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ALA President Sari Feldman writes: “At ALA, we know that the future relevance of libraries will depend on what we do for people rather than what we have for people. What isn’t entirely clear is what this evolution means for library education and the MLIS degree. A 2014 paper from Deloitte LLP’s Deloitte University Press, ‘The Lifetime Learner’ (PDF file), describes a new landscape in which individuals must weigh the increasing costs of a traditional education against the uncertainty of a future payoff.”...
American Libraries column, Nov./Dec. |
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Maria R. Traska writes: “Fred Stielow (right), a self-confessed wonk, has been involved in digital automation for decades. In the 1970s, he was on the project team for HyperTies, the first DOS-based hypertext program used on the earliest iteration of the internet. He’s a champion of the library, takes his financial duties seriously, and views his work on statistics as helping to set the strategic direction and further the mission of the library. So how can libraries find and develop more leaders like Stielow for their boards of trustees?”...
American Libraries feature, Oct. 30 |
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Folk-music collector, ethnographer, and archivist Alan Lomax, who died in 2002, was born 100 years ago in 1915. To celebrate the anniversary, Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music invited two Lomax experts to speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival on November 4. Michael J. Kramer (left) teaches history and American studies at Northwestern University, and Nathan Salsburg (right) is curator of the online Alan Lomax Archive. They spoke to American Libraries about Lomax and his relevance today....
American Libraries feature, Nov. 2
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Winnie Hu writes: “Among parents of the under-5 set, spots for storytime at the New York Public Library have become as coveted as seats for a hot Broadway show. Lines stretch down the block at some branches, with tickets given out on a first-come-first-served basis because there is not enough room to accommodate all of the children who show up. Workers at the 67th Street branch on the Upper East Side turn away at least 10 people from every reading.”...
New York Times, Nov. 1 |
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A growing number of libraries are opening earlier and holding special storytimes to cater to some little Minnesotans who like to read in their own way. Carver County Library and several other Minnesota libraries are piloting Sensitive Storytimes to accommodate children on the autism spectrum or with sensory processing disorders. The Center for Engaging Autism has trained librarians across Minnesota to better serve children on the spectrum in their communities....
Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oct. 31 |
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 The fired director of the Queens (N.Y.) Public Library is suing his former employer for more than $2 million, claiming that the tactics used against him both before and since his discharge were politically motivated. Thomas W. Galante was terminated in 2014 for allegedly misspending library funds on such items as a $27,000 smoking deck outside his office. Galante's complaint filed in Brooklyn federal court on November 2 alleges that he was the victim of damaging press leaks orchestrated by a group of library trustees, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz, and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer....
New York Post, Nov. 2; Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2 |
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Library Systems and Services Inc. is running into opposition as it seeks to add the 24 branches of the Kern County (Calif.) Library in Bakersfield to its portfolio of 82 in six states, allowing the county to shed a unionized workforce of 118. The library system north of Los Angeles would be the largest addition for LSSI since the firm began in 1997. In Kern County, the bid for private management has residents debating whether the printed word is a special trust....
Bloomberg Business, Nov. 2 |
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All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, resigned in late October to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. The move came after telling Elsevier of the frustrations of libraries that reported they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn’t even figure out what it would cost to subscribe....
Inside Higher Ed, Nov. 2 |
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Courtney McDonald, Anne Haines, and Rachel Cohen write: “The world is changing, the web is changing, and libraries are changing. Commercial behemoths like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, together with advancements in technical infrastructure and consumer technology, have established a new set of expectations for even casual users of the web. These expectations have created new mental models of how things ought to work. Has our collective concept of the purpose of the library website evolved as well?”...
ACRL TechConnect Blog, Nov. 2 |
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Evan Dashevsky writes: “Right now, people are walking around with super powerful digital cameras in their pockets. The public has enthusiastically shrugged off any privacy concerns and learned to embrace mobile photography. And gadget makers have responded with better and ever more capable digital cameras. Chances are, you’re not even taking advantage of all the cool things your phone’s camera can do. Check out our slideshow for 14 amazing smartphone camera tricks.”...
PC Magazine, Oct. 31, Apr. 7 |
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Jeffrey M. Perkel writes: “Eight major tools—colwiz, EndNote, F1000Workspace, Mendeley, Papers, ReadCube, RefME, and Zotero—all compete in the reference-management market. Some excel at streamlining the process of browsing and building literature libraries, whereas others focus on creating bibliographies, aiding collaboration through the use of shared workspaces, or recommending papers. Each tool exists to help researchers tame the digital flotsam and jetsam of scattered, downloaded PDFs.”...
Nature, Nov. 2 |
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Ingrid Burrington writes: “We came to Los Angeles because we wanted to start the drive where the cloud started—and we decided that meant going to where the internet started, which, in turn, meant going down a rabbit hole of debated histories that, for better or worse, deposited us in Room 3240 of Boelter Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles. This was the home of UCLA’s Network Measurement Center, which, between 1969 and 1975, served as one of the first nodes of the ARPANET.”...
The Atlantic, Nov. 2 |
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Marisa Macy writes: “To learn more about a place, immerse yourself in the literature of that region. I want to take you on a journey to the Southwestern part of the United States through literature written for children. Here are some selected books for young readers to delight, learn, challenge, and inspire.”...
ALSC Blog, Nov. 3
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