The New York Times: “After years on the decline, Barnes & Noble’s sales are up, its costs are down — and the same people who for decades saw the superchain as a supervillain are celebrating its success. In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers,… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Libraries
Librarians Can’t Be Neutral in the War on Information
Information Today / Dave Schumaker: “…Specialized librarians are an obvious example of librarians whose success depends on their not being neutral. Legal, medical, corporate, and other specialized librarians perform more in-depth research than librarians in other settings. They fulfill Ranganathan’s fourth law—“Save the time of the reader”—in a very direct way, by selecting, summarizing, and… Continue Reading
OCLC and Google now connect web searchers directly to library collections
“OCLC and Google are working together to link directly from books discovered through Google Search to print book records in the catalogs of hundreds of U.S. libraries. This feature is part of Google’s ongoing effort to connect people to their local libraries through Google Search. The initial phase of this new program connects people using… Continue Reading
Maryland Gives Up on Its Library E-book Law
Publishers Weekly: “Maryland’s library e-book law is effectively dead. In a court filing this week, Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh said the state would present no new evidence in a legal challenge filed by the Association of American Publishers, allowing the court’s recently issued preliminary injunction blocking the law to stand, and paving the… Continue Reading
Shelf-promotion: the art of furnishing rooms with books you haven’t read
Guardian UK: “Books are props, just like you buy a little objet – Interior designer Miles de Lange” – “There may be two kinds of bookcase owners: those who own more books than they can accommodate, cramming tomes into every crevice – and those who dot their shelves with artfully placed stacks, and have space… Continue Reading
The giant archive hidden under the British countryside
Youtube Video – “DeepStore provides expert commercial document storage and retrieval services and is the UK’s largest underground storage company. Based in Winsford, Cheshire, 150m below ground, the company was established in 1998 as an alternative use for the space created from mining millions of tonnes of rock salt in Britain’s largest salt mine –… Continue Reading
Ukrainian libraries respond to Russian invasion in surprising and heartbreaking ways
Berkeley Library – ‘Islands of hope’: Ukrainian libraries respond to Russian invasion in surprising and heartbreaking ways — here’s how – “Thousands of miles from UC Berkeley, in libraries across Ukraine, the squeak of shifted chairs has been replaced by the blare of air raid sirens, and the distant rattle of old pipes by the… Continue Reading
Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives
Washington Post: “Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren’t the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. With the violence well into its second month, the country’s digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation’s servers. Over the past month, a motley group of… Continue Reading
Libraries and the Contested Terrain of “Neutrality”
New on LLRX – Libraries and the Contested Terrain of “Neutrality” – Rick Anderson is University Librarian at Brigham Young University. His commentary addresses timely, thoughtful and critical conversations and knowledge sharing around the issues of censorship, book banning, library ethics and professional responsibility across communities. Continue Reading
LLRX March 2022 Issue
Articles and Columns for March 2022 Libraries and the Contested Terrain of “Neutrality” – Rick Anderson is University Librarian at Brigham Young University. His commentary addresses timely, thoughtful and critical conversations and knowledge sharing around the issues of censorship, book banning, library ethics and professional responsibility across communities. Truth to Power – Robert McKay discusses his… Continue Reading
A Scientific Explanation for Your Urge to Sniff Old Books
LitHub – Jude Stewart Breaks Down the Chemical Reactions Behind Olfactory Bibliomania…”This is an intimate smell that’s not necessarily miniature. You can smell a single old book, riffle through its pages rapidly and let your nose bask in the scented breeze. But just as often you encounter this smell as a solid wall in a… Continue Reading
Schools nationwide are quietly removing books from their libraries
Washington Post: “Meet the librarians fighting bans and scrambling to preserve children’s freedom to read..Slowly — over months of meetings, investigations and secret conversations with fearful librarians across her counties — she came to understand the disturbing reality. Administrators, afraid of attracting controversy, were quietly removing books from library shelves before they could be challenged.… Continue Reading
