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On May 3, Library Journal and EBSCO hosted the webinar, “Essential Techniques for Life Science Research.” Nigel Robinson, Director of Content Management at Clarivate Analytics, demonstrates the power of a subject index created by life scientists for thorough life sciences research.
As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries Initiative came to a close at the end of 2018, I joined many in reflecting on the massive contribution of that decades-long investment in libraries and what it now makes possible through its legacy partners.
During the final week of January, temperatures across the Midwest plunged to dangerous, record-breaking lows. Many libraries remained open and helped keep their constituents warm, out of the elements, informed, entertained, and, most of all, safe.
Author and activist Robin DiAngelo explained that grappling with racism can be uncomfortable for white people—but it's crucial to dismantling systemic oppression.
ProQuest yesterday announced the launch of ProQuest One Academic, a new resource that utilizes a single user interface to offer access to ProQuest Central, the Academic Complete collection, Alexander Street’s Academic Video Online collection, and the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global database.
On December 1, 2018, Berkeley Public Library (BPL), CA, rolled out its new Easy Access Cards, designed for library customers without a fixed address. These include patrons who are experiencing homelessness, lack current documentation, are in transition between addresses, or are in the foster care system.
Learn the math behind determining the number of congressional seats for each state in the United States from the American Mathematical Society, publisher of Mathematical Moments, a program that promotes appreciation and understanding of the role mathematics plays in science, nature, technology, and human culture.
Students of sustainable agriculture learn the concepts and techniques they need to practice and promote farming that is environmentally sound as well as profitable, according to the College Board, an organization that connects students to college success and opportunity
Since the October 27, 2018, shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, when a lone gunman killed 11 worshippers and injured seven during Shabbat morning services, PJ Library has extended its mission to provide books and resources to parents who may be searching for ways to explain anti-Semitism to their young children.
Citing irreconcilable disagreements with publisher Elsevier’s business model, the editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics on January 10 unanimously announced its resignation and subsequently launched a new journal, Quantitative Science Studies.
Whether you’re a librarian, scientist, student or general consumer, when seeking research for your work, relevant information and sources seem plentiful, especially since the internet has made it easier than ever to discover and share content. However, the more there is, the harder it becomes to find what you need.
Voting in the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) election begins March 11, and members in good standing can cast their ballots through April 3. LJ invited this year’s presidential candidates, Anne Marie Casey and Jon E. Cawthorne, to weigh in on some current issues.
Dr. Carlton C. Rochell, who served as Dean of Libraries at New York University (NYU) from 1976–1999, died in Nashville, TN, on Dec. 23 at the age of 85 after a brief illness.
From Princeton University: On the morning of Sept. 2, 2018, the world community woke to the news that Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro had caught fire, destroying one of Latin America’s oldest and most important scientific and cultural institutions.
On December 19, the House of Representatives passed the Museum and Library Services Act (MLSA) by a margin of 331–28, and it was signed into law on December 31. The bill, also known as S. 3530, reauthorizes the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through 2025.
The United States Senate indefinitely postponed its vote on the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act, also known as S. 1010. The bill, introduced in May 2017, proposes to amend title 17 of the United States Code to make the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee.
The Academic Libraries Video Trust (ALVT) this week announced that six universities have joined the organization as Founding Benefactors. The project, now live at videotrust.org, will facilitate the preservation of commercial video content available exclusively on VHS or other obsolete, deteriorating formats.
From the ITU (International Telecommunications Union): ITU, the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies (ICTs), estimates that at the end of 2018, 51.2 per cent of the global population, or 3.9 billion people, will be using the Internet.
The Panorama Project—a multiyear library and publishing industry initiative focused on researching the impact that libraries have on book and author discovery, brand development, and retail sales—released its first report last week, indicating that a recent, national library promotion led to a significant sales increase for the promoted title.
In the days leading up to the November 6 midterm elections, libraries and their boards and supporters nationwide were working on getting out their yes votes—but not the Woodstock Public Library (WPL), NY.WPL’s allies focused on getting residents to vote no on a ballot question that would have eliminated its library district.
The Library of Congress (LC) last month launched crowd.loc.gov, a new crowdsourcing platform that will improve discovery and access to the Library’s digital collections with the help of volunteer transcription and tagging.
On the morning of November 6 as residents of Pleasant Valley, NY, were lining up to vote on the town’s first library referendum in eight years, firefighters were battling a two-alarm blaze at the Pleasant Valley Free Library.
