By Barbara Fister. Libraries are getting some welcome positive attention lately. The Ferguson Public Library has just been named Library Journal’s Library of the Year for being a creatively hospitable public space for a community in crisis. Scott Bonner, the library director, keeps sharing the warm glow by reminding everyone that this is what public libraries do every day. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Ever since the news broke about Science pulling a political science paper after graduate students called attention to problems with its methodology and one of its authors asked for it to be retracted, I’ve been mulling over how to talk about this episode with students. It says something about how peer review works, but doesn’t always. Read more...
By Scott McLemee. Five years ago, this column looked into scholarly potential of the Twitter archive the Library of Congress had recently acquired. That potential was by no means self-evident. The incensed “my tax dollars are being used for this?” comments practically wrote themselves, even without the help of Twitter bots. Read more...
By Brian Mathews. A few weeks ago I heard Carrie Donovan (Head of Teaching and Learning, Indiana University Libraries ) give a keynote address at The Innovative Library Classroom Conference.
Here are the slides from her talk: Shaking up the Sediment: Re-energizing Pedagogical Practice while Avoiding Bottle Shock. And here are slides from the other presentations at the conference. More...
By Brian Mathews. Troy Swanson is the teaching and learning librarian and Library department chair at Moraine Valley Community College. His article A Radical Step: Implementing A Critical Information Literacy Model (published in 2004) was my first exposure to critical theory in librarianship. More...
By Brian Mathews. I decided to ask a professor. Laura Saunders is an Assistant Professor at Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where she teaches and conducts research in the areas of reference and instruction, intellectual freedom, and academic libraries. She also has a strong interest in social justice issues related to libraries. More...
By Brian Mathews. Here is a quick interview with Andrew Whitworth, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Manchester and Programme Director of the MA: Digital Technologies, Communication and Education. He published Radical Information Literacy: Reclaiming the Political Heart of the IL Movement. More...
By Brian Mathews. I was in grad school when I first encountered Library Juice – an email-based zine filled with socially progressive essays and other reflections. It was dramatically different than the esoteric journals we were using in class. More...
By Brian Mathews. We all know there has been a national decline in reference transactions. Here is some raw ARL data suggesting that questions have dropped nationally from 20,000,000 in 1995 to just barely 5,000,000 in 2014. More...
By Carl Straumsheim. Academic, library and technology organizations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy adopted last month by publisher Elsevier, saying it undermines open-access policies at colleges and universities and prevents authors from sharing their work. Read more...
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