Latest news with #libraries
Times
17 hours ago
- Business
- Times
Finland proposes a very novel idea — invest in the public library
In the €100 million Oodi library, which looms over central Helsinki like a cruise ship from the future, robots called Tatu, Patu and Veera trundle back and forth between the shelves and the reading rooms. Against this backdrop, foreign visitors might be surprised to see how many children and teenagers are engaged in an almost unsettlingly archaic activity: reading and borrowing books. In the age of TikTok, Netflix and Candy Crush, it is not just Finland's public libraries that are booming, but also demand for their physical paperbacks and hardbacks. Last year the average Finn visited them nine times and borrowed 15 books, resulting in the highest lending figures for 20 years. The appetite for children's and young adults' literature has risen to a record for the third year in a row, with a total of 38 million loans in 2024. That works out at about 40 books or other pieces of material, such as audiobooks, for each person under the age of 18. In Helsinki, the capital, which has a population of about 690,000, there were 9.2 million library visits and 5.7 million loans. Even by the standards of a country that is often ranked as the most literate on the planet, the numbers are remarkable. In Britain, the total number of loans has fallen to less than half of what it was at the turn of the millennium, despite a tentative recovery in the wake of the pandemic, and about 40 libraries a year are closing. Visits to German public libraries are still about a fifth lower than they were before the advent of Covid-19 and about one in five of them has shut down over the past decade. The most obvious explanation for the phenomenon is that Finland values its libraries and invests accordingly. The state spends about €60 per capita on the public library system each year, approximately four times as much as the UK and six times as much as Germany. • Encyclopaedia Britannica is back and 'it's better than ChatGPT' Where other countries rely on corporate skyscrapers or shopping centres for their visions of architectural modernity, Finland often looks to its libraries, such as Oodi and Vallila in Helsinki, the main Metso library in Tampere, or the revered 20th-century designer Alvar Aalto's projects in Rovaniemi and Seinajoki. They have traditionally served as engines of social mobility and integration. Erkki Sevanen, professor of literature at the University of Eastern Finland, grew up in a working-class family in Eura, a thinly populated district of villages 110 miles to the northwest of Helsinki. 'My parents and relatives did not used to read books, but there was a fine and well-equipped public library in our home village,' he said. 'It opened a whole world of classical literature and philosophy for me in the 1960s and 1970s.' Sevanen said the public libraries were a significant part of the reason he had ultimately pursued a university career, and that today they perform a similar function for immigrants to Finland. 'I am very grateful to this system,' he said. 'It was part of what made my social rise from the working class to academic circles possible.' The roots of this culture predate Finland's independence in 1918. Like large parts of Scandinavia and continental northern Europe, it was profoundly influenced by Lutheran Protestantism and its insistence that each individual should engage with the texts of scripture for themselves. 'The ability to read was a requirement for everyone who wanted to get married. To demonstrate their reading skills, people were tested at church gatherings,' said Ulla Richardson, professor of technology-enhanced language learning at the University of Jyvaskyla. The movement gathered steam in the 19th century, when Finland was a semi-autonomous duchy in the Russian empire and the new public libraries were focal points for an emerging sense of national identity. They remain important hubs for Finnish society, providing a space in which people can be alone and together at the same time. 'Many Finns tend to consider libraries almost as sanctuaries,' Richardson said. Alongside computers and internet access, they offer board games, video games, musical instruments, sewing machines, seasonal theatre passes and even sports equipment in some cases. These services are particularly valued by families with straitened financial means, who might not otherwise be able to afford school textbooks or other media. 'The libraries are spaces that children and teens can access freely, especially if they don't have other places to go,' said Richardson. 'These days we also have self-service libraries open when there are no personnel working.'
