All posts by George Eberhart

EBSCO has contributed funding to a new open source library services platform aimed at academic libraries, with early versions expected to be ready by 2018.

EBSCO Supports New Open Source Project

If the yet-unnamed project sticks to its schedule and finds interest as lively as expected, it could open a new chapter in library technology at least as important as the advent of LSPs and the recent rounds of major company mergers and acquisitions. The initiative builds on the enthusiasm of academic and research libraries for … Continue reading EBSCO Supports New Open Source Project

Attendees are seated at the Perspectives on Islam event on March 9 at Darby (Mont.) Community Public Library.

Perspectives on Islam in Montana

In 2016, along with our regular programming for children, we chose the Montana Historical Society traveling history footlocker, Coming to Montana: Immigrants from Around the World, for field trips with elementary-school children from Darby Public Schools, one of our local partners. The footlocker was exhibited at the library and provided a useful starting point for … Continue reading Perspectives on Islam in Montana

Artwork for the 1958 National Library Week campaign

National Library Week

By any measure, the event was a huge success: Some 68 million subscribers to 22 national magazines could read well-placed articles about libraries. A total of 170 million homes served by radio and TV could hear or view 14 network programs on libraries. Readers could glean 11,607 stories celebrating libraries running in newspapers at the … Continue reading National Library Week

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey at the Dartmouth College commencement, June 14, 1953. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library

The Freedom to Read

Eisenhower’s words shocked many