Wiener Library in Camden Town, London, UK
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 flickr.com/photos/cdevers/5702488800/
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.
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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.
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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.
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Almost every librarian, at some point in their career, will spend time “on reference.” Michael Dirda gives a great review of a new title by Jack Lynch: You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. The book will be available on February 28.
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Amanda Jacobs Foust, former Electronic Services Librarian for Marin County Free Library, provides a 50 minute presentation on how to build and develop and e-book collection.
Slides (PDF)
Handout (PDF)
License for image: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
Adams House Library, Harvard. Photo credit to https://www.flickr.com/photos/ricardo/
From the Harvard Gazette. “Each of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate residential Houses has a library, and despite their rich histories and outward grandeur, these are intimate spaces. Students spend long stretches clicking away on laptops or fall asleep draped over books during all-night study sessions.” Read the rest here.
On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it. The website works in two stages, firstly by attempting to download a copy from the LibGen database of pirated content, which opened its doors to academic papers in 2012 and now contains over 48 million scientific papers. The ingenious part of the system is that if LibGen does not already have a copy of the paper, Sci-hub bypasses the journal paywall in real time by using access keys donated by academics lucky enough to study at institutions with an adequate range of subscriptions. This allows Sci-Hub to route the user straight to the paper through publishers such as JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier. After delivering the paper to the user within seconds, Sci-Hub donates a copy of the paper to LibGen for good measure, where it will be stored forever, accessible by everyone and anyone. Read the rest.
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An older piece by Grant McCracken that provides an important reminder on how libraries (and other organizations) can create value from their seemingly outmoded systems.
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Great piece in the NYT on leading and getting feedback. “One of the most powerful ways we can take charge of developing new skills is to ask for feedback.” Read the rest here.
