While technically a private institution, NYPL is chartered by New York State, many of its buildings are publicly owned, and the mayor, council speaker, and comptroller each appoint a representative to the board.
The NYPL board has discussed renovating and re-purposing these apartments. It's a good idea, though it should be pointed out that this board has a history of foolish, reckless, and possibly corrupt dealing, as when they sold off the Donnell Branch and nearly destroyed the iconic Main Library on 42nd & 5th (the one with the lions; look up "Central Library Plan" for details).
Now we are working on a local designation. This is important because real estate developers have many of these buildings in the crosshairs. Currently, hand in hand with the NYPL and the Robin Hood Foundation, they are looking to tear down the Inwood Branch, under the guise of building a shiny new library, inside a big condo with some "affordable housing". A few years ago, they did tear down the Brooklyn Heights Branch, replacing it with a smaller library inside a large condo (there is an argument that civic works ought to be freestanding to communicate import). Before that, the Donnell Library was torn down, replaced year later with a library that is a fraction of the original and squeezed into a basement beneath a luxury hotel, the latter valued at a multiple of what the NYPL got in the deal. And for a while, the developers behind the Barclays Center were itching to tear down the Pacific Branch in Brooklyn.
These libraries are important civic spaces. Whatever your feelings about paper vs digital, there is no denying that NYC's libraries are heavily used, and that they constitute an important part of the fabric of our civic life, a place where New Yorkers of all stripes congregate and mingle.
Historical footnote: NYPL is in fact a private institution chartered by New York State, formed through the merger of the Astor and Lenox libraries, to which was added a gift from the Tilden Foundation. It serves the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, while the Queens Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library have their own systems (Brooklyn was a separate city until 1898). To further confuse matters, many of the libraries NYPL runs, including the Main Library, are owned by NYC, while others are belong to NYPL itself. Scott Sherman's book, Patience & Fortitude, provides a good, pithy history.
No reason why those groups couldn’t be putting libraries in all their new buildings. I think the public would benefit more from ADDITIONAL libraries, particularly in underserved areas, vs replacing ones that already exist!
Always felt YT sold itself early because they needed someone with deep pockets to defend themselves from the lawsuits over copyright infringement. Insiders, am I wrong?
I did a lot of work at PARC on the design of readable fonts, and a few years later on reading from a display (CRT) using a super-good eye tracker we had. This was prompted by "bad feelings" when trying to read from displays. The displays are better today, but I still have "bad feelings" (somewhat different) from reading from various kinds of displays, even including eInk ones. It's partly "movement" and partly memory, so I always print out to read when I can. (This is a disappointment to say the least.)
Thanks. I tried to go all digital a few years ago -- getting rid of nearly all my 1000+ paper books -- only to conclude I'm generally better off reading paper and nearly always better off reading important things on paper. This because paper has a higher barrier to entry (I think of it as "slow information"), because the cookie-cutter sizing of tablets and ereaders screws up sizing (of code in particular) and, frankly, because I get tired of looking at screens and struggle to resist context switching. That said, I like to have an electronic copy of everything for easy referencing and corpus work.
The subject of paper vs digital is of particular interest to me because I volunteer with www.savenypl.org, a group created to thwart the NYPL's efforts to gut the stacks at the 42nd Street Library and sell of two branch libraries (we succeeded, mostly). I am not as skeptical of keeping books off site as some of our members, but I think many libraries are misguided in their rush to remove paper books, for reasons of both reading efficacy and surveillance. I know many technologists share these concerns. Richard Stallman was kind enough to help a few years ago (https://stallman.org/save-the-nypl.html). Now it would be good to have additional technical people weigh in on the issue of digitization / paper book removal.
May I add you to the list of such people and / or keep you posted?
There's no question that electronic media as readable as paper can be done -- and, in a way, it is not too surprising that it hasn't (I don't think most technologists care). I am quite curious why the super-high-res screens don't work better for this (worth looking at).
The first commercial laser printers were 300dpi and the result was quite readable (the very first one that was invented -- by Gary Starkweather at Parc -- was 500pdi). I asked John Warnock why 300dpi worked better than I thought it would, and he said that it was the "real black" and excellent accuracy.
We have both at least that on "retina" type displays, so I'm guessing that there is still some refresh flicker that is causing some of the problems (if so, then that would revise long ago experiments that indicated most people would not be bothered by anything above 120p).
