Based on preliminary analysis, the average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 54.6°F, 2.6°F above the 20th century average. This was the third warmest year since record keeping began in 1895, behind 2012 (55.3°F) and 2016 (54.9°F), and the 21st consecutive warmer-than-average year for the U.S. (1997 through 2017). The five warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S. have all occurred since 2006. Source: NCEI/NOAA
During the year, the U.S. experienced 16 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion, with total costs of approximately $306 billion – a new U.S. annual record. The previous costliest year for the U.S. was 2005 with losses of $215 billion driven in large part by Hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Rita. The number of events (16) ties 2011 for most billion-dollar disasters in a single year. Source: NCEI/NOAA
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
From The Chicago Tribune: Last week, city and Chicago Public Library officials declared Chicago a sanctuary city for those stories, by establishing “Book Sanctuaries” across the city’s 77 distinct community ...
From Penn State: Penn State University Libraries has expanded its robust scholarly research potential of one of America’s foremost 20th-century writers through the acquisition of the Toby and Betty Bruce ...
From Politico: Far from the trenches in states like Florida and Texas, organizations in deep-blue New York are stepping into the fray by directly lending 25,000 books to non-residents since spring, ...
From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...
From a ULC Release: The Urban Libraries Council’s new member tool — the Business Value Calculator — provides public libraries with a concrete way to measure and evaluate its contributions ...
From an Ithaka S+R Post by Kurtis Tanaka: As Ithaka S+R’s research has well documented, people in prison have profound information needs and suffer from an equally profound lack of resources ...
DeepMind’s New Chatbot Uses Google Searches Plus Humans to Give Better Answers (via MIT Technology Review) Inside the 15,000-Strong Record Collection at Hawaii’s State Archives (via Vinyl Factory) South Carolina: ...
Direct to the Full Text of the Resolution Introduced by Congressman Raskin 7 pages; PDF. From PEN America: With free expression and the freedom to read being undermined in America’s ...
From a Joint News Release: Paolo Manghi, CTO of OpenAIRE, is co-leading an international team led by University of North Texas that has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation ...
From ALA (via YouTube): R.L. Stine has been writing scary stories for more than 30 years. His books have sold more than 400 million copies and have been translated into ...
From a DPLA Announcement Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce the release of January 6th on the Record: The Investigation into the Attack on the U.S. Capitol, ...
How Libraries Became Refuges for People With Mental Illness (via Slate) New Online: Special Issue of IFLA Journal to Mark the 20th Anniversary of the IFLA Statement on Libraries and ...
