student Advocates for Speech where she spoke and wrote about topics like book banning, political censorship in AP US History curriculum, and the failing humanities education in Florida. Last Banned Books Week, she joined the Miami bookstore Books & Books for their musical Sing for Freadom event!
Now a freshman at the University of California Santa Cruz, Iris finds joy in music, reading, writing, and learning. She envisions a life of working towards collective liberation for all people through the vehicle of fighting mass incarceration and criminalization.
A contemporary production of one of William Shakespeare’s plays might cut lines for a snappier performance, and some directors will even eliminate characters or combine scenes for expediency. The plays might be set in Miami or Mantua, costumed in ’60s mod or medieval tunics. We are taught early on that we can cut and paste Shakespeare’s text, and we can put Richard III in a World War I uniform, but we do not change Shakespeare’s language. Prince Hamlet says, “How dost thou?” not “Wassup?”
But theater people were not always so precious about Shakespeare. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds no fewer than seven printings of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” that include an added deathbed conversation between Romeo and Juliet in the play’s final scene. The editorial introductions to these editions reveal changing attitudes toward the fixed nature of the text; they challenge our contemporary reverence for Shakespeare as an untouchable genius.
The first full edition of “Romeo and Juliet,” in 1599. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
The first authorized, complete edition of “Romeo and Juliet” was published in 1599 and served as the source text for the 1623 First Folio of “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.”
By 1769, a new version of “Romeo and Juliet” — “as it is performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane” — had become popular. Published with alterations to the text made by an actor/director named David Garrick and first staged in 1748, this edition eliminates references to Rosaline (Romeo’s initial love interest), reduces the role of Mercutio and, most notably, adds a 67-line final conversation between Romeo and Juliet.
In Garrick’s version of Act 5, Scene 3, Juliet wakes up after Romeo takes the poison but before he dies. (“O true apothecary! Thy drugs are not so quick” in Garrick’s version.) The lovers share a melodramatic final conversation, and then Romeo dies in Juliet’s arms. Subsequent 1794, 1814, 1819 and 1874 editions of “Romeo and Juliet” adopt Garrick’s alterations to Shakespeare’s original text.
The stage actor David Garrick revised parts of “Romeo and Juliet” and his version gained popularity for decades. Artist: Benjamin Wilson, 1754. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
The prefatory notes to these editions provide context and justification for retaining Garrick’s changes. Some simply prefer Garrick’s version over Shakespeare’s. A few claim that Garrick’s alterations are more faithful to the original 16th-century sources that Shakespeare used for the story of “Romeo and Juliet,” including an Italian novel by Bandello.
After more than a century of preference for printing Garrick’s altered version of “Romeo and Juliet,” attitudes begin to shift back toward Shakespeare’s original text in the late 1800s. An 1882 edition reprises the figure of Rosaline, and Romeo dies immediately after taking the poison without the deathbed conversation added by Garrick.
Chasing these changes from edition to edition through time eventually leads us back to where we started; in 1886, a multivolume series of Shakespeare’s plays publishes a facsimile of the 1599 quarto edition of “Romeo and Juliet” along with a scholarly preface that demonstrates a concern for identifying the original text and introduces a practice for noting textual variants.
This focus on representing and honoring the true, authoritative text continues today, and we might be surprised to learn that readers haven’t always regarded a fixed version of Shakespeare’s plays with such “mannerly devotion.”
Rather, an altered version of the text was a “trespass sweetly urged” for over a century.
The “right to be forgotten” – perhaps better characterized as a right to de-index – has been a hotly debated privacy issue for well over a decade now, pitting those that argue that the harms that may come from the amplification of outdated but accurate content outweighs the benefits of maintaining such content in search indexes. The issue gets its start in Europe, but the Canadian experience has featured privacy commissioner findings and investigations alongside court rulings and provincial reforms.
Kris Kleinis one of Canada’s leading legal experts on privacy, access to information and information security issues. He is the founder and managing partner of nNovation LLP, a leading boutique firm specializing in data protection, the Managing Director of IAPP Canada, and teaches the Privacy Law course at my faculty at the University of Ottawa. He joins me on the Law Bytes podcast to discuss the background behind the right to be forgotten, the recent OPC finding, and what may lie ahead on the issue.
portal: Libraries and the Academy Volume 25, Number 4) (preprint)
Abstract
This qualitative research study explored current reference models in academic libraries to determine what’s working well and what isn’t. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 participants overseeing reference services at large, land-grant universities. The findings suggest that there is still perceived value in point-of-need, face-to-face research assistance provided by a librarian or professional staff member at a designated location, although most participating libraries are using a combination of approaches rather than relying solely on this traditional model. The data indicate that there is no one-size-fits-all solution; rather, solutions are context-dependent and develop through incremental changes, often in response to internal and/or external pressures.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelli posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
books![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
infodocket_feed
.jpg)
Scientists don’t lack for questions they want answered—they lack hours in the day and tools they can trust to get those answers. Experimental logs live in spreadsheets; instrument readings arrive as CSVs; and results tables pile up across projects. Turning those structured files into answers takes time and often requires advanced programming skills to be done efficiently.
In a new report documenting public school book bans over the 2024-2025 school year, PEN America cites alarming censorship pressures on school districts including: new federal efforts to restrict education that amplify rhetoric from state and local efforts to ban books; persistent attacks conflating LGBTQ+ identities as “sexually explicit;” and state-mandated bans or “no read” lists which prohibit specific titles statewide.
US-based library consortia provide an essential collaborative framework that enables academic institutions to achieve preservation, access, innovation, and educational goals that would be impossible individually. The report reveals that library consortia are stepping up as critical bulwarks against resource scarcity and service disruption among their members. Interviews with consortial leaders highlight both the urgent challenges they face—vendor consolidation, shrinking institutional capacity, and political and financial pressures—and the opportunities they see for bold collective action.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is having a profound impact on higher education. In the 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition, GenAI was included—either explicitly or implicitly—in all six of the key technologies and practices anticipated to have significant impact on the future of teaching and learning:
The autumn is upon us in the Northern Hemisphere. We’re back at work after the summer break, the new school year has begun, and we’re once more getting up early, or at crack of sparrow’s song (or, more humorously, crack of sparrow’s fart,or simply crack of sparrow’s) to get ready for the day. ‘What fresh hell is this?’ we hear you cry as you wrap up warm because it’s nobbling (a Welsh word to describe very cold weather). Well, while we can’t eradicate the back-to-school blues, we hope you’ll find some of the selection of new words below shortsome (a chiefly Scottish term for ‘enjoyable, lively, or entertaining, especially so as to give the impression that time is passing quickly’). Hopefully you’ll discover something new about already familiar terms, encounter some hidden gems (something or somewhere that has importance, value, or beauty, but is not immediately obvious or widely known), and perhaps be surprised by some of their origin stories. Let’s get crackalacking.
Research suggests nearly half of all tasks in the information services sector could be transformed by AI. This isn’t a distant future scenario—it’s happening now. What can we do to shape the impact of AI on libraries and library workers?
In addition to Mr. Takei, youth honorary chair Iris Mogul will also raise awareness about censorship threats throughout Banned Books Week. Ms. Mogul is a Florida teen who started a banned books club in her community after the state implemented laws that resulted in the removal of hundreds of books about race, history, and sexuality from schools. Ms. Mogul continued her advocacy work as a student leader in the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Student Advocates for Speech and received an honorable mention from the Miami Herald Silver Knight Awards in May 2025..