Libraries in California fire areas found themselves playing several roles at once. A number were evacuated, and still more were closed for smoke and debris cleaning even if they did not receive direct damage. Many also served as community gathering places and regional assistance centers—some as soon as they received the all-clear to reopen.
The American Farm Bureau Federation’s 33rd annual survey of classic items found on the Thanksgiving Day dinner table indicates the average cost of this year’s feast for 10 is $48.90, or less than $5.00 per person.
The “Google Generation”, “Digi Natives”, “Generation Z” – the newest generation of today’s college students have arrived in your library bringing with them a paradoxical challenge
Oregon’s Douglas County libraries made news in spring 2017, after a measure on the November 2016 ballot failed and the 11-branch system closed its libraries. Since then, a small but loyal number of volunteers and Friends organizations have stepped in to bring their libraries back as DIY operations, one at a time.
At New York Public Library's Schomburg Center, artists and writers convened to discuss an iconic image in rap history and celebrate a recent book collecting images of hip-hop artists.
Voters turned out at the polls in record numbers on Tuesday, November 6, for the 2018 midterm elections. But strong voter turnout did not necessarily drive support for libraries at the voting booth.
ProQuest today announced the development of Rialto, which will integrate the features and capabilities of Ebook Central, OASIS, and Leganto within the Ex Libris Alma cloud-based Library Services Platform. Named after the Rialto Bridge in Venice, Italy, the company describes it as a product that will bridge gaps in current selection and acquisition processes for academic libraries, greatly simplifying workflows for Alma users.
This fall, the Seattle Public Library (SPL) kicked off a partnership with yəhaw̓, an Indigenous-led arts project created to spotlight the creativity of the local Native community.
It’s no secret that scholarly publishing is overwhelmingly white; 83 percent, according to the Workplace Equity Project’s (WEP) recent survey. Nor that there is a dearth of women at the top—and that there is a very real gender pay gap.
Adam Matthew Digital, a SAGE company, has launched Quartex, a digital asset management solution designed to help libraries showcase archival collections.
Effective October 1, Penguin Random House (PRH) changed its licensing terms for public library ebooks, discontinuing its longstanding one-copy, one-user perpetual license model, and establishing a two-year access model.
LJ talks to Edward Fiske, author and former education editor for the New York Times, who has been producing the Fiske Guide to Colleges for more than 30 years.
To say “times have changed” is an understatement. The advent of a blizzard of digital resources means that we simply don’t have the people or means to evaluate sources as we once did.
Since January, I have been a member of the five-person Board of Trustees of the Monroe County Library System, MI. For the past 20 years, I have also worked as a correctional officer in a medium-sized Michigan county jail.
At the University of North Alabama, we are quite proud of the first-year library instruction sequence that was built through years of hard work, testing various ideas and components, and constant reflection and assessment.
Sociologist Eric Klinenberg is the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture Speaker at the upcoming ALA Midwinter Meeting. In this Q&A about his book Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, he suggests that the key to a more equitable society may lie in our shared spaces—particularly libraries.
On September 25, the University of Rhode Island opened an Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab on the first floor of the Robert L. Carothers Library and Learning Commons. While many universities have launched AI labs in recent years, URI officials believe this is the first such facility located in a university library.
Thanks to a $12 million gift, the New York Public Library (NYPL) has begun work on a permanent exhibition of treasures from its extensive—and eclectic—collections.
Hassan Ahmad, a Virginia-based immigration attorney, has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit to view the papers of John Tanton held at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. Ahmad has argued that the material should be openly available, as it is relevant to current controversies over immigration policies.
Following two years in development, Gale launched its Digital Scholar Lab (DSL), a cloud-based text mining and natural language processing solution that facilitates analysis of raw text data (optical character recognition/OCR text) from 160 million pages of Gale Primary Sources content.
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has requested that National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Records Management sign off on a records retention schedule that would potentially destroy detainee records in 11 item categories, including accounts of solitary confinement, assault, sexual abuse, and investigations into deaths in ICE custody.
The American Library Association has announced a plan to explore Chicago’s commercial real estate market with the listing of its headquarter buildings at 40 and 50 East Huron.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services issued its most recent Public Libraries Survey (PLS) Report on August 2, offering a look at public library use, financial health, staffing, and resources in the country’s 9,068 active public libraries in FY 2015.
Julius C. Jefferson, Jr., Section Head, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and Lance Werner, Executive Director, Kent District Library, Comstock Park, Mich., are the candidates for the 2020-21 presidency of the American Library Association (ALA).