BBC News
2 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Consultation under way on threatened Peterborough libraries
A council is asking residents how they use their city's network of libraries as it reviews plans to reduce the City Council proposed cutting its static libraries from 10 down to three as part of budget proposals, saying the move would save £314,000 a users objected to the plans and asked the council to reconsider the loss of community authority's cabinet agreed to put the proposal on hold and "complete a full needs assessment" before making a detailed recommendation. The consultation, which will close on 5 August, asks people about which libraries and services they use and how they travel are currently 10 libraries and a mobile library serving Peterborough. In its original proposal, the council said it would invest in a modernised Central Library and two additional libraries, with smaller self-service facilities in hubs across the of Woodston Library, one of the branches earmarked for closure, argued the facility was more than a library and also used as a community space for local residents. Alison Jones, cabinet member for housing and communities at Peterborough City Council, said: "We know how much some people value their library service and this came across clearly in the budget consultation earlier in the year. "We listened to what residents told us and committed to carrying out this engagement exercise prior to any decisions being made."The council said the results of the survey would be analysed and published by the end of the current 10 libraries are: Peterborough Central LibraryBretton LibraryDogsthorpe LibraryEye LibraryHampton LibraryOrton LibraryStanground LibraryThorney LibraryWerrington LibraryWoodston Library Follow Peterborough news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
New York Times
5 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
Watchdog Finds Trump Administration Broke Law by Withholding Library Funds
The Trump administration broke the law when it withheld funding for the nation's libraries, a nonpartisan government watchdog said on Monday, a finding that inches the White House another step closer to a legal showdown over its powers to reconfigure the country's spending. The decision by the Government Accountability Office was the second time in two months that oversight officials have found fault in the ways that President Trump and his top aides have tried to circumvent lawmakers in their quest to reshape the federal budget so that it conforms with their political views. The inquiry concerned the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which serves as the federal government's primary source of funding for libraries, museums and archives. In March, Mr. Trump sought to sharply curtail the agency as part of an executive order focused on the 'reduction of the federal bureaucracy,' prompting legal challenges from states, librarians and other opponents. The accountability office, an arm of Congress that keeps watch over the nation's spending, concluded on Monday that the library agency ultimately 'ceased performing' its functions after the president's directive, and withheld funding that lawmakers had previously appropriated to carry out its mission. Ethics officials ultimately classified the interruption in aid as an illegal impoundment, which is prohibited under a 1970s law meant to restrict the president and his ability to defy Congress on spending. The White House maintains that those limits are unconstitutional, and the president and his top budget aide, Russell T. Vought, have sought to test that theory as part of their dramatic and chaotic reorganization of the federal government. Earlier this year, the accountability office revealed that it had opened more than three dozen investigations into Mr. Trump's spending activities. It announced the first of those findings in late May, concluding that the administration violated the law when it withheld money under a $5 billion program to expand electric vehicle charging stations. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Flipping the bird at an old man wasn't exactly in my playbook. It felt like a rupture
Here's a scene: I'm at a library on the outskirts of Melbourne. I'm 'in conversation' with a librarian. It's not possible to keep those words out of scare quotes, not if you're aware of the small and faulty machine that keeps Australian book publicity moving. What I am doing is being asked generous, kind, eminently answerable questions about my new book so that I can move a few units. It's a 'conversation' I'm grateful for because I like moving units and I like talking to librarians and, let's be real, I also like talking about myself. The crowd, including several Melbourne friends, is attentive and also kind and generous. What could go wrong? Libraries are safe spaces, temporary haven for kids and their parents, rough sleepers and the lonely, and people who a millennial friend describes as neurospicy. I love libraries. They're full of readers and I love them too. So, this library is a safe space. The warm murmur of people, some of them sitting on the carpet in the aisles, disappeared into words. The big windows looking on to a lake, giving light to the pages. I'm glad to be there. The crowd (the 'crowd') includes a couple of men, one in his possibly late 60s, one in his possibly late 70s. The first listens and smiles; the second stands at the back of the