Recent quotes:

Cai Xia: An Insider Breaks with the Chinese Communist Party

The People’s Liberation Army assigned me to a military medical school. My job was to manage its library, which happened to carry Chinese translations of “reactionary” works, mostly Western literature and political philosophy. Distinguished by their gray covers, these books were restricted to regime insiders for the purpose of familiarizing themselves with China’s ideological opponents, but in secret, I read them, too. I was most impressed by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by the American journalist William Shirer, and a collection of Soviet fiction. There was a world of ideas outside of the Marxist classics, I realized. But I still believed that Marxism was the only truth.
#communism #China #library - foreignaffairs.com

'Extraordinary' 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time | Books | The Guardian

“It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,” said Wilson-Lee. “The idea that this object which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project and which one always thought of with this great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved, for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …”
#history #europe #literature #library - theguardian.com

Fitbit creates research library with Fitabase, publishes results of corporate wellness study | MobiHealthNews

The library currently has 163 different published studies that mention using a Fitbit (or a few of them) as part of their study design. The pace of research using the wearables has been accelerating every year, Ramirez said, posing what Fitabase believed was a need for a comprehensive library. “So we wanted to make it a public resource where anyone who wants to explore Fitbit research can have a one-stop shop. It’s meant to be a library down the street, and it will continue to grow as people do more research.”
#big-data #fitbit #library - mobihealthnews.com

The Internet Archive tries to remember

Right now, the archive holds around 20 petabytes of data, including 500,000 pieces of software, more than 2 million books, 3 million hours of TV, and 430 billion web pages. In a single day, they digitize more than 1,000 books. They capture TV 24 hours a day. In a week, they save more than 1 billion URLs. As of 2013, only 8 percent of the archive was uploaded by users, some 53,000 people who have accounts with the archive. In order to continue the work of creating “universal access to all knowledge,” as is the archive’s mission, they want to get as many people working on the project as possible.
#memory #big-data #library - niemanlab.org