Open eBooks is an app containing thousands of popular and award-winning titles that are free for children from in-need households. These eBooks can be read without checkouts or holds. Children from in-need families can access these eBooks, which include some of the most popular works of the present and past, using the Open eBooks app and read as many as they like without incurring any costs. The goal of Open eBooks is to encourage a love of reading and serve as a gateway to children reading even more often, whether in school, at libraries, or through other eBook reading apps. Learn more here.
Tag: libraries
Digital Liberal Arts Exchange
A group of colleges and universities are exploring ways to share expertise and services through a Digital Liberal Arts Exchange (DLAX). The DLAX is currently seeking participants.
Image credit to M C Morgan (flickr.com/photos/mcmorgan/6980770408)
Emory + Georgia Tech = Library Next
Emory University and Georgia Tech launched plans recently to build shared collections. Pics and more information at renewal.library.gatech.edu
Image credit to flickr.com/photos/hectoralejandro/4317321945
Academic Librarians and Working Space
The design firm Sasaki Associates released a 2015 survey, of more than 400 librarians at nearly 200 institutions, on their work spaces and here’s what they found.
Image credit to https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterhess/6021938898/in/photostream/
Library-Publisher Partnership at MIT
Under new direction, the Libraries and the Press are revisiting their own missions and core values, and have converged in part around the principle of adaptability. Namely, both organizations share the aims to actively engage in the changing technologies, practices and policies around creating and sharing information; embrace an entrepreneurial ethos that welcomes thoughtful risk taking and is not afraid to learn from failures; and adapt continually to the changing needs of the communities they serve…Read the rest.
Francine Houben and NY Public Library
Houben’s most quoted line on libraries is that they are the “cathedrals of the 21st century.” I ask her what she means by that and she says, “I think that they’re the most important public building nowadays, for everybody.” In fact, she has arrived in New York from the Netherlands just in time to be a pivotal figure in a culture war, an unwinnable argument about what these crucial institutions are, who they’re for, and how they should best deploy their resources. Read the rest.
Libraries and Social Memory
Carter G. Woodson is rightly known as the father of African-American history, but the debt owed to Woodson by both American society, and historians of American culture, goes well beyond his scholarly contributions. Now, one of the few libraries named after Woodson and a facility that houses one of the largest collections of Afro-American history and literature is in serious danger. Libraries serve as not only sources of community, connection and learning, but also as social repositories of memory. Without a memory both people and societies are lost – they have no identity. A threat to our collective memory, is a threat to our individual dignity.
