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Eight leading companies have sent a message to the offices of all US senators who have not already endorsed both the Senate LSTA and IAL “Dear Appropriator” letters. Baker & Taylor, Follett, Gale Cengage, OverDrive, Peachtree Publishers, Penguin Random House, ProQuest, and Rosen Publishing are urging the senators to sign on because: “[L]ibrary funding may be among the very best yielding and most leverageable investment that Congress makes across the entire federal budget. Libraries are thus very much critical national infrastructure: ubiquitous, indispensable, and economically essential.”...
District Dispatch, Apr. 26, May 11 |
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Liz Granger writes: “Jody Gray witnessed a ‘barrage of tragedy’ within her first year as director of the ALA Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services—from the Pulse nightclub murders in Orlando, Florida, to the Dallas police shootings. That’s why Gray’s office launched the Twitter hashtag #LibrariesRespond last summer. ODLOS wanted to foster a grassroots conversation in which library professionals could share ideas and responses to current events. The tag caught on.”...
American Libraries Trend, May |
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After 15 years of service, ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels will pack up his office, send his papers off to the ALA Archives, and embark on adventures in retirement at the end of July. Help us give him a heartfelt send-off by posting memories, stories, and good wishes in the comments section. All comments received by May 31 will be compiled into a special booklet and presented to Keith at a June 25 reception during the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago....
AL: The Scoop, May 12 |
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Kathy Rosa writes: “For librarians of all stripes, dissertations are an often-overlooked source of valuable information—information that has the potential to improve or even transform the institutions we serve. Dissertations, after all, are more than mere requirements for a doctoral degree; they’re original, substantial contributions to knowledge. Here we present eight of the year’s top LIS dissertations, each capable of shaping the practice of library and information science in a different way.”...
American Libraries feature, May |
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Michele Casto, Bobbie Dougherty, and Margaret Gilmore write: “The D.C. Punk Archive started as a collecting initiative to document the local punk scene of Washington, D.C. Through community engagement and programming, the archive project has expanded to pursue goals even broader than collection building, positioning the District of Columbia Public Library as a direct supporter of the current local music community.”...
American Libraries Spotlight, May |
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The Washington-based Office of American Spaces is part of the US Department of State. The office provides oversight, strategic direction, funding, and training for nearly 700 library collections abroad offered by US embassies and consulates to foster connections between the US and foreign audiences. In recent years, the office has transformed American Spaces into a new model of active, high-tech, programmatic platforms for engaging foreign citizens, in line with the best practices of modern American libraries. This is its annual report for 2016....
Office of American Spaces, Apr. |
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OCLC and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Library are working together to make it easy for editors to link citations in Wikipedia to millions of library materials represented in WorldCat. Wikimedia’s cite tool, a companion to its visual editing interface, allows editors to generate a full citation from a single identifier. Integrating OCLC’s WorldCat Search API into the cite tool will help editors add citations that link back to resources represented in WorldCat....
OCLC, May 11; Wikimedia Blog, May 11 |
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Emily Bayci writes: “One of the best parts of being a children’s librarian is getting to dress up and look ridiculous all of the time. No questions asked. My favorite way to express this? Funky hats. It all started innocently enough. There were a few hats hanging around at my graduate school and I wore them while working at the help desk. People thought it was fun and when I found a cool hat at a store I would end up buying one.”...
ALSC Blog, May 10
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Richard Byrne writes: “In yesterday’s Practical Ed Tech Live episode I answered a question about where to find old maps to layer in Google Earth. One of the resources that I suggested was Old Maps Online. Old Maps Online is a map that you can browse and search to find historical maps to view online, download, and print. You can search the map by entering a location, or you can just pan and zoom around the world to discover historical maps.”...
Free Technology for Teachers, May 11–12
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Lance Ulanoff writes: “Ever since Minority Report hit theaters in 2002, we’ve dreamed of controlling interfaces with our hands just like Tom Cruise’s crime-fighting character did in Steven Spielberg’s film. Our reality, though, tends to be more disappointing. That’s going to soon change for Windows 10 PC users, though. On May 9, before Microsoft’s Build developers conference in Seattle, the company showed me how developers can enable gesture control for Windows with the addition of a plug-and-play Gesture API.”...
Mashable, May 9–10
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Mike Orcutt writes: “Companies that do business online are missing out on billions in annual sales thanks to a bug that is keeping their systems incompatible with internet domain names made of non-Latin characters. Fixing it could also bring another 17 million people who speak Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indian languages online. Those are the conclusions of a new study by an industry-led group sponsored by the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.”...
MIT Technology Review, May 9; Universal Acceptance Steering Group, Apr. 11
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Peyton Stafford writes: “There are four kinds of ebook business models that K–12 librarians need to know about: one user/one copy, subscription, demand driven acquisition, and unlimited perpetual simultaneous access. I will not attempt to compare product offerings in depth, but I will mention an example or two of each model. Because ebook technology is still in its early stages, the platforms and feature sets of each offering change rapidly, so any comparison is bound to be a snapshot at best.”...
No Shelf Required, May 11
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