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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 […]
Today’s guest post is from Jesse Johnston (Sr. Research Development Officer Office of Research, Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Michigan), Kate Murray (Digital Projects Coordinator, Digital Collections Management & Services Division), Marcus Nappier (Digital Collections Specialist, Digital Content Management Section), and Ted Westervelt, Chief, US/Anglo Division. It has become ever more […]
The American Library Association (ALA) made a historic decision to cancel its 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago, as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But in these unprecedented times, it’s more important than ever for librarians and library workers to seek and embrace community and keep up with professional development opportunities. ALA Virtual (June […]
Illustration: Tom Deja On March 20, American Libraries Live hosted the webinar “Libraries and COVID-19: Managing Strategies and Stress.” Moderator Dan Freeman, director of ALA Publishing eLearning Solutions, led a discussion with librarians and health professionals on the front lines of the crisis about the library response to the pandemic and methods to reduce stress […]
The ALA Gay and Lesbian Task Force marching in the 1992 San Francisco Pride parade. Photo: ALA Archives Fifty years ago, under the auspices of the American Library Association’s Social Responsibilities Round Table, a small group of activists, librarians, and activist-librarians formed what was then known as the Task Force on Gay Liberation—the very first gay […]
Illustration: © Atstock Productions/Adobe Stock If your library were offered two chances to save a life, would it take them? The response might seem like an obvious “yes.” But for many public libraries the answer is more nuanced. In October 2018, Emergent BioSolutions, the company that manufactures the opioid overdose reversal drug Narcan (generic name: […]
