libraries

In an open letter to American librarians, Barack Obama has criticised “profoundly misguided” rightwing efforts to ban books from libraries in public schools.“Some of the books that shaped my life – and the lives of so many others – are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives,” the former president wrote.“It’s no coincidence that these ‘banned books’ are often written by or feature people of colour, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.”Obama’s letter on Monday supported…

Dear Reader, PREMIUM The newly renovated David Sassoon public library in Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. (Courtesy the author) I am at the David Sassoon Library in Mumbai. Walking up the newly renovated wide staircase with its burnished balustrades and gleaming brass carvings, past a marble statue of the founder David Sassoon, 19th century city businessman and Baghdadi Jew, I am in awe. Upstairs is a high-ceilinged Gothic reading room, its chandeliers arching over emerald lamps on every teakwood desk. There are bolted…

Libraries in England generate at least £3.4bn in value a year through services supporting children’s literacy, digital inclusion and health, a study has found.Researchers at the University of East Anglia discovered that the services that a typical branch provides in a year are worth £1m, and that libraries’ value could equate to six times their running costs.The report, published on Friday, should be a “gamechanger” for how libraries are viewed by “local and national” decision-makers, said Isobel Hunter, chief executive…

To help you choose here are the top 10 Python deep learning libraries for programmers in 2023 Python has progressively risen to the top of the programming language rankings. This is due to a variety of factors, including its extraordinarily high efficiency in comparison to other widely used languages. Artificial neural networks, which are algorithms modeled after the architecture of the human brain, are used in the machine learning discipline known as deep learning. Python Deep Learning libraries for programmers in 2023…

Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay was among the books most requested for removal or restriction in libraries in the US in 2022, according to new data on banned books.The list of books, released by the American Library Association (ALA) to mark the start of National Libraries Week, shows that titles were challenged most often because they contained LGBTQ+ representation or content that the complainants deemed sexually explicit.The list is normally a top 10, but this year was expanded to include 13 titles because multiple…

In the video for Lael Neale’s recent single, In Verona, she takes us on a woozy walk through the streets of Hollywood. Alongside grainy footage of the Walk of Fame, we find her drifting through the mausoleums of Hollywood Forever, a celebrity cemetery on the same block as Paramount studios, as she hypnotically chants about “perfect death”, prayer and purity. As ritzy as any red carpet premiere, Hollywood Forever is where stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney share a final resting place with the…

Improve Your Data Visualisations with These Easy-to-Use Matplotlib Style LibrariesExample line plot with gradient fill generated by the CyberPunk matplotlib theme. Image by the author.Matplotlib is a widely used data visualisation Python library, and is often come across early in the data science and python learning journey. However, over the years, it has gained a reputation for creating plain-looking figures, and it can be awkward to use, especially for newcomers.In my last few articles, I have shown how we can turn the…

Time to go out of the shadowsImage by me via Midjourney.While the big guys, Pandas, Scikit-learn, NumPy, Matplotlib, TensorFlow, etc., hog all your attention, it is easy to miss some down-to-earth and yet, incredible libraries.They may not be GitHub rock stars, or taught in expensive Coursera specializations, but thousands of open-source developers pour their blood and sweat into writing them. They quietly fill the gaps left by popular libraries from the shadows.The purpose of this article is to shine a light on some of…

In this article, we have discussed the top 10 python libraries for data visualization in 2023 Python is one of the most widely used programming languages. It serves to be a blessing in the field of data science. When one boasts of possessing good Python skills, it is expected out of that person that he/she is well acquainted with libraries in Python. Here are the top 10 Python libraries for data visualization in 2023 which make programming and developing models a lot easier. 1. SciPy This stands for Scientific Python.…

Dear Reader, PREMIUM Srikanth Velamakanni, Group Chief Executive & Vice-Chairman, Fractal Analytics. A few months ago, my B-school batchmate Madhavan, gets a phone call. “Someone wants to donate 200 books to your office because he is leaving NCR, would you be interested?”, asks a mutual friend. Naturally, Madhavan says yes. PRS, the legislative research firm Madhavan co-founded, has a books budget. But this only covers volumes on policy and reference books that relate directly to PRS’s work on…