By Stefan Lundberg and Jan Petter Myklebust. "I had a list of whom to fire in my drawer and I had attended a course in how to handle mass firing of staff. But I decided: I will not do it – I will not fire my staff – whatever happens to me," Kai Ekholm, Finnish chief librarian and director of the National Library of Finland, said to the Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet last month. More...
By Matthew Reisz. Landmark documents and artefacts in the history of science and religion go on public view for the first time. More...
By . There’s no doubt that people in the UK value libraries. They are seen as an asset to communities, offering a calm, quiet, neutral space, where anyone can access information for work or leisure. When libraries are threatened with closure, community groups and public figures spring into action to try to save them. More...
By Barbara Fister. We’re doing some soul-searching at my library about how we support student learning and whether the ways we’ve done it for years are working as well as they could. As at many libraries, the reference desk is seeing fewer consultations and our liaison work with departments could use a reboot. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Over the years, I’ve made a point of helping students see the ways in which library systems make biased decisions when it comes to organizing information. The Library of Congress classification system treats women as a category subordinate to families. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. I have students read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” every spring. Bush was a scientific bureaucrat who helped organize the work of the Manhattan Project. In 1945, just before the fruits of that project were used to destroy two Japanese cities, he published his thoughts about what scientists would do in peacetime, focusing in particular on the problem of managing a proliferation of information. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. By now, you’ve probably heard of Sci-Hub, a collection of millions of articles being gathered through borrowed or stolen library logins, then loaded onto servers abroad for anyone to download. The woman who started it has been called a modern-day Robin Hood. Also, a criminal. There has also been heated debate about why librarians aren’t doing more to back publishers in this fight. After all, these thieves are taking advantage of licensed scholarship that costs libraries billions of dollars annually! Surely we want to stop this rampant theft. Read more...
By Josh Logue. Many campus libraries are open to those with no affiliation with the colleges and are proud of that tradition -- even as it sometimes raises safety issues. Read more...
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