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If you’re reading this, you’re likely to know that the Signal is a collaborative blog that was created to share about digital preservation efforts and has since traced the evolution of digital practices over the years. We regularly share about ongoing projects and work undertaken by Digital Collection Management specialists as well as by the LC […]
Four police officers confront a Black man at a library computer and tell him that because he’s been disturbing other patrons, he must leave the premises. The man refuses. The confrontation ends when the Black man is tased and dragged out of the library by the officers. This incident took place at the library where […]
Amid mass protests of police violence against Black people, some libraries are revisiting the ways in which they’ve historically interacted with law enforcement—such as by hosting police-led community programming like Coffee with a Cop, hiring off-duty police as security officers, or calling 911 on disruptive patrons. For example, Toledo–Lucas County (Ohio) Public Library (TLCPL) has […]
Illustration ©ivector/Adobe Stock In an April 23 Public Library Association (PLA) webinar, “Public Libraries Respond to COVID-19: Strategies for Advancing Digital Equity Now,” three public librarians shared their experiences with everything from lending laptops and mobile hotspots to low-tech solutions like using sandwich boards and direct mail to advertise library services. Larra Clark, deputy director […]
The Taiwan Reading Festival. Photo: National Central Library in Taipei City, Taiwan Four libraries earned this year’s American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects. Their projects included smartphone training for seniors, multicultural events, a country-wide reading festival, and programming to raise awareness of Indigenous populations and their perspectives and needs. The […]
A boy reads at a Blumont library facility. Most books are nearly destroyed from overuse. Photo: Karen E. Fisher Deep in Jordan’s northern desert, in the refugee camp known as Zaatari, 76,000 Syrians live, work, pray, and—thanks to a campwide, refugee-run library system—read. In the low-resource, high-constraint environment of Zaatari, only about 82% of eligible […]
How you and your staff react to a threat is paramount to the success of your response. The inability to react effectively may damage your facility or collections and could contribute to injury or death. This is an excerpt from Library as Safe Haven: Disaster Planning, Response, and Recovery: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians (ALA […]
Photo: Peter Hurley/Vilcek Foundation When it was published in 2016, Yaa Gyasi’s first novel Homegoing was lauded for its broad historical, geographical, and generational sweep, tracing a sprawling family tree back to two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana. Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf, September) also explores the Ghanaian-American immigrant experience, this time through the eyes of a neuroscientist […]
By Terra Dankowski | July 1, 2020 Libraries rise to the challenge of maintaining services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photos: Nicole Johnson/Grand Rapids (Minn.) Area Library (drive-through); Robyn Huff (reopening); Pottsboro (Tex.) Area Library (e-sports); Tina Chenoweth (Animal Crossing) As communities struggle to contain COVID-19, their libraries ask: What do regular services look like in […]
Infobase’s Films on Demand fashion studies streaming video collection includes more than 1,300 titles. As colleges and universities gear up for distance learning or a limited return to campus, streaming media is emerging as a key tool. The on-demand availability and unlimited simultaneous use offered by some platforms make streaming a valuable resource for both […]
We are living in extraordinary times. A time when a pandemic has required that we distance ourselves from one another, and a time when the stand against racism and racial violence requires we come together. Just as there was an outcry across the field to keep our staff and communities safe and protected from COVID-19, […]
I was born in 1968, a year many describe as the most tumultuous of the second half of the 20th century. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered April 4, 1968, as he was protesting the conditions of Memphis sanitation workers whose rallying call was “I Am a Man.” Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was murdered while […]
Friends, data wranglers, lend me your ears; The Library of Congress’ Selected Datasets Collection is now live! You can now download datasets of the Simple English Wikipedia, the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, sports economic data, half a million emails from Enron, and urban soil lead abatement from this online collection. This initial set of […]
Welcome to the Spring 2020 Digital Library Services Newsletter, prepared by the Product and Service Management team! This newsletter includes contributions from: Cathy Aster, Hannah Frost, Dinah Handel, Sarah Seestone, Andrew Berger, Jacob Hill, and Michael Olson. The Digital Library of the Middle East The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME), which aims to become one […]
Welcome to the Spring 2020 Digital Library Services Newsletter, prepared by the Product and Service Management team! This newsletter includes contributions from: Cathy Aster, Hannah Frost, Dinah Handel, Sarah Seestone, Andrew Berger, Jacob Hill, and Michael Olson. The Digital Library of the Middle East The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME), which aims to become one […]
By Linda Lam, Laura Nguyen, Tati Scutelnic, and Astrid J. Smith As the daily work of Stanford Library’s Digital Production Group (DPG) is primarily hands-on, imaging and performing post-production work on images of collections materials, making the switch to working from home while sheltering in place has taken patience, flexibility, and creativity. Coordinators and imaging […]
By Linda Lam, Laura Nguyen, Tati Scutelnic, and Astrid J. Smith As the daily work of Stanford Library’s Digital Production Group (DPG) is primarily hands-on, imaging and performing post-production work on images of collections materials, making the switch to working from home while sheltering in place has taken patience, flexibility, and creativity. Coordinators and imaging […]
By Linda Lam, Laura Nguyen, Tati Scutelnic, and Astrid J. Smith As the daily work of Stanford Library’s Digital Production Group (DPG) is primarily hands-on, imaging and performing post-production work on images of collections materials, making the switch to working from home while sheltering in place has taken patience, flexibility, and creativity. Coordinators and imaging […]
This guest blog post is shared by Chris Adams, Solutions Architect in the Office of the Chief Information Officer/IT Design & Development Directorate, and Julia Kim, Digital Projects Coordinator at the National Library for the Blind and Print Disabled at the Library of Congress, formerly the Digital Assets Specialist at the American Folklife Center, supporting […]
Our online column Letters of the Law explores a wide range of legal issues that arise in libraries, with the help of a pair of leading authorities: Mary Minow, a librarian who became a lawyer, and Tomas A. Lipinski, a lawyer who became a librarian. Together they have authored four books on the subject, including […]
