'Thappad would have run even longer and better had the coronavirus not been there.'

'What I'm really worried about is that the day this lockdown ends, we will all rush to work and we'll kill the lovely environment we are seeing now.'

'We are so busy in our lives, there is never any time.'

'What you do today defines what you are going to be tomorrow.'

'I will not take anything for granted now.'

Please join us for a day-long symposium:

Women Documenting the World
Women as Folklorists, Ethnomusicologists & Fieldworkers
Thursday, September 26, 2019 
9:30 am -5:00 pm
Mary Pickford Theater, James Madison Building, Library of Congress

The American Folklife Center launches its multi-year initiative to highlight, explore, and celebrate the contributions of women as ethnographic fieldworkers and scholars with Women Documenting the World, a day-long program of talks, interviews, and discussions on Thursday, September 26. 

The free event, which is open to the public, calls attention to the role of women in establishing many of the foundational collections that enrich the American Folklife Center archive as well as other ethnographic archives throughout the world. It features presentations by contemporary researchers who are currently engaged in both national and international fieldwork, and includes brief presentations by American Folklife Center staff about important fieldwork collections in the American Folklife Center archive that were created by women, and that are too often overlooked.

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at 202-707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov

Find further information at the link!

African American Dollmaking and Puppetry: Renegotiating Identity, Restoring Community
Various speakers and artists, moderated by Camilla Bryce-Laporte

February 18, 2020, 11:30am-2:00pm
119 First Floor
Thomas Jefferson Building

African American artisans utilize ancient skills and innovative technologies to create dolls and puppets that are both whimsical and starkly serious. Their creations — incorporating clay, textiles, wood, glass, and found objects — embrace the somber reality of African American experiences and optimism for a boundless future. Working alone and in communities these artisans create dolls and puppets that articulate Black beauty, strength, style, spirituality, and truth. Their works, embodying older traditions and innovative vocabularies for storytelling, are designed to amuse, educate, and heal. Dolls of each of 8 makers will be displayed on tables from 11:30-12:00 pm and 1:30 pm-2:00 pm.

Folklorist Camila Bryce-Laporte will present six makers as they discuss their work and the stories behind that work. This will be followed with a question and answer session from 12 noon to 1:30 pm.

This program may deal with sensitive subjects and is aimed at adults rather than children.

Some of the dolls will be for sale through the auspices of the Library of Congress sales shop.

Click here for more information.

One of the many ironies of modern living is that while technology is bringing people closer, the sense of loneliness is growing. That’s because a text message can never replace a hug, and virtual Siri a real friend. ​

Barker Library - TA439.S96 2013

Barker Library - TA440.S85 2017

Barker Library - TA435.A36 2019

Hayden Library - QH450.2.L63 2018

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Hayden Library - QH505.L397 2019

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Hayden Library - QH331.F433 2018

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In his Move Fast and Don’t Break Things presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle, Scott Jehl shared a number of resilient patterns and tools to help us establish and maintain performant access to our Web sites. Here's my notes from his talk:

• For successful Web design, people used to suggest we move fast and break things. Today we've become more responsible but things can still break for our users if we're not mindful.
• So many factors that can compromise the delivery of our Web sites are out of our control. We need to be aware of these in order to build resilience into our designs.
• We used to use browser detection and feature detection to ensure our sites were supported across Web browsers. Progressive enhancement's importance ballooned as a wide range of new devices for accessing the Web, touch interactions, and more browsers became popular.
• Trying to make a Web site look and work the same across devices was broken, we realized this was the wrong goal and we need to adapt to varying screens, networks, input types, and more.
• Some practices stay good. Progressive enhancement and accessibility prepared us for many of these changes but it is also a performance enhancement on its own.
• Figuring out how to make Web sites faster used to be hard but the tools we have for measuring performance have been improving (like PageSpeedTest and WebPageTest).

Making Web Sites Fast

• First meaningful content: how soon does a page appear to be useful to a user. Progressive enhancement is about starting with meaningful HTML and then layering additional enhancements on top of it. When browsers render HTML, they look for dependencies in the file (CSS and Javascript) before displaying anything.
• CSS and Javascript are most often the render-blockers on sites, not images & videos. Decide if they need to load at high priority and if not, load async or defer. If you need them to run right away, consider server push (HTTP2) to send files that you know the browser needs making them ready to render right away.
• If your server does not support push, you can inline your critical CSS and/or Javascript. Inlining however is bad for caching as it does not get reused by other pages. To get around this you can use the Cache API to inline content and cache it as a file for reuse.
• Critical CSS tools can look over a series of files and identify the common CSS you need across a number of different pages for initial rendering. If you inline your critical CSS, you can preload the rest of your CSS (not great browser support today).
• Inlining and push are best for first time visits, for return visits they can be wasteful. We can use cookies for checking for return visits or make use of Service Worker.
• Time to interactive: time it takes a site to become interactive for the user. We should be aiming for interactivity in under 5seconds on a median mobile phone on 3G. Lower end phones can take a long time to process Javascript after it downloads.
• More weight does not mean more wait. You can prioritize when things load to make pages render much faster.

