Library

Bandi Mbubi on Conflict Minerals

I’ve previously blogged, written about and, at this year’s Digital Odyssey, spoke on conflict minerals and the need for librarians to be aware of and respond to the issue. In the video above Bandi Mbubi speaks at TEDxExeter on his own experience of the effects of the war in Congo caused by tantalum mining.

Bandi Mbubi grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, experiencing first hand the political unrest and oppression which have since worsened there. As a student activist, Bandi suffered persecution and fled the country, seeking political asylum in the U.K. But Mbubi has kept his home country on his radar, noting how the mining of tantalum — a mineral used in cell phones and computers — has fueled the ongoing war there in which 5 million have died.

Congo Calling

Raise Hope for Congo

Harvard cracks the ultimate archive, DNA

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

Another People’s Library under assault

Activists in Oakland opened a People’s Library yesterday…

Oakland Activists Take Over Derelict Library Building by Andrew Stelzer | August 13, 2012 — 8:38 PM

Neighborhood activists are occupying an abandoned library building in East Oakland … and opening the doors on a grassroots “people’s library.”

Volunteers sorted book donations Monday while children made welcome signs and mopped the floor of the building just off International Boulevard and 23rd Avenue. Organizers dubbed it the “Victor Martinez Peoples’ Library,” in honor of the late Bay Area writer, author of Parrot in the Oven.

Activist Jaime Silva says the city has talked of rehabilitating the library twice in the last decade but has done nothing. The derelict 1918 library remains an eyesore, he said.

…and today, this happened

More images are available here. For updates follow @BibliotecaPopul on Twitter.

Updates

Oakland police shut down ‘people’s library’ installed in vacant building

Biblioteca Victor Martinez in East Oakland (Video)

Victor Martinez People’s Library Open

Abandoned library occupied in Oakland

Occupying Oakland: “It’s Supposed to Be a Library, Not a Dump!”

Response from Librarians

On Oakland’s people’s library

There was one thing that all the speakers agreed upon at the debate – even if libraries are obsolete, librarians aren’t. Rather than dividing our time and effort on compensating for an inadequate educational system, or inequalities in the market place, we should free up our brilliant librarians to work within these organizations to make the institutions better. Why take amazing information professionals and saddle them with leaky roofs, security at the door, and maintaining physical artifacts in often duplicative collections just waiting to be digitized? We see this at the Cushing Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts that made the press when they significantly downsized the physical collection of the library. They did so at the same time they hired more librarians. Close the library and hire more librarians.

(Thanks to @freemoth for the link)

— Libraries are Obsolete #2

Libraries Are Obsolete

On Wednesday, April 18, Harvard Library Strategic Conversations will sponsor an Oxford-style debate on the role of libraries. The program will be held from 3 to 4:30pm in Piper Auditorium, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, with a reception to follow.

Libraries Are Obsolete: An Oxford-Style Debate

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Updated April 26 with a link to the video of the full debate

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