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2023 International Innovators

National Central Library’s Open Lab Multi­media Center includes a DIY studio, for activities like sewing, and music rooms. Two libraries earned this year’s American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects. The winning entries are the National Central Library (NCL) in Taipei City, Taiwan, and Seoul National University Library (SNUL) in South […]

A Helping Hand

Ihor Poshyvailo, founder of Maidan Museum in Kyiv, holds the ceramic cockerel that has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. Photo: Bohdan Poshyvailo/Maidan Museum Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dominated headlines since February, and the conflict has affected people globally—including American librarians. While it’s easy to feel helpless when war breaks out in another country, […]

2022 International Innovators

Students from universities in several countries participate in calligraphy tutorials through City University of Hong Kong and learn how to parse historical East Asian texts. Two libraries earned this year’s American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects. The winning entries include a program that teaches information literacy through calligraphy and a […]

By the Numbers: United Nations1

Map indicating the 50 countries that participated in the UN Conference on International Organization at San Francisco in 1945. Photo: ©United Nations (2021), digitallibrary.un.org 50Number of countries represented at the United Nations (UN) Conference on International Organization in San Francisco from April 25 to June 26, 1945. Representatives wrote a charter for the UN with […]

2021 International Innovators

Students compete in the Virtual Library InfoLit Race Challenge at Nazarbayev University Library in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan Five libraries earned this year’s American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects. The winning projects include programs that offered online academic aid and games to college students during the pandemic; examined the significance of historic […]

International Innovators

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 […]

Bringing Books to the Desert

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 […]