Keeping Web Sites Fast

• Making a web site fast is easier than keeping it fast. Over time, Web sites will add a number of third party services with unknown performance consequences.
• We can use a number of tools, like Lighthouse, to track performance unfriendly dependencies. Speed Curves will let you set performance budgets and see when things are over. This allows people to ask questions about the costs of what we're adding to sites.
• Varying content and personalization can increase optimizations but they are costly from a performance perspective since they introduce a second meaningful content render. Moving these features to the server-side can help a lot.
• Cloudflare has a solution that allows you to manipulate pages on their server before it comes down to browser. These server-side service workers allow you to adjust pages off the client and thereby avoid delays.
• Homepages and landing pages are often filled with big images and videos. They're difficult to keep performant because the change all the time and are often managed outside of a central CMS.
• For really image heavy pages, we can use srcset attributes to define multiple sizes of images. Writing this markup can be tricky if written by hand. Little helper apps can allow people to write good code.
• Soon we'll have a native lazy load feature in browsers for images and iframes. Chrome has it in testing now and can send aspect ratios before actual images.

A gesture of love and solidarity from estates and communities in East London to Grenfell and their local community.

Last year, India's food consumption increased almost 5 per cent considering that it had 7 plus GDP growth. India consumes more edible oil than any other country in the world. Most of the staple diet of many countries are soybeans, maize, rice, wheat etc. Many readers have complained that Rice's statement was taken out of context to sensationalize. Here is what happened.

New York : Teachers College Press, ©2001

London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

Dordrecht ; Boston : Kluwer Academic Publishers, [1996]

Barcelona : Editorial Anagrama, 2015-2017.

Thursday, January 16, 10:30 AM
NATIONAL AMBASSADOR FOR YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE INAUGURATION: JASON REYNOLDS

Award-winning author Jason Reynolds will be inaugurated as the 2020-2021 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, the seventh writer to hold this position. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden will lead a conversation with Reynolds during the ceremony, which will also include a special appearance by 2018-2019 National Ambassador Jacqueline Woodson.

Tickets are not required for this event, which is free and open to the public. This event will also be livestreamed from both the Library's Facebook page and the Library's YouTube site (with captions).

Co-sponsored by Every Child a Reader and the Children’s Book Council, with additional support from Dollar General Literacy Foundation.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

To learn more about Jason Reynolds and his activities as National Ambassador, visit his Library of Congress resource guide. 

The Library of Congress' partner, Every Child a Reader, is currently accepting proposal submissions from libraries, schools, community centers, and organizations interested in hosting an event with Jason Reynolds, the 7^th National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Reynolds will travel to rural/small underserved communities across the country during his two-year term to have meaningful discussions with young people. Through his platform, “GRAB THE MIC: Tell Your Story,” he will connect with, listen to, and empower students to share their stories and start their journey as storytellers.

Organizations are encouraged to put together proposals that support and align with Jason's platform and the mission of the program. 

To learn more about the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature program click here. To learn more about Reynolds’ tenure as Ambassador click here.

Submit your proposal here: https://everychildareader.net/ambassador/

The Spy Next Door Trailer

Outdoor Darts isn't for the faint of heart.

The iNuke Boom from Behringer weighs 700 pounds and can pump out an almost illegal amount of decibels.

James Cameron wants everyone to adopt 5D, a term coined by the film and television industry to describe shooting 2D and 3D simultaneously.  We caught up with him at NAB recently and asked him why?

Square Enix presents Sleeping Dogs, an open world crime drama set in the city of Hong Kong.

And we're off! Comic-Con is just starting and if we're to judge by this video, already super awesome! Check out a glimpse of whats to come...

We chat with the cast of Doctor Who on US response to the show, who they're most excited to see, and much more!

A quick and easy way to make wounds that will last for hours and hours.

Inside the Mansion -- and Mind -- of Kim Dotcom