Knowledge In The Stacks

"Splendidly articulate, informative and provoking....A book to be savored and gone back to."—Baltimore Sun On the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the Information Age. He explores how libraries are built and how they are destroyed, from the decay of the great Alexandrian library to scroll burnings in ancient China to the destruction of Aztec books by the Spanish—and in our own time, the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia. Encyclopedic in its breadth and novelistic in its telling, this volume will occupy a treasured place on the bookshelf next to Baker's Double Fold, Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, Manguel's A History of Reading, and Winchester's The Professor and the Madman.

Like any bored eleven-year-old with an imagination, Prem makes fantastic wishes. So when his father drags him to a monsoon-lashed Mumbai, Prem know it's futile to dream of home. Instead, he wishes for a genie, a dragon and some superpowers. What he certainly doesn't wish for is a quest to save some gods who are at the brink of extinction. He finds that the gods' last hope lies in the hands of those who channel the mysterious power of the Vedas. Caught in a cosmic crossfire, with a talking fish, some inventive monkeys and a few unexpected allies, Prem learns of his true identity-as a Torchbearer. Can the Torchbearers stop bloodthirsty demons from getting their hands on the Nectar of Immortality and bring the gods back to power?

Maxwell's down-to-earth candor combined with scholarly insight is designed to inspire and enlighten her library peers and colleagues. Drawing from history, sociology and philosophy, Sacred Stacks voices the importance of the library profession and libraries as community institutions in a secular time.

A one-stop, complete guide to tabletop role-playing games for novice librarians as well as seasoned players. Tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) are a perfect fit for library teen services. They not only hold great appeal for teen patrons, but also help build important skills ranging from math and literacy to leadership and dramatics. Role-playing games are cost-effective too. Dragons in the Stacks explains why RPGs are so effective at holding teenagers' attention, identifies their specific benefits, outlines how to select and maintain a RPG collection, and demonstrates how they can enhance teen services and be used in teen programs. Detailed reviews of role-playing games are included as well, with pointers on their strengths, weaknesses, and library applications. Coauthored by an experienced young adult librarian and an adult services librarian, this is the definitive guide to RPGs in the library, and the only one currently available.

The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.

For many institutions, to ignore your university’s ranking is to become invisible, a risky proposition in a competitive search for funding. But rankings tell us little if anything about the education, scholarship, or engagement with communities offered by a university. Drawing on a range of research and inquiry-based methods, Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge exposes how universities became servants to the education industry and its impact. Conceptually unique in its scope, Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge addresses the lack of empirical research behind university and journal ranking systems. Chapters from internationally recognized scholars in decolonial studies provide readers with robust frameworks to understand the intersections of coloniality and Indigeneity and how they play out in higher education. Contributions from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts explore the political economy of rankings within the contexts of the Global North and South, and examine alternatives to media-driven rankings. This book allows readers to consider the intersections of power and knowledge within the wider contexts of politics, culture, and the economy, to explore how assumptions about gender, social class, sexuality, and race underpin the meanings attached to rankings, and to imagine a future that confronts and challenges cognitive, environmental, and social injustice.

A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture. What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds. thestack.org

The current scientific and technical literature in the fields of medi cine and engineering, in addition to learned society journals, embraces textbooks, monographs and conference proceedings. The last of these cate gories is potentially of prime importance given the increasing pace at which knowledge is advancing. However, traditional conference proceedings often tend to be indigestable, both due to their excessive volume and to the un evenness of the ingredients. Here we have attempted to overcome these deficiencies by selecting a set of contributions which, in our opinion, in the best sense convey the flavour of the 4th IMEKO Conference on "Advances in Biomedical Measurement". This meeting, which took place in Bratislava in May, 1987, was held concurrently with the 1st Regional Conference of the Socialist European Countries on Biomedical Engineering and the 2nd Czecho slovak Conference on Biomedical Engineering. From more than 200 papers presented in 14 sessions, 56 contributions have been selected to represent four major areas within which advances in biomedical measurement are occurring. These are: measurement and instru mentation (including prosthetics); signal and image processing; modelling and simulation; and decision support. The process of deciding which authors should be invited to contribute to this volume was not always easy. What we have tried to do is to achieve a mix which provides an overview of the state of the art across this broad spectrum of endeavour.

Thousands of public relations (PR) students and professionals have relied on this authoritative text to understand the key role of research in planning and evaluating PR campaigns. Revised and expanded to reflect today's emphasis on standards-based practice, the third edition has a heightened emphasis on setting baselines, creating benchmarks, and assessing progress. Stacks presents step-by-step guidelines for using a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods to track output, outtakes, and outcomes, and shows how to present research findings clearly to clients. Every chapter features review questions and a compelling practice problem. PowerPoint slides for use in teaching are provided at the companion website. Instructors requesting a desk copy also receive a supplemental Instructor's Manual with a test bank, suggested readings, and case studies. New to This Edition: *Chapter on standardization, moving beyond the prior edition's focus on best practices. *Chapter on different types of data sets, with attention to the advantages and disadvantages of using Big Data. *Addresses the strategic use of key performance indicators. *Covers the latest content analysis software. Pedagogical Features: *Each chapter opens with a chapter overview and concludes with review questions. *End-of-chapter practice problems guide readers to implement what they have learned in a PR project. *Appendix provides a dictionary of public relations measurement and research terms. *Supplemental Instructor's Manual and PowerPoint slides.