Each week, we reflect on the top articles, blog posts, tweets, news, thoughts, and other tidbits we’ve found interesting or useful. Check out what our writers have spotted this week in library news. Enjoy!

Sheila

The Mozilla Global Sprint collaborative hackathon is taking place Thursday, May 10 and Friday, May 11, 2018, featuring projects around web literacy, openness, privacy & security, digital inclusion, and decentralization with the goal of creating a better, safer, and healthier internet! For those interested in digital information, data, and records, Endangered Data Week will be participating in the sprint with a project to develop a user-friendly toolkit of endangered data-related tutorials and resources. Interested parties from all backgrounds, skillsets, and experience levels are encouraged to contribute in person (depending on location) or remotely for all or part of the sprint. For more information, see the EDW Global Sprint primer and list of ways to contribute.

A new article in The Atlantic explores how Artificial Intelligence is Cracking Open the Vatican’s Secret Archives through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and transcription technology.

Are you a master’s or doctoral student focusing on digital information and technology in librarianship, information science, or a closely related field? The Paul Evan Peters Fellowship (sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE) is now seeking applicants; deadline is May 24, 2018.

The Intellectual Freedom Committee of Multnomah County Library has compiled the following articles for the Rights, Responsibilities & Reactions – Intellectual Freedom News, April 2018, related to issues of privacy, censorship, free speech, intellectual freedom, social media, and access:

• Choose Privacy Week 2018: Explore, learn, and teach about big data – Choose Privacy Week Blog, American Library Association (ALA)
• Homeland Security to compile database of journalists, Bloggers – Bloomberg Law 
• Data and Goliath: Four ways you can protect yourself from digital surveillance – Huffington Post
• “Big Brother” in India requires fingerprint scans for food, phones and finances – New York Times
• ALA announces top 10 challenged books of 2017 – ALA office for Intellectual Freedom
• ‘Campus free-speech crisis’ is focus of new law – despite lack of Arizona incidents – AZCentral
• Aurora Library removes poem after accusations of Islamophobia – NBC Chicago
• Aurora Library employee resigns after Muslim poem controversy – Chicago Tribune
• Facebook reveals its censorship guidelines for the first time — all 27 pages – Los Angeles Times
• Platform censorship won’t fix the Internet – Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Reference: New database tracks evictions in the United States, data set also available – Library Journal Infodocket
• ALA Panel on Capitol Hill: Leverage libraries, E-rate to improve tribal, rural access to high-speed Internet – ALA News
• Oregon governor fires state librarian – Library Journal

Kait

Western University’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies student-run journal has just launched! Check out your fellow LIS students’ research in Vol 1 of Emerging Library & Information Perspectives.

Jodi

In an effort to encourage local governments to reach data based decisions, Harvard’s Ash Center runs the remarkably useful Data-Smart City Solutions site. The site gathers tools and offers solutions to recurring problems for urban communities, ranging from infrastructure to health services. In an effort to make their information more discoverable, the site recently launched Solutions Search, a searchable database that helps users find the solutions they need. Compiling awesome visualizations, articles on using data, and everything in between, the database is an excellent information resource for patrons and local governing bodies alike.

Cover photo from Alan Wu on Flickr Commons. Changes were made in adapting this image.  Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.