With The Book of Magic, Alice Hoffman's sequel to Practical Magic, coming out in October, now is the perfect time to round up some witchy fiction to get readers in the Halloween mood. Read on for both adult fiction and young adult works with crossover appeal.

By using new learning strategies, language learning can be interesting and fun. We feature a series of options that can give you fluency in no time.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill administration announced on October 1 that, as part of major budget-tightening initiatives across the institution, the UNC Libraries’ funding will be cut by $5 million over two years. During the current academic year, close to $2 million will come from the collections budget.

A launch date has not yet been announced, but OverDrive has been recruiting librarian advisors from public, academic, and K–12 libraries to offer input and refine Readtelligence—an upcoming suite of tools for ebook selection and curation developed by the company using artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning tools to analyze every ebook in the OverDrive Marketplace.

COVID shifts drove falling print circ and rising ebooks. But will it last? LJ's 2021 Materials Survey looks at some of the last year's trends.

This is the 13th year of the LJ Index of Public Library Service and Star Library ratings. The 2020 scores and ratings are based on FY18 data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Public Library Survey (PLS). Because of that delay, they don’t reflect the impact of the coronavirus; that won’t be reflected in the data until 2022. The big news in this year’s edition is that successful retrievals of electronic information (e-retrievals)—measuring usage of online content, such as databases, other than by title checkout—joins the six other measures that determine the LJ Index.

Whether librarians are providing services in-person or virtually, reference has changed with the pandemic.

Library Journal’s annual Placements & Salaries survey reports on the experiences of LIS students who graduated and sought their first librarian jobs in the previous year: in this case, 2019. Salaries and full-time employment are up, but so are unemployment and the gender gap; 2019 graduates faced a mixed job market even before the pandemic.

The following research article was recently published by Scientometrics. Title Citation Analysis of Ph.D. Theses with Data From Scopus and Google Books Author Paul Donner Deutsches Zentrum für Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung (DZHW) (German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies) Source Scientometrics (2021) DOI: 10.1007/s11192-021-04173-w Abstract This study investigates the potential of citation analysis […]

From a Coalition Publica Announcement: Metadata is an essential aspect of academic publishing. It ensures accurate identification of a journal’s content and can improve discoverability, access, dissemination, preservation, and, arguably, research impact.  Given metadata’s important role in digital scholarly publishing, Coalition Publica is pleased to announce the publication of two important reports prepared by its […]

Note: We first mentioned PrivaSeer in an infoDOCKET post on April 25, 2020. From Penn State University: A search engine that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “read” through millions of online documents could help privacy researchers find ones that are related to online privacy. The researchers who designed the search engine suggest it could be […]

From the Canadian Press (via CTV) Researchers say recent service cuts at Canada’s national archives are making their work — already hampered by COVID-19 — even more challenging. In a letter to Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian Historical Association urges the institution to reconsider reductions that have left its archival reading room open just […]

When the long-awaited COVID-19 vaccines began to roll out in mid-December 2020, their distribution was immediately complicated by a shortage of doses and widespread uncertainty about who would be given priority. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued suggested guidelines for phased allocation. When it was not yet clear who would be next, many library workers, leaders, and associations began advocating for public facing library workers to be vaccinated as soon as feasible.

In the messy middle of the pandemic, library leaders share how things have changed since March 2020, their takeways, and continuing challenges.

Whether librarians are providing services in-person or virtually, reference has changed with the pandemic.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of books on the subject has been increasing exponentially. This introductory list, which will be updated regularly, is meant to help collection development librarians get started on determining which books work best for their collections.

To celebrate this spooky season, we've rounded up some of the scariest films ever made across the world.

Lindsey Drager wins the 2021 Annual Bard Fiction Prize for The Archive of Alternate Endings. Michelle Good wins the 2021 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award for Five Little Indians. The Ursula K. La Guin Prize for fiction, newly created, will debut next year. Interviews explore the perspective of authors Billy Porter of Unprotected, Kalani Pickhart of I Will Die in a Foreign Land, Wendy J. Fox of What If We Were Somewhere Else, Ken Haigh of On Foot to Canterbury, Omar El Akkad of What Strange Paradise, Yvonne Orji of Bamboozled by Jesus: How God Tricked Me Into the Life of My Dreams, and Phoebe Robinson of Please Don't Sit On My Bed In Your Outside Clothes.

The 2021 Cundill History Prize Finalists are announced. State of Terror by Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton, To Rescue the Republic by Bret Baier with Catherine Whitney, and The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family by Ron Howard and Clint Howard top the bestsellers lists. News about upcoming releases including a book series by Henry Louis Gates Jr and Bad Mormon by Heather Gay. Interviews explore the experiences of Steve Shirripa of Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos and Courtney Balestier of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.

Mary Kubica’s novels have been translated into over thirty languages and have sold over two million copies worldwide.