State of America’s Libraries 2020; American Libraries, April 20, 2020

American Libraries; State of America’s Libraries 2020

New report shows libraries on the front lines

"On April 20 the American Library Association (ALA) released the State of America’s Libraries 2020 report, an annual summary of library trends released during National Library Week, this year April 19–25, that outlines statistics and issues affecting all types of libraries during the previous calendar year.

Although the report focuses on 2019, libraries are shown to be on the front lines addressing societal and community challenges—a role they are certainly playing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many libraries serve as first responders that take on roles outside of traditional library service that support patrons’ needs and community development. Functioning at various times as career counselors, social workers, teachers, and technology instructors, library staff members give special care to adopt programs and services that support the most vulnerable and curious.

The report found that the popularity of libraries in 2019 continued to soar. According to a recent Gallup poll, visiting the library is the “most common cultural activity Americans engage in by far.” In 2019, US adults reported taking an average of 10.5 trips per year to the library, a frequency that exceeded their participation in other common leisure activities like going to the movies, a museum, or the zoo.

The best proof that public libraries are about more than just books is their evolution into libraries of things,offering nontraditional collections that are community-specific and imaginative. The wide array of items available to check out includes air mattresses, dolls, bicycles, binoculars, and accordions."

8 of last year's 10 most challenged books had one thing in common: LGBTQ content; CNN, April 21, 2020

Alaa Elassar, CNN; 8 of last year's 10 most challenged books had one thing in common: LGBTQ content

"It's clear that the days of censoring books are far from over. And while sex, magic and curse words are all reasons books are still being banned, it's LGBTQ stories that now top the list of challenged books. 

In 2019, at least 377 challenges were filed seeking to remove 566 books from libraries, schools and universities, according to a recent news release from the American Library Association (ALA). Out of the top 10 most challenged books of the year, eight of them contained LGBTQ content and characters.

This is the fourth year in a row that books containing lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters and story lines have been targeted by mainly patrons, parents, school boards, and political and religious groups."

IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN COMIC BOOK JOURNALISM: THE POLITICS OF X-MEN: RED; Comic Watch, April 18, 2020

Bethany W Pope, Comic Watch; IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN COMIC BOOK JOURNALISM: THE POLITICS OF X-MEN: RED

"It’s extremely rare for a run of a mainstream comic to result in a story with as much philosophical complexity and clarity of vision as Tom Taylor’s (shamefully abbreviated) X-Men: Red. Because the author set out to tell ‘the best X-Men story’ he could, and because he managed (somehow) to gain something close to free-reign from editorial (as well as having the good luck of being paired with some truly remarkable artists; most notably Mahmud Asrar) the end result was not only the best continuous X-Man story of the decade, but something which will (in time) surpass Whedon’s revolutionary run on Astonishing in terms of fan-regard. In this article, I am going to pick (a little) at the weave of the story in an effort to isolate and reveal a few of the integral threads which form the weft of the narrative.

The central thesis of these eleven issues is that the act of compassion is a more powerful tool than the most brutally cinematic superpower. Empathy is the thing which slaughters fear. Looking at your enemy and seeing a person, woven through with hopes and loves, fears, the usual mixture of frailties, transforms disparate (possibly violent) mobs into a functional community by revealing that there is no ‘us versus them’. There’s only ‘us’. The X-Men are the perfect superhero group to make this point, because their entire existence is predicated on the phrase ‘protecting a world which fears and hates them’. The X-Men have always represented the struggle that othered groups (racial minorities, religious minorities, women, members of the LGBTQIA community) have faced when trying to live in function in a world that is slanted, dramatically, in favor of straight, white (American) men. Such a group is a necessary force in the current, fractured, geo-political climate."

Open COVID Pledge: Removing Obstacles to Sharing IP in the Fight Against COVID-19; Creative Commons, April 7, 2020

Diane Peters, Creative Commons; Open COVID Pledge: Removing Obstacles to Sharing IP in the Fight Against COVID-19

"Creative Commons has joined forces with other legal experts and leading scientists to offer a simple way for universities, companies, and other holders of intellectual property rights to support the development of medicines, test kits, vaccines, and other scientific discoveries related to COVID-19 for the duration of the pandemic. The Open COVID Pledge grants the public free, temporary access to IP rights in support of solving the COVID-19 crisis, removing unnecessary obstacles to dissemination of the knowledge and inventions that could save lives and limit suffering."

Public Libraries’ Novel Response to a Novel Virus; The Atlantic, March 31, 2020

Deborah Fallows, The Atlantic; Public Libraries’ Novel Response to a Novel Virus

[Kip Currier: The University of Pittsburgh's Master of Library and Information Science graduate degree program will launch for the 2020 Summer Term a brand new required course  -- The Information Professional in the Community -- epitomized by this article demonstrating the vital roles that information professionals exercise in a diverse array of analog and digital communities during challenging times, like the Covid-19 pandemic.]

"America’s public libraries have led the ranks of “second responders,” stepping up for their communities in times of natural or manmade disasters, like hurricanes, floods, shootings, fires, and big downturns in individual lives.

Throughout all these events, libraries have stayed open, filling in for the kids when their schools closed; offering therapeutic sessions in art or conversation or writing after losses of life; bringing in nurses or social workers when services were unavailable to people; and hiring life-counselors for the homeless, whom they offer shelter and safety during the day.

Today, interventions like those have a ring of simpler days. But libraries have learned from their experience and attention to these previous, pre-pandemic efforts. They are pivoting quickly to new ways of offering services to the public—the core of their mission. When libraries closed their doors abruptly, they immediately opened their digital communications, collaborations, and creative activity to reach their public in ways as novel as the virus that forced them into it.