(But I think I feel that my eyes are doing extra saccades on laptop displays, and that the contrast ratios and res are not good enough with eInk.)
The experiments I did at Parc, cross connected with Tom Cornsweet's work at SRI, showed curves that swung both with contrast ratio, and "distance from real black".
Another thing that will help (for "Aldus" type personal books) will be the next round of flexible displays that will feel a little more conformal.
(Also, how could the Ipad and Eink tablet folks failed to have put the batteries on one side of a symmetric device so it could be held with the center of mass in the offhand?) This is really shockingly awful elementary human factors design. The next round of these will hopefully have a lower density/mass in any case.
I think a glossy screen in a well lit room will never achieve an acceptable black. I am writing this on a macbok in a room with bay windows and I can see my reflection on the white parts of the screen.
Screens used to have a "quarter wave plate" that would knock down a lot of the reflections -- I'm not sure why the glossy screens came back (more light out? cheaper?).
I have an older MacAir that does not have a highly reflective screen. The black is pretty good.
My feeling is that my eyes are jumping a bit with it, and for this (or some other) reason, I also have a distinct "I'm not remembering as well" underlying feeling. (This could be an illusion, or it could be harking back to long ago when I was trying to learn how to remember more of what I was reading ...)
Glossy displays definitely appear to have more vibrant color in the average big-box store with very diffuse lighting. They are also somewhat better if you can sit so that all of the specular reflections from bright lights will be directed away from you.
Digital Media May Be Changing How You Think. "Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly,"
https://www.dartmouth.edu/press-releases/digital-media-chang...
Thanks. This is interesting (and somewhat related to a Stanford thesis done by Steve Wyer ca 1980). And it has the fun irony of presenting a rather abstract result in the medium it says emphasizes concreteness ...
It would be good to know if they have tried studies that involve grades of reading fluency.
As a white man from a relatively privileged background, I lived in Harlem long before it was deemed "safe". I remember apartment hunting north of Central Park around 2003 and getting a lot of dirty looks from the black Americans who had been there for generations. Who could blame them? To them I was another invader from Columbia U. And while I was there as a "pioneer" and not a "settler", as one paying about as much as they did, and while I resented the charm-bracelet girls as much as they did, I was changing the tone of the place, like it or not.
New York is now in the midst of a battle over absentee landlords. You might call it ground zero in the battle over the future of the US. You walk through Central Park and the Plaza Hotel, now mostly condos, sits dark. No one home. And behind there's a string of supertowers twice as high as the average skyscraper. The New York Times last year had an expose [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign...] about the buyers: many foreign, many dirty, most masking their identities with shell companies. Since the owners often do not reside in New York, they're contribution to the city's coffers is mixed. More importantly, it seems pretty clear that a majority of New Yorkers resent the shadows being cast over their parks. We may have "air rights", but unlike San Francisco, we have no law guaranteeing sun rights. No wonder many of us are deficient in D.
Meanwhile, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, is happy to let the builders have their way, so long as they support his "affordable housing" agenda, ie, contribute. Until recently he refused to acknowledge what has been plain: that the homeless population has ballooned -- to 60,000, almost half of them children. Many of these people got priced out.
We can debate the fairness of all this as well as the wisdom of price controls, etc. What we should acknowledge, though, is the fact that policies have consequences, that sometimes change outpaces people's ability to adapt, and that we as a city / society will pay the costs, directly or indirectly. For a very moving but also nonjudgmental look at these dynamics, check out the documentary Homme Less: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=homme+less
I wonder how many of the people in the system the MTA/NYPD can identify in real time and with what precision it can locate them. I presume they know the identities of a large proportion through entrance swipes from credit/debit-purchased metrocards, but that still leaves the problem of determining when someone has exited and where they in the meantime.
Between the travel data they're storing on the metrocards (exhibit number one, the Ebola doctor) and the ubiquitous cameras, I think the WiFi has more to do with tracking the public than improving service.
I was the subject of one of Stanton's photos. While I admired his site at the time and what seemed like a commitment to free speech, I've since watched him sell out when it suits him.
HONY is a sandboxed version of New York and New Yorkers, and the political stands Stanton takes are cheap shots. He is more bond salesman than reporter. I'd be happy to see his credibility in a million little pieces.
Could you please give some examples? I understand the cultural criticism in the original post, but it seems extreme to me to wish ruin on someone because of their photography project.