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik on Monday extended a ban on the online publication of digital blueprints that can be used to manufacture guns with 3-D printers and computer numerical controlled (CNC) milling machines. Since a growing number of U.S. public and academic libraries provide access to 3-D printers and CNC milling machines as part of Maker spaces and fab lab workshops, the case has drawn attention from the library field.
The University of California, Berkeley Law Library (BLL) last month implemented the TIND cloud-based Integrated Library System (ILS), becoming the third U.S. academic institution to adopt the new ILS. In collaboration with BLL, TIND completed the development of a new, launch-ready acquisitions and serials module as part of its initial contract.
After years of nudging, the Congressional Research Service (CRS)—the in-house think tank for the House of Representatives and Senate—is making its records accessible to the public online for the first time.
New Orleans Public Library’s (NOPL) Nora Navra Library celebrated its grand reopening in the city’s 7th Ward neighborhood on Friday, August 24 and Saturday, August 25. The completion of the new 7,800 square foot building marks the reopening of all six NOPL branches that were destroyed in the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
As part of a broad range of initiatives and actions to address diversity, RWA released the results of its first diversity survey, conducted in April 2017, this June. About a quarter of RWA’s members responded, showing the membership to be largely white (86%), not Hispanic or Latinx (95%), heterosexual (88%), female (97%, of whom less than .1% were transgender), and nondisabled (79%).
MORE POWER TO THE LIBRARY STAFF in Hurricane, UT, who have sparked an important conversation in response to a ban on displays about LGBTQ topics. They have been fighting this decision, which contravenes the Library Bill of Rights and departs from widespread practice around raising awareness of resources for underserved or historically marginalized populations.
When workers at the Hurricane branch of the Washington County Library System, UT, were told to change signage on LTBTQ-themed displays and stop wearing buttons pointing library visitors to LGBTQ resources, they brought their concerns to the local press.
SAGE has acquired Talis, a technology company, and its enterprise teaching and learning platform, Talis Aspire, which is used by over 1 million students at more than 100 universities across 8 countries.
An online ALA Council poll, held August 9–16, voted 140–4 to rescind a controversial meeting room interpretation. The Library Bill of Rights will revert to the 1991 version that had previously been in effect.
According to a new analysis by researchers at New York University, violence has fallen in nearly all major U.S. cities since 1991. AmericanViolence.org, supported with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is based at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management and currently provides city-level figures on murder rates in more than 80 of the 100 largest U.S. cities.
The University Libraries at Virginia Tech this summer became the first R1 research library to implement the Koha open source integrated library system (ILS), migrating more than 1.5 million holdings from its former ILS.
A team made up of digital humanities librarians and other academic partners has developed an interactive website that visualizes the impact of Trump administration’s family separation policy’s enforcement and the emerging humanitarian crisis it has engendered.
As always, library vendors had a number of announcements to share at the American Library Association’s 2018 annual conference in New Orleans. Here are a few that LJ had an opportunity to learn about in person.
Janelle Richards stepped into her role as the first Environmentalist in Residence at Toronto Public Library (TPL), ON, Canada, on June 4. An environmental educator and certified teacher with over seven years’ professional experience, Richards will offer her expertise on conservation and sustainability, as well as programs, workshops, and community consultations, at TPL’s Albion Branch and Scarborough Civic Centre Branch.
An article that appeared in Forbes magazine online on July 21, calling for all public libraries to be replaced by Amazon bookstores, has the library community—and the communities they serve—up in arms. The op-ed piece, “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” by Panos Mourdoukoutas, chair of the economics department at Long Island University’s Post campus, drew righteously indignant and thoughtful responses.
Kimber L. Fender retired as director of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Sue Landers has been named the next Executive Director of Lambda Literary, and more people news from the July 2018 issue of Library Journal.
Booknet Canada surveyed 500 Canadians over the age of 18 who read digital books about their format preferences, book buying, price points, channels, and more. See INFOdocket for an infographic and link to a video presentation on the findings.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Foundation has abandoned a proposal that would have split the museum and library between Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Dickinson State University.
The State Library of Ohio has launched Libraries by the Numbers (LBTN), a web-based data visualization tool that enables users to create custom infographics about individual library systems using data drawn from their Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Public Library Surveys.
Northeastern University (NEU) has launched the Boston Research Center, an addition to its library that will focus on interdisciplinary studies of Boston’s history.
Council revisited its ongoing plan to reorganize for effectiveness and efficiency, adopted several important resolutions, and more at the 2018 Annual ALA Conference,
Across downtown New Orleans on Friday, June 22, attendees of the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference buzzed about the Opening General Session, where Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden would be interviewing former First Lady Michelle Obama.
