One evidence of the striking singularity of this particular moment is the fact that there are currently 206 holds at the small library in Kearns, Utah on the book "White Fragility: Why it's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism."
While not all government records may be free or digitized, the National Archives hosts a page of links from other genealogy sites where you can look for information.
Libraries and historical/genealogical societies may also have books and periodicals that recorded the development of the area and the people who lived there, although you may have to visit in person to look at the original material has not been scanned. (Some libraries also offer free access to the commercial genealogy services.)
When University of Virginia (UVA) professor Andrew Stauffer sent his class to the library in the fall of 2009, he expected them to focus on the printed text of the books they brought back. But Stauffer and his students soon realized that was just one story being told in these volumes. While looking at nineteenth-century copies of work by Felicia Hemens, a poet widely beloved at the time for her sentimental verse, the students were immediately drawn to everything else happening in these books; not just the expected underlining and dog-ears, but bookplates, diary entries, letters, quotes, pressed flowers, and readers own poetic flights of fancy.
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In this way, Book Traces celebrates what Stauffer calls bibliodiversity; appreciating each book as its own object with its own life and history. "We're fighting against the idea that once you've digitized a single copy, then you don't need others,: says Stauffer.COMMENT
The National Library of Medicine's Database at the start of June contains over 17,000 published papers about he new coronavirus. A website called bioRxiv, which hosts studies that have yet to go through peer review, contains over 4,000 papers.COMMENT
In earlier times, few people aside from scientists would have laid eyes on these papers. Months or years after they were written, they'd wind up in printed journals tucked away on a library shelf. But now the world can surf the rising tide of research on the new coronavirus. The vast majority of papers about it can be read free online.
But just because scientific papers are easier to get hold of doesn't mean that they are easier to make sense of. Reading them can be a challenge for the layperson, even one with some science education. It's not just the jargon that scientists use to compress a lot of results into a small space. Just like sonnets, sagas and short stories, scientific papers are a genre with its own unwritten rules, rules that have developed over generations.
Charlie Forster was at the library one afternoon in March when he ran into a friend from Allderdice High School in PittsburghCOMMENT
"I was like, 'Do you want to come over to my house?'" he said, "So we took the bus home and made grilled cheeses and watched that movie 'Her'" which explores isolation and relationships nurtured via electronic devices.
Little did he know that the coronavirus that was spreading accross the country would give him and his friends their own lesson in being along.
Dear Ann Cannon,COMMENT
I find that during this time of social distancing, one of the activities I miss most is visiting the library. Any suggestions for borrowing books? Not e-books, not audio book, real books.
The Entry for November 14th begins, "I must make a note of this day as one of the absolutely flawless ones of my life." Even if his private journal was a kind of performance-- for himself? for future readers?-- it was a very convincing one. (The penciled journal pages can be read in the rare-books room of the British Library.)COMMENT