room to one side. He is very clearly someone who doesn't know who I am and doesn't care, but neither do I – he's there and I'm grateful. At the end of the conversation there are a few questions, some carefully crafted by writing friends who know that the terrible silence that follows 'does anyone have a question?' is a lonely place. Then the older man puts up his hand and the microphone is handed to him. Then he starts a long story about his long life, and I let him talk because I get it. I mean, I just talked about myself; have at it, buddy. It's not surprising to me that what he says has absolutely nothing to do with my book. I wait, not for him to finish, but for a couple of minutes of monologue to pass, and then I say something like, it's clear that the past is vivid for all of us. That's why I've written about it. Afterwards there's a signing line. The two men are there. The older stands to one side of the desk I'm sitting at, as though we're friends and he has more special things to say just to me. He doesn't need to buy a book. The other man steps in front of a woman and her child waiting for me to sign their copy and I say, actually, you've pushed in – can you wait at the back of the line? I don't say, you dick, but I think it. When he gets to the front of the line he tells me a pretty engaging story about his past, and then he goes away without having bought a book. I'm on my way out, getting my bag, chatting to the librarian, who's smart and warm and kind, and has worn herself out talking about me. The older man is still there and he's saying, can I have a photo? I've had my photo taken an inordinate number of times in the last 24 hours and I haven't enjoyed it. I'm in my late 50s and I haven't yet reconciled myself to the way I look. The person I now appear to be, heavier, with a lined face and teeth I don't like, isn't someone I want to know about. I know, my bad – I should love my older self. So, partly because I'm sick of it but mostly because this bloke only wants a photo as an extension of the attention he craves, I say no. I point to the big photo of me on the screen, taken several years ago, and say, you can take a photo of that. I'm turning away as he says you looked better with long hair. Without warning – to me or anyone around me – I'm swinging back round to face him and I'm giving him the finger. Then I'm saying, a hot flush surging across my body and face: You don't get to talk to women like that. You can't speak to me like that. I catch a glimpse of the librarian's face – tears have sprung to her eyes. I see my young publicist, who's holding my bag and stepping between me and the old man. She ushers me away and I can hear the man protesting or saying something, whatever it is, something about me, something about himself. I don't look back as Jasmine and I step outside into the bright autumn air and hurry towards our taxi. So many things to say about this. First, that flipping the bird at an old man wasn't exactly in my playbook – not at any time and especially not when I'm trying to sell books. But also, flipping the bird wasn't something I wanted to be doing. Not because it's rude, but because it felt like a rupture, a violation – of me, not of him. A thousand times I've tolerated and even, sometimes, welcomed comments on my appearance. A thousand times I've stood, politely rigid, while a man tells me about himself. This usually happens when it's me who's meant to be the focus. Some men – not all of them – subconsciously hate this and need to remind themselves that they exist by telling me about themselves. I've learned now to civilly stop them, or even point out to them what they're up to, but I've never made a rude gesture, because control over a situation like this is what I want and need. Women learn this control young, and practise it – or fail to practise it – throughout their lives, because the comments and the monologues never stop coming. But as it turns out there's some ghost chilli in my own spice mix. I wanted to say to that man: do you think I'm not looking at you? Do you think I didn't notice that you looked like a praying mantis, frail and savage, wobbling away in the corner of my vision, waiting to do something nasty? You're old too, dickhead. And you probably looked better when you had all your hair. The rupture came because the abyss below it was already there. But the concealment of that abyss, where self-doubt lives (self-doubt about my looks, and even about my intelligence) is my safe space. It's my choice to stand guard over it and repel people with thoughtful, firm, clear words. It made me feel shaky and hurt when I gave him the finger. I hope it gave him a shock and I hope it hurt him too, and I don't regret it. I just don't like it when men make me lose my cool, because it's my fucking cool. Tegan Bennett Daylight is a 56-year-old teacher, critic and writer of novels, including How to Survive 1985
CTV News
12-06-2025
- Business
- CTV News
AI chatbots need more books to learn from
CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artists and others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes 'all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated US$50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'' Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language,' said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.' ———— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives. Matt O'brien, The Associated Press