LibraryLinkNJ, a statewide cooperative that oversees a $1.36 million interlibrary loan (ILL) delivery service serving 2,600 public, private, academic, corporate, and other libraries throughout the New Jersey, will stay in business at least one more year after members voted to approve a $2.38 million budget for its fiscal year 2019.
Longtime archivist, former head of the Vancouver Public Library’s history division, and queer rights activist Ron Dutton donated more than 750,000 items documenting the British Columbia LGBTQ community to the City of Vancouver Archives in March.
As Canada’s Saskatoon Public Library, Saskatchewan, nears the launch of its new organization-wide restructuring, employees are both excited and apprehensive about their new roles, library leadership is optimistic about the shift to a community-led model, and negotiations with the library workers’ union are still in progress.
Last week, the Library Freedom Institute launched a program designed to help librarians become advocates for online privacy, created by the Library Freedom Project in partnership with New York University.
I chatted recently with New Zealand librarian Sally Pewhairangi, who shares her unique approach to encouraging library professionals on a new website called The Library Boss. Her ideas should inspire LIS students, new librarians, and seasoned professionals.
Historic, distinctive, and notorious, with a rich literary past and a celebratory spirit, New Orleans has a character all its own. Home to pirates and plantation owners, voodoo queens and vampires (or so the legend goes), it’s no wonder this city has inspired writers for centuries. And you’re in luck, because with the city commemorating its tricentennial, there’s never been a better time to visit.
Representing every region of the country, five libraries have been honored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) with a 2018 National Medal for Museum and Library Service.
If you haven’t yet read From Awareness to Funding: Voter Perceptions and Support of Public Libraries in 2018, please put it on the top of your to-do list. Released in March by the Public Library Association (PLA) and the American Library Association Office for Library Advocacy, in partnership with OCLC, it updates the findings of the initial Awareness to Funding report done in 2008 with startling insights into how voters connect to libraries or—more concerning—increasingly don’t.
The U.S. Senate has voted to keep net neutrality protections in place, using the powers of the Congressional Review Act to block the Federal Communications Commission’s December 14 overturn of the 2015 Open Internet Order.
The planned Barack Obama Presidential Center will not contain a traditional presidential library of physical archives from Obama’s two terms as president, but it will hold a branch of the Chicago Public Library to serve the Jackson Park neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side.
Technology and automation vendor bibliotheca has launched open+, an access and security solution that enables libraries to expand open hours to times when the library is unstaffed. The U.S. launch follows deployment and testing at Gwinnett County Public Library, GA; Hennepin County Library, MN; and Ventura County Library, CA.
With so many sessions, panels, and events, trade publishing conference BookExpo and its consumer companion BookCon, held May 30–June 1 and June 2–3, respectively, at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, can be overwhelming for conference newbies and veterans alike. Here are a few that the LJ editors are most excited to attend.
The Aurora Public Library (APL), IL, took down a controversial poem displayed at its Santori Public Library that appeared to express anti-Muslim sentiment and violence against Muslim women. The poem’s author, George Miller, professor and chair of the philosophy department at Lewis University, Romeoville, IL, stated that it was written as satire and not intended to be anti-Muslim.
Jason Kessler, the alt-right activist who was a primary organizer of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally that ignited violence in Charlottesville, VA, has been banned from the University of Virginia (UVA) campus in Charlottesville after visiting the UVA Law Library on April 18 and again on April 25.
In a decision that caught many members of the Oregon library community by surprise, Gov. Kate Brown fired Oregon State Librarian MaryKay Dahlgreen on March 13.
On March 1 PEN America, a literature and human rights organization that advocates for freedom of expression, named Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jennifer Egan as its new president.
The MIT Media Lab has expanded beyond academic and corporate collaborations to join forces with public libraries for the Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX), coordinated by the Media Lab Learning Initiative and MIT Libraries and supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The third Personal Librarian and First Year Experience Library Conference, held at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University on March 21 and 22, focuses on all aspects of the first-year student experience and the personalization of outreach and services for incoming students.
New York State Librarian Bernard A. Margolis, known to all as Bernie, died on Saturday, April 14 at age 69 after an eight-year battle with acute myeloid leukemia.
After votes for the American Library Association (ALA) election were tallied on April 11, the organization announced that Wanda Kay Brown would be ALA’s 2019–20 president-elect.
Hoopla digital last week announced an agreement with eBooks2go that will add thousands of educational ebooks and homeschooling materials to the digital content platform’s service, offering library patrons access to Shell Education and TIME FOR KIDS content from Teacher Created Materials Publishing, as well as ebooks and other resources from Boys Town Press.