#spanish libraries

[intothestacks]

Libraries Around the World: San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain

The Library of El Escorial

Image courtesy of Jose Maria Cuellar's Flickr stream.

This library is located in the Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the historical residence of the king of Spain. Phillip II was responsible for adding the library and most of the books originally held within. The vaulted ceilings were painted with gorgeous frescoes, each representing one of the seven liberal arts: rhetoric, dialectic, music, grammar, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. These days, the library is a World Heritage Site, and it holds more than 40,000 volumes.

[alizalayne]

happy halloween!! the second book in my graphic novel trilogy is available to preorder. It's about what happens when you grow a paw. it is also a dragon mystery. and you also get to find out where penny came from, which is quite interesting

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Leafed through what I think is one of the best Spanish translations of North and South, 30 dead, 79 injured.

[longlostlorian]

Maelstrom's plan, aka, that's it that's the book in a nutshell. MAELSTROM: A PRINCE OF EVIL is available now!! Go read the graphic novel random people (and my friends also) are calling cute/funny/enjoyable/etc

[sugarsnappeases]

just had this thought of lily as a lit student volunteering at her local library and barty as this delinquent being assigned to do community service there. like she starts off with a bit of a ‘oh this poor criminal, i must save him’ mindset and then is constantly frustrated by barty as it’s clear that he just. doesn’t want to be saved. and he’ll deliberately mess up the book organisation systems and try to scam people by fining them when their books are nowhere near overdue so he can keep the money for himself. and lily is running around after him, huffing as she loudly puts the books back in their proper places, whacking him round the back of the head when she catches him trying to scam some old man. she’s screaming at him in the back room, leaning over him as he sits back unbothered on one of the chairs, shoving her finger in his face but he just grins and tries to bite it so she’s whacking him again and storming out bc he’s just SO infuriating. but then somehow he’s also going in depth with her about the motivations of iago in othello and whether the tragedy can be blamed entirely on him or if society itself plays a part in the plot’s development or animatedly discussing keats’ ode to a nightingale and the concept of negative capability and how it relates to the body. and she’s just completely fascinated by him, she wants to analyse him like one of the texts from her classes, she thinks she could write essay upon essay about his view of the world and the way his brain works and the tattoo she can always see just poking out of the top of his collar. and now she’s missing deadlines bc she wants to spend time w him, and laughing as he knocks over an entire bookshelf while trying to tell her about the book he’s just read, and really he doesn’t want to be saved but maybe he’s saving her instead…

[hooked-on-elvis]

"Black Spanish Flower (with blue/green stones)" suit. Black jumpsuit with matching green lined cape.

Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, Las Vegas, NV. Dinner Show, Friday, August 31, 1973. 8.45 pm - 9.45 pm

This suit is just gorgeous!

Photographs by Laurens van Houten — Source: Book "Caught In A Trap" by Arjan Deelen and Laurens van Houten.

[novel--notes]

How is it possible that it feels like you are breaking my heart, and I haven’t even had you yet?

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hello, do you have any recommendations for books in Spanish? Preferably written originally in Spanish and not translated

ooh bestie I am not like. at the level of spanish fluency where I am reading novels. that's a pipe dream.

[eldiariodetiara]

But you are. You are worth all that trouble. You are worth walking through a fucking fire. Don’t you see that?

Elena Armas, The Spanish Love Deception

[creed-of-cats]

Few US Online Library Cards that are Easy to Sign Up for

for absolutely no reason at all and no relevance to any discourse happening at this moment in Dec. 2024.

You can get access to Kanopy, a streaming service (that has Great Courses Plus, international films, documentaries, art films, and children's programming), through some of these!

The Enoch Pratt Library has an online library card that will give you access to the Maryland Digital Library. You just need a random address in the US state of Maryland. I can give you some if needed: https://catalog.prattlibrary.org/client/en_US/default/search/registration/$N/SYMWS/true?

