TED Talks
TED: A street librarian's quest to bring books to everyone | Storybook Maze
As a self-proclaimed radical street librarian, Storybook Maze makes books appear where they're scarce. Through initiatives like free, public book vending machines and street corner story times, she eliminates book deserts — or areas with...
SciShow
One Weird Reason People Suck at Parking
Human territoriality results in some pretty ridiculous behaviors. And luckily, scientists have studied it in all kinds of situations.
SciShow
Why Do Old Books Smell So Good?
Musty, with hints of vanilla, coffee, and maybe fresh cut grass-- why do old books smell the best?
PBS
The top library books people tried to ban or censor last year
Battles have erupted at schools, school boards and library meetings across the country as parents, lawmakers and advocacy groups are debating books. The American Library Association documented more than 1,200 demands to censor books and...
PBS
Archive is making sure internet history doesn't disappear
What's online doesn't necessarily last forever. Content on the Internet is revised and deleted all the time. Hyperlinks "rot," and with them goes history, lost in space. With that in mind, Brewster Kahle set out to develop the Internet...
PBS
Finding Emily Dickinson in the power of her poetry
Who was Emily Dickinson? A new exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York takes a closer look at the iconic American cultural figure through her poems and the remnants of her life, and finds a less reclusive woman than we...
PBS
The new librarian of Congress on the value of 'free information'
The Library of Congress has a new chief: Carla Hayden. Most of her predecessors in the role have come from scholarly institutions, but Hayden is a librarian through and through. She is also the first woman and the first African American...
PBS
Landscape photographer races to finish decades of work
Oregon photographer Christopher Burkett is best known for producing large-format film prints of American landscapes, some of the highest resolution color photographs ever created without computer technology. But he only has a limited...
PBS
Take a 360 tour of President Lincoln's summer retreat
Like many presidents before him, President Donald Trump spent part of the summer away from the White House, taking a 17-day Òworking vacationÓ at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. President Abraham Lincoln could relate. To get...
PBS
Getting books from the U.S. feeds these students' love of reading
Books For Africa has sent more than 41 million books over the last 30 years to 53 different countries, where students say the variety of titles have made them enthusiastic readers. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.
PBS
Appreciating The 'Powerful Good' Of The Public Library
As the American Library Association bestows its 2018 "I Love My Librarian" awards, librarian Kristen Arnett expresses her humble opinion on why visiting a library is the best way to show your appreciation.
PBS
Christopher Curtis, Newberry Award Winner for 'Bud, Not Buddy' (Feb. 18, 2000)
Christopher Curtis, Newberry Award winner for "Bud, Not Buddy" (Feb. 18, 2000) (Author Interview)
TED Talks
George Dyson: The birth of the computer
Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.
TED Talks
TED: The mission to safeguard Black history in the US | Julieanna L. Richardson
Black history in the US is rich, profound -- and at risk of being lost forever, if not for the monumental efforts of Julieanna L. Richardson. As the founder of The HistoryMakers -- the largest national archive of African American...
TED Talks
William Noel: Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes
How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the...
TED Talks
TED: The mind-bending art of deep time | Katie Paterson
Short-sightedness may be the greatest threat to humanity, says conceptual artist Katie Paterson, whose work engages with deep time -- an idea that describes the history of the Earth over a time span of millions of years. In this lively...
TED Talks
TED: Everything you hear on film is a lie | Tasos Frantzolas
Sound design is built on deception -- when you watch a movie or TV show, nearly all of the sounds you hear are fake. In this audio-rich talk, Tasos Frantzolas explores the role of sound in storytelling and demonstrates just how easily...
TED Talks
William Kamkwamba: How I built a windmill
When he was just 14 years old, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book.
TED Talks
TED: New ways to understand life in a pandemic | Aaron Maniam
Poet and policymaker Aaron Maniam describes how the language we use to explain COVID-19 shapes the way we think about it -- whether it's as a "war," a "journey" or, as he suggests, an "ecology." He encourages us to explore a range of...
TED Talks
Richard Baraniuk: The birth of the open-source learning revolution
In 2006, open-learning visionary Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions (now called OpenStax), an open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials...
TED Talks
Naif Al-Mutawa: Superheroes inspired by Islam
In "THE 99," Naif Al-Mutawa's new generation of comic book heroes fight more than crime -- they smash stereotypes and battle extremism. Named after the 99 attributes of Allah, his characters reinforce positive messages of Islam and cross...
TED Talks
Brewster Kahle: A free digital library
Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library -- every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history ... It's all free to the public -- unless someone else gets to it first.
TED Talks
Chera Kowalski: The critical role librarians play in the opioid crisis
Public libraries have always been about more than just books -- and their mission of community support has taken on new urgency during the current opioid epidemic. After witnessing overdoses at her library in Philadelphia, Chera Kowalski...
TED Talks
Jay Walker: My library of human imagination
Jay Walker, curator of the Library of Human Imagination, conducts a surprising show-and-tell session highlighting a few of the intriguing artifacts that backdropped the 2008 TED stage.