You can be sure that this is just the beginning. Today libraries are already acting and improvising. Later, they’ll be figuring out what the experience means to their future operations and their role in American communities."

X-Men: The 10 Most Important Events in Dawn of X (So Far); Comic Book Resources, April 10, 2020

Brandon Zachary, Comic Book Resources; X-Men: The 10 Most Important Events in Dawn of X (So Far)

Take a look back at the most important things during the first phase of the current direction of the X-Men franchise, Dawn of X.

"9. Nightcrawler's Religious Ideas Become Pillars In X-Men

Discussing the ethics of the Crucible alongside Cyclops in X-Men #7, Nightcrawler reflects on the idea of the soul and what being a good mutant really means with resurrection available to them."

Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis; WBUR, April 9, 2020

Meghna Chakrabarti and Brittany Knotts, WBUR; Michael Schur On Ethics And Morality In A Crisis

"How do you think "The Good Place" characters Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason would have responded to the coronavirus in their Earth lives?...

MICHAEL SCHUR, ON HOW JASON WOULD RESPOND TO THE CORONAVIRUS...

Jason: “Then there's Jason, who is just an idiot. And Jason, I don't know if you saw one of the craziest photos to me of all of the photos we've all been looking at, it was that county line in Florida. ... Where one county had shut down its beaches, and the other county had not. And so as a result, the beach was entirely empty. And there was just like suddenly just a wall of people extending further out, down the beach, because that county's beaches were open. Whatever county that is, that's where Jason would be. … So he and Eleanor probably wouldn't have been dissimilar in terms of the way they approached this, but for different reasons. Eleanor was selfish, and Jason was just sort of impulsive and didn't really think anything through.”...

What do we owe each other? 

Michael Schur: “I said before that there's a certain sort of minimum that is required of everyone, to the best of our abilities. The basics, right. Staying inside, staying away from people, trying to kind of stop the spread of the disease. But then beyond that, there's an enormous sliding scale, I think. If you have the ability to, for example, pay your dog walker, if you have the financial means to continue to pay your dog walker who can't walk your dog anymore, or someone who helps you clean your house, or anybody who works for you in any capacity. If you have that ability, I think you need to do that. And then, you know, you keep sliding up the scale. If you have the ability to keep people on the payroll at your business who are working for you, even if it means you lose money, I think you have to do that, too. And it just keeps going up and up and up."

Social distancing isn’t a personal choice. It’s an ethical duty.; Vox, April 9, 2020

Sarah-Vaughan Brakman, Vox; Social distancing isn’t a personal choice. It’s an ethical duty.

Why we should foreground our commitment to the common good in the fight against coronavirus.

"Social distancing is inconvenient at best, truly burdensome at worst. What hasn’t helped matters is the confusing messaging of why we should social distance at all. We’ve been conditioned to think social distancing is only about us — lowering the risk to one’s self and one’s family. And yet we’ve also been told that this is something we need to do to protect others. 

While not necessarily incorrect, both ways of thinking about it are not equal to the task before us. What we need is an exhortation to act that is grounded firmly in an ethical foundation, one that not only gets at the deeper purpose of social distancing, but that also lays the groundwork for a more resilient society on the other side of this crisis. We as a global society need to see social distancing as nothing less than an act of solidarity, an intentional choice that binds us in a common cause."

University libraries offer online “lending” of scanned in-copyright books; Ars Technica, April 7, 2020

Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica; University libraries offer online “lending” of scanned in-copyright books

"A consortium of university libraries called HathiTrust recently announced a solution to this problem, called the Emergency Temporary Access Service. It allows participating HathiTrust member libraries to offer their patrons digital scans of books that they can "check out" and read online.

HathiTrust has a history of pushing the boundaries of copyright. It was the defendant in a landmark 2014 ruling that established the legality of library book scanning. At the time, HathiTrust was only allowing people with print disabilities to access the full text of scanned books. Now HathiTrust is expanding access to more people—though still with significant limits...

These limits distinguish HathiTrust's service from another recently announced "emergency library." Two weeks ago, the Internet Archive announced it was offering the general public the opportunity to check out 1.4 million scanned books. During the pandemic, the Internet Archive isn't limiting the number of people who can "borrow" a book simultaneously.

Cornell University legal scholar James Grimmelmann tells Ars that the limits on the HathiTrust program will put the group in a stronger position if it is ever challenged in court. The same fair use doctrine that allows HathiTrust to scan books in the first place might also justify what the organization is doing now—though that's far from certain."

Triage and ventilator rationing not the only ethical issues in pandemic, bioethicists say; National Catholic Reporter, April 6, 2020

Heidi Schlumpf, National Catholic Reporter; Triage and ventilator rationing not the only ethical issues in pandemic, bioethicists say

"News of life-saving ventilators being rationed, hospitals issuing blanket "Do Not Resuscitate" orders and politicians suggesting that some human lives are expendable in service of the economy have highlighted the importance of an ethical framework for decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic.

What used to be theoretical, textbook exercises have become real-life dilemmas for overburdened or soon-to-be-overburdened health care systems.

But Catholic bioethicists say clinical triage decisions, while important, are only part of a number of broader ethical concerns, including preventative strategies such as paid sick leave, truthful communication from political leaders and assistance with payment for testing and treatment.

Concern for the common good and for the most vulnerable populations become even more urgent during a pandemic, Catholic ethicists told NCR. And preparedness and prevention are as much moral issues as are end-of-life decisions.

Nearly 1,400 bioethicists and health leaders said as much in a letter to the White House and U.S. Congress dated March 21. The letter was organized by the New York-based Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, and included a number of prominent Catholic signatories."