The Queer Liberation Library is a completely online library that focuses on queer and social justice related texts. You just need an email: https://www.queerliberationlibrary.org/login

The Books Unbanned has multiple US libraries under its banner that will give cards to any US address you find. It's meant to be for youth and young adults, but if you're not of the age range just lie, its okay.

Seattle: https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/teens/books-unbanned

Brooklyn (very good, but I'm not sure it's still active): https://www.bklynlibrary.org/books-unbanned

Boston: https://www.bpl.org/books-unbanned/

San Diego: https://www.sandiego.gov/public-library/booksunbanned

[samipekoe]

What does Heavy Hangers mean I’m late but reading Dungeon Meshi bc of u

it means big beautiful breasts that hang heavily. and I hope you enjoy!!!! it's amazing!!!!!!

[futurespanishphysicist]

hi everyone!

so this has been my week so far:

i went to the library with a friend twice

i had my first chemistry exam (it could have been better, but i think i did it well)

i made some philosophy essays

i started the electric field in physics!

i did some math questionnaires that my teacher assigned to us

and this week i didn't go running, i took it as a break

thanks for reading, i hope you had a good week. <3

[nazliwrites]

Not all book characters are my boyfriends. Some are best friends. Some crime partner. Some comfort zone. Some secret sharing sisters. Some protective brothers. Some I hate. Some I love. Some mother. Some father. But they all are definitely my family.

[girderednerve]

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated.

With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog. The only way librarians can limit what Hoopla books their customers can borrow is by setting a limit on the price of books. For example, a library can use Hoopla but make it so their customers can only borrow books that cost the library $5 per use.

“Investigating these authors, their book covers, their social media, etc takes A LOT OF TIME, especially with the volume of questionable material increasing month to month (and that's not including the sheer amount of legitimate books published each month in adult fiction that I'm looking at),” one librarian who asked to remain anonymous so she could talk openly about her job, told me. “Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”

This type of low quality, AI generated content, is what we at 404 Media and others have come to call AI slop. Librarians, whose job it is in part to curate what books their community can access, have been dealing with similar problems in the publishing industry for years, and have a different name for it: vendor slurry. While the term now encompasses what seems like AI-generated content as well, it predates the rise of generative AI, and also refers to the glut of low quality, often self-published ebooks or book “summaries” that are common on Hoopla. As some librarians told me, the sheer quantity of books in Hoopla’s service makes it seem more valuable because it offers such a large number of books, but in reality that number is misleadingly inflated by this slurry.

Several of the librarians I talked to said that they are worried about discussing [the problems raised by Hoopla's weak, unclear selection policies, including the 2022 inclusion of explicitly white nationalist texts,] because of the growing hostility towards libraries and groups like Moms for Liberty demanding that books about LGBTQ rights, race, and ethnicity be removed from libraries. One the one hand, librarians want to curate their collections and make sure their patrons are getting access to quality information. On the other hand, they don’t want people to think that they are trying to censor what materials patrons can access in way that’s comparable to what organizations like Moms for Liberty want. None of the librarians I talked to suggested the AI-generated content needed to be banned from Hoopla and libraries only because it is AI-generated. It might have its place, but it needs to be clearly labeled, and more importantly, provide borrowers with quality information.

[readings-in-the-dark]

12.07.2024

Another spanish lesson today, and I love learning about grammar ✨️🖤 the grammar lessons have been my favourites so far, I always feel like I'm learning something about the structure of the culture that a language exists in (though that's probably something to do with the autism brain-mapping that I got 😂)

I've also been to the library so much this week (3 separate occasions, just to browse!), despite the continuous headaches I've been having, so I've featured some of the books that've picked up 💕

Word of the day 📑:

árabe - Arabic (language)

What I did today 📤:

Editing BTS video for next week (4hrs 🫠)

Lingoda spanish lesson (1hr)

Cooked dinner (Fusili Bolognese bc I didn't have spaghetti 😂)

10 mins of duolingo (502 day streak 🎉)

Reading my leisure book (45mins)

Currently reading 📚: The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick