Related
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.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded CRL $200,000 in funding to lead a one-year effort to plan the next phase of the World Digital Library.
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 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.
Adam Matthew Digital, a SAGE company, has launched Quartex, a digital asset management solution designed to help libraries showcase archival collections.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social media platforms serve as a virtual complaint window for angry consumers. Higher ed is no different when community members share concerns and voice anger in online public spaces. Academic librarians need to know how to handle these situations.
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.
Northeastern University (NEU) has launched the Boston Research Center, an addition to its library that will focus on interdisciplinary studies of Boston’s history.
PREMIUM
Librarians Everywhere | Careers
It’s a growing trend: each year more library school graduates report working as librarians outside of libraries in LJ’s annual placements and salaries survey.
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.
When a school is as large as Arizona State University (ASU), it is not always easy to find books written by members of the university community. To that end, ASU Now, the university’s internal news site, has developed Sun Devil Shelf Life, a new online platform providing information and access to works by ASU faculty, staff, alumni, and students.
Fifty years after the campus uprisings of 1968, college students are again raising their voices in activism—although as Project STAND, the online student dissent archive portal, demonstrates, those voices never went away.
May 17 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The idea started with a 2011 blog post by web developer Joe Devon, in which he argued that “it’s more important to make a site accessible than pretty.” As librarians at the University of Southern California (USC), we began a case study in December on accessible design for library instruction. We invoke Devon’s humility, as well as his call to action, because it closely follows our own path of going from knowing very little to gaining more knowledge and becoming advocates for accessibility.
Flat budgets, price increases, and a reliance on status journals for tenure and promotion keep familiar pressures on the serials marketplace.
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.
Recorded Books, an RBmedia company, has launched an enhanced RBdigital app, enabling library patrons to use a single interface to access its audiobooks, ebooks, magazines, comics, streaming video, educational content, games, and more.
The comprehensive program at the 13th annual Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) conference featured presentations from danah boyd and Robyn Caplan of the Data & Society Research Institute.
As smartphones become ubiquitous, libraries and vendors are responding with new apps, features, and mobile-friendly websites.
Virtual reality is fast reaching a mainstream tipping point, with libraries already facilitating next-generation learning environments that use it
Most college students prefer to read print books for pleasure, but when they are conducting research, almost two-thirds now prefer ebooks or express no format preference, according to Library Journal's 2018 Academic Student Ebook Experience Survey, sponsored by EBSCO.
On March 15 the Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act (S. 2559) was introduced in Congress, moving the United States closer to implementing the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled. The treaty was adopted in 2013 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)—the United Nations international copyright arm—at an international diplomatic conference in Marrakesh, and has since been ratified by 36 countries.
Students who can confidently analyze primary sources “look at things with a critical eye,” says school librarian Tom Bober. But cultivating this crucial skill can be daunting, as he discovered as a classroom teacher. After attending the Library of Congress (LC) Summer Institute in 2013, however, Bober was armed with strategies—and ready to spread the word.
Long before Liesl Toates moved to her new job at the Monroe #1 BOCES School Library System in September 2017, she had made a mark on education in western New York at the Genesee Valley School Library System, where she worked for eight years.
Today, access to born-digital federal government information is relatively easy. Most of it is even available for free. But there are few legal guarantees to ensure that the information published today will be available tomorrow. Now, the GPO Reform Act of 2018 about to be introduced in Congress, pitched as a modernization of the Government Publishing Office (GPO) and the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), will actually endanger long-term free public access to government information.
The University of Oklahoma (OU) Libraries are lucky enough to own all 12 of Galileo’s first editions, four of which contain the author’s own handwriting. They’re also fortunate to have as part of their team Twila Camp, whom the libraries’ associate dean of knowledge services and CTO Carl Grant calls a “talented collaborator, out-of-the-box thinker, and lifelong learner/librarian.” Camp, OU libraries director of web services, leads the technical team that helped create 2015’s Galileo’s World, a series of 20 exhibits at seven locations on three OU campuses.
The first time Emma Hernández encountered the term digital inclusion was on the application for the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN)/Google Fiber Digital Inclusion Fellowship, a one-year program for emerging leaders from digitally divided communities to improve digital access. “I…realized that these words described the difficulties I had faced as a lifelong member of the digitally disconnected masses,” she says.
Jennifer Ferretti has been a digital librarian for more than ten years at various institutions. A fine arts graduate from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), she returned to MICA in 2015 to lead digital initiatives. “I never wanted to be a librarian,” says Ferretti, because “I didn’t know what librarians did. I never had a librarian I connected to and never met a Latinx librarian.” A supportive internship supervisor at the Smithsonian (2007–08) and a strong community on “librarian Twitter” changed that.
“In middle school,” says Kristina Spurgin, “I taught myself to code in BASIC and repurposed the Address Book application that came with our Tandy Radio Shack 1000 EX to subject index my parents’ National Geographic collection—for fun. Now I have a spreadsheet that tells me when to start making bread, given the time I want to eat the bread and whether it’s chilly, neutral, or warm inside.” Unsurprisingly, Spurgin is meticulous in describing how initiatives she leads on the job improve upon existing processes and enable work that was previously impossible.
Over the past eight years, Trevor Owens has moved from the Library of Congress (LC) to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and back to LC. The common thread that runs through each role, however, is his ability to see the big picture and think strategically about digital materials and the policies surrounding them. Owens “has the rare capacity to convert critical intellectual engagement with the challenges that libraries face into practical guidance that resonates with a wide range of librarians,” says nominator Thomas Padilla, visiting digital research services librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Allie Stevens’s lightbulb moment came when she took an introductory public libraries course at Louisiana State University. Before that, Stevens thought she’d be a science or medical librarian. The class opened her eyes to the many skills required to be a public librarian. “I loved the inherent challenge in that—to learn something new on any given day and to help people in direct and tangible ways.”
After the 2016 presidential election, Graduate Fellows from the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities came to the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library to consult Laurie Allen, the director for digital scholarship. They feared environmental and climate data on government websites would disappear under the new administration. What could they do?
More than one-third (37%) of academic library materials budgets go to database subscriptions and electronic reference materials, followed by journals and serials (23%), print books (22%), ebooks (11%), and media/streaming media (5%), according to the Academic Library Collection Development Survey 2017, conducted by LJ’s research department and sponsored by EBSCO. Book holdings are still weighted toward print, with survey respondents, on average, describing print as 60.3 percent of their overall collection, and ebooks as 39.7 percent.
There’s a new place to learn inside Virginia Tech’s Newman Library in Blacksburg, VA: a three-room suite and office known as the Athenaeum, which first started hosting digital humanities programs in November 2017.
SPONSORED
While most databases provide abstracting and indexing, MathSciNet® also provides users with 3rd party reviews of the published literature created by over 21,000 PhD reviewers. This approach dates back 75-years to the database's origin as the publication Mathematical Reviews launched in 1940 by Otto Neugebauer.
SPONSORED
Kathy Wolcott, Acquisitions Librarian at Mathematical Reviews, a division of the American Mathematical Society, stresses that knowing your community is key to ensuring that your database is tailored to them.
When LibGuides 2 was released in 2015, Texas A&M University Libraries seized the opportunity to rethink radically our LibGuides program. Instead of transferring existing content to the new platform, we chose to start from scratch with a renewed focus on the user experience within Guides. A pivotal part of this reconstruction involved training more than 60 librarians and staff members who serve as LibGuides creators.
Following more than a year of preparation and testing, the Library and Information Resources Network (LIRN) has implemented Muse Proxy for its member libraries. This new customizable multi-platform proxy server will simplify the work LIRN does to help its member libraries offer students and faculty seamless access to licensed databases and other resources while off campus.
The 13th annual Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) conference returns to the AT&T Conference Center at the University of Texas at Austin on March 4–7, offering attendees a range of presentations on electronic resources management in seven tracks: licensing, collection development, organizational strategies, external relationships, user experience (UX), scholarly communications and library publishing, and emerging technologies and trends.
Sterling Heights Public Library, MI, has been offering BrainHQ, an online suite of gamified brain training exercises available to libraries through Demco’s partnership with Posit Science, as a component of a yearlong community initiative called “Exercise Your Brain!”
Digital Science has debuted Dimensions. The free core version of the platform delivers one-click access to over nine million open access articles and 860 million abstracts and citations.
EBSCO Information Services and BiblioLabs will launch OpenDissertations.org, an open access initiative that will facilitate the discovery of electronic theses and dissertations beginning early this year.
In August, Trevor Owens became the first head of digital content management in library services at the Library of Congress (LC). The role at LC represents something of a full circle for Owens; before serving in various roles at the Institute of Museum and Library Services from 2015–17, most recently as acting associate deputy director for libraries, Owens was a digital archivist at LC’s Office of Strategic Initiatives since 2010. The position, on the other hand, is brand new—both to Owens and to LC.
The 2017 ACRL/NY (Greater New York Metropolitan Area Chapter of Association of College and Research Libraries) Symposium, held on December 1 at Baruch College in Manhattan, led off with an interesting proposition: that thinking creatively about access—and how libraries can provide the widest range of access now and into the future—can offer a new kind of framework for shaping collections.
For the library user, conducting research can be challenging. Find out four ways your library can help ease these library user challenges.
The good news is that more academic librarians are leading textbook affordability and open educational resources initiatives at their institutions. What if we could do even more good work with statewide efforts? Fortunately, there are some good models to lead the way.
Speakers at ITHAKA’s The Next Wave conference, held at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel on November 29, made the case for work that colleges and universities must take on if they want to improve national educational attainment. The conference, “Innovating and Adapting to Address Today’s Higher Education Challenges,” looked at new approaches from a variety of angles, from administration to the classroom to research, with alignment between leadership and the library given particular attention.
The Library of Congress (LC) recently launched labs.loc.gov, a new online space that facilitates creative use of the Library’s digital collections.
Adam Matthew Digital last month announced the launch of Handwritten Text Recognition, an artificial intelligence technology that enables full-text searching of digitized, handwritten manuscript collections.
After a group of middle schoolers from Wilmington, NC had the chance to share in the discovery of some rare primary source documents, transcribe them, and get an up-close look at the digitization process, North Carolina may have a few more aspiring archivists ready to help preserve its past.
As collections transition to digital and print finds its way into remote storage sites, how does our profession respond to research that favors print over digital for reading comprehension, learning, and meeting student preferences?
Recent trends in technology are dramatically reshaping academic library collections, and while the use of video in higher education isn’t new, the move toward streaming brings a new array of benefits and challenges for academic librarians. LJ recently explored the ways in which libraries are addressing interest in streaming video services.
U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) director Davita Vance-Cooks has asked the Depository Library Council (DLC) to recommend changes to Chapter 19 of Title 44 of the U.S. Code, a request that has some members of the government information community concerned and others encouraged. Chapter 19 codifies GPO’s Federal Deposit Library Program (FDLP) into law, guaranteeing that the government will provide its information for free to the general public, and has not been significantly revised since the early 1990s.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (LC) announced June 15 the creation of two new born-digital collections: the Web Cultures Web Archive (WCWA), which will feature memes, GIFs, and image macros that surface in online pop culture, and the Webcomics Web Archive (WWA), which will collect comics created for an online audience.
A new initiative spearheaded by the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries, the Collections Convergence Initiative, will bring together researchers, library curators, and scholars to advance research, deepen their work with USC’s extensive special collections, expand the libraries’ public programming, and ultimately develop new collections.
While working as an NTEN/Google Fiber Digital Inclusion Fellow at the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL), I observed a profound digital disparity in the Bay Area, despite it being the center of technology innovation. In an effort to bridge the divide, we partnered with community organizations to host the first San Francisco Digital Inclusion Week (DIW) in May 2017.
The World Wide Web is always evolving, and user expectations constantly respond to prevailing trends. Navigation habits become conditioned by content management system (CMS) templates, common screen layouts, search bar locations, and menu designs that shape how people use popular websites. And libraries have to keep pace.
In August 2016, the Greater Baton Rouge, LA, region was impacted by widespread and sustained flooding. Many people were forced to get rid of a majority of their personal archives, including a number of photographs. The materials salvaged were wet and/or in advanced states of mold development. In response to the crisis, the archival community in Baton Rouge began to educate the public through local media and library resources on how to halt degradation of flood-damaged items. As a result, some of these mementos were saved.
Looking beyond the headlines to examine public policy issues that affect the American Library Association (ALA), panelists at the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) session “Report from the Swamp: Policy Developments from Washington” discussed the need for ongoing vigilance—and also promising avenues for advocacy.
While intellectual freedom and open access (OA) are two ideals widely held and strongly advocated for across all disciplines of librarianship, each touches on different values. The panel “Intellectual Freedom and Open Access; Working Toward a Common Goal?” at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Chicago, sponsored by ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Round Table, invited three librarians from different sectors to weigh in on where and how the two principles overlap, and how they can support each other.
The first staff layoffs since 2011 is this confirmed will take effect in July at the Montana State Library (MSL) in Helena, as one of several cost-cutting measures forced by budget cuts enacted by the legislature for FY18 and 19. And MSL officials are bracing for a second, even steeper round of reductions in funding, staff, and services later this summer.
Library Ideas, developer of the Freading ebook and Freegal music solutions for libraries, is launching the GoChip Beam, a new type of device for lending movies and television series. Each GoChip Beam device contains a small Wi-Fi router, rechargeable battery, and solid state storage preloaded with five feature length movies or an entire season of a television series, all enclosed in a 3.5″ x 1″ stick.
MIT Press has joined forces with the Internet Archive (IA) to scan, preserve, and enable lending of hundreds of the press’s books that are currently unavailable in digital form. With support from British funding agency Arcadia, IA will scan a selection of MIT Press’s backlist titles, which will then be available for any library that owns a physical copy of each book to lend or make openly available, and will also be accessible through IA’s archive.org.
Marmot Library Network has developed a Digital Archive and repository solution, enabling its member libraries to showcase digitized collections of images, postcards, books, magazines, videos, recorded oral histories, music, and academic research. Users can discover archive content from throughout the multi-type consortium with a simple catalog search.
OverDrive announced last week that Simon & Schuster Audio, Baker Publishing, and Lerner Publishing will be making ebooks and audiobooks available for licensing on the OverDrive platform via a cost-per-circ (CPC) model later this year.
In the scope of its programs, services, and collections; the incredible reach of its efforts in cooperation with other public agencies, departments, and local businesses; and its work to identify and fulfill needs of both the mainstream and marginalized people of Nashville and Davidson County, the Nashville Public Library (NPL), the Gale/LJ 2017 Library of the Year, is a model for the nation and the world.
In a May 2 statement, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) announced that Louisiana State University (LSU) filed a lawsuit against academic publishing company Elsevier for breach of contract on February 27. According to the complaint, Elsevier cut off the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine’s (SVM) access to content that was legally licensed by LSU Libraries. For many reasons, especially Elsevier’s often contentious relationship with libraries over the decades, this will be one of the more interesting cases to watch unfold.
Aiming to raise awareness and maintain momentum for preservation efforts focused on publicly administered data, the inaugural "Endangered Data Week" kicked off on April 17 and ultimately featured more than 50 presentations, panels, and projects in the U.S., Spain, and Australia.
At the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (TSCPL), KS, we call our website our digital offerings and our social media channels our “digital branch,” and we want everyone in Shawnee County to be able to access the digital content and the services the library offers to its customers.
As part of an effort to bridge the digital divide, Broward County Library (BCL), FL, in partnership with T-Mobile, the county’s Enterprise Technology Services division, CareerSource Broward, and the School Board of Broward County, has launched a two-year pilot program that will provide 300 tablet computers and data access plans to eligible residents of the Broward Municipal Services District (BMSD).
On March 2—which would have been Lou Reed’s 75th birthday—the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPLPA) announced its acquisition of the late musician’s complete archives. The press conference, held at NYPLPA’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, in Lincoln Center, touched off a two-week celebration showcasing Reed’s work, including displays of selected items from the archives at NYPLPA and the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, as well as several public programs.
Literacy—and how libraries are reimagining services to address it for patrons of all ages—took center stage at the Northeast Dade–Aventura Branch, Miami Dade Public Library System (MDPLS), FL, March 9–10, at LJ and School Library Journal’s 2017 Public Library Think Tank. The event—targeting “Libraries and Literacies: Redefining Our Impact”—looked at multiple literacies, including digital, media/information, civic, reading, visual, multicultural, and health, and focused on strategic thinking through a literacy lens.
Nonprofit altmetrics pioneer Impactstory has launched Unpaywall, a free extension for Google Chrome and Firefox browsers that helps users obtain free full text copies of open access (OA) research papers.
Delores Tucker is often remembered for her criticism of “gangsta rap,” but she can also be credited with prompting a new form of hip-hop scholarship. In 1997 the activist and politician used several Tupac Shakur lyrics to issue a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the artist’s estate. Teresa Neely, then a doctoral student, heard the news and recognized the lyrics as being taken out of context. To her it was a sign that Shakur’s words needed to be studied as a whole to be understood.
The shift to digital delivery of serials content has had a profound effect on the information ecosystem. Powerful discovery and social networking tools expose users to an incredibly rich world of commercially produced and open access (OA) content. Most publishers have explored new ways of pricing their content—such as population served, FTE (full-time equivalent), tiered pricing based upon Carnegie classification, or other defining criteria—or the database model, which treats all content within an e-journal package as a database, eliminating the need for title by title reconciliation. However, in the end, the pricing conversation always seems to circle back to the revenue generated by the annual subscription model.
The 2017 conferences held by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L), in March and April respectively, covered trends ranging from diversity to emerging technology.
On March 30 the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (KF) announced the award of nearly $1 million to support five innovative library projects. The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (CML), NC; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA; Peer 2 Peer University, Chicago; Richland Library, Columbia, SC; and Southwest Harbor Public Library, ME, each received between $35,000 and $250,000 to help realize a range of creative concepts addressing the digital information needs of their communities. Simultaneously, KF released a report, “Developing Clarity: Innovating in Library Systems,” examining opportunities and challenges within the lifecycle of library innovation.
Recently, I was teaching a privacy class for librarians, and the topic turned to the privacy versus convenience trade-off—the occasional annoyances of using privacy-enhancing technologies online. An audience member laid out what she felt I was asking of the group. “You’re telling us to start selling granola when everyone else is running a candy store.”
These are exciting times for Chicago Collections (CC), an online member consortium of libraries, museums, historical societies, and other cultural heritage organizations in and around Chicago. CC named a new executive director, Jeanne Long, in February, and is gearing up to cohost the annual gathering of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in April.
Do you want to web stream your story times? The Youth Services Department at the Fayetteville Public Library, AR, hoped to make these events available to parents and children who couldn’t get to the library, and our patrons’ response has been fantastic!
With content divided into seven distinct tracks—Managing e-Resources & Licensing, Collection Development & Assessment, Organizational Strategies, External Relationships, User Experience & Promotion, Scholarly Communications & Library Publishing, and Emerging Technologies & Trends—the annual ER&L conference in Austin, TX, offers attendees deep-dive presentations, case studies, and panel discussions on every aspect of electronic resource management (ERM).
Australia’s Western Sydney University (WSU), in collaboration with ProQuest, announced on February 12 that it will begin providing first-year students with no-cost access to digital textbooks through WSU’s library.
The results of the 2016 presidential election caught many by surprise. With the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, and his immediate remaking of American policy through executive orders, public and academic librarians began to mobilize. From book displays addressing resistance and inclusivity, to graphics proclaiming that all are welcome in the library, to topical LibGuides, to online groups organized by discipline or principles, library staff and supporters across the country joined forces with like thinkers to do what they do best: share information where it’s most needed.
Although every library would benefit from running usability studies, not every library has a dedicated staff available to conduct those studies. Anecdotally, librarians seem to feel incapable of undertaking usability studies for reasons including time, budget, and expertise.
Many libraries work with local cultural institutions to provide patrons with free or reduced-cost access. These print passes can be checked out in-house by patrons just like other resources, complete with circulation limits, due dates, and fines. Some software companies are simplifying pass management with web-based tools to help patrons discover and check out museum passes and event tickets or make reservations.
One of the most effective ways to test and evaluate a new program or service is to conduct a pilot project, but how do you scale up from there? How do you translate the small successes into sustainable, permanent additions to your library?
In the wake of the record-breaking attendance at the January 21 Women’s March on Washington, and sister marches in over 60 cities on all seven continents, social media reported that protesters were abandoning their signs after the event. Not all of those were destined for the recycling bin, however: archivists in several cities came out to collect and preserve them.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the U.K.-based nonprofit Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) in November 2016 announced the formation of a Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives.
Faculty and students returning to the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston campus for the Spring 2017 semester will encounter a library with resources noticeably reduced thanks to dramatic budget cuts. On November 10, 2016, an email notified the UMass Boston community of budget cuts for Fiscal Year 2017, including roughly 20 percent of the Healey Library’s general operating fund, amounting to approximately $700,000.
The Navajo Nation Library (NNL) is working to secure the funding necessary to digitize and catalog thousands of hours of stories, songs, and oral histories of the Navajo people, originally recorded in the 1960s by the Navajo Culture Center of the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity (ONEO).
On November 18–20, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) hosted “Hack the Stacks,” a solution-building event where over 100 developers, programmers, and others with a passion for computer science worked overnight to develop innovative solutions for the challenges faced by modern libraries and archives. The goal was to animate, organize, and enable greater access to the increasing body of digitized content produced by the AMNH Library.
Library for All, a nonprofit organization that has created a digital library solution designed to deliver ebooks and high-quality educational materials to children and readers in developing countries, was recently honored with an Empowering People Award. The global competition held by the Siemens Stiftung foundation is designed to find the most innovative technology solutions currently improving people’s lives in the developing world.
For its 2016 Next Wave conference, scholarly nonprofit organization ITHAKA brought together nearly 200 academic librarians, publishers, technology partners, and scholars at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel on November 30 to take a look at what may lie ahead for academia. “The Bigger Picture: How Macro Changes in Higher Education Should Shape Your Strategy” condensed what had previously been spread over two days into one all-day session, with a strong focus on academic professionals’ take on the landscape.
As the United States—and the world—prepare for the January 20, 2017 presidential inauguration, libraries, institutions, and citizens are joining forces to identify federal government websites to be captured and saved in the End of Term (EOT) Web Archive.
A new tool from Australia’s State Library of Queensland can make a cartoonist out of even the least artistically inclined. The Fun Palaces comics maker lets users place a set of ready-made images into panels, then write their own word balloons to develop a fully fleshed out four panel comic.
Early in 2017, Adam Matthew, a database vendor known for its collections of digitized historical primary sources, will release a new collection called Race Relations. The database will offer access to a trove of previously undigitized civil rights material from the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, 1943–70, an organization that was based at Fisk University in Nashville and whose records are now housed at the Amistad Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. Chianta Dorsey, an archivist at the Amistad Center, explains, “The formal program of the department began in 1943 as a forum to engage in a national discussion regarding numerous topics including racial and ethnic relationships, economics, education, government policy, housing and employment.”
articles
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LOG IN
We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LOG IN
Thank you for visiting.
We’ve noticed you are using a private browser. To continue, please log in or create an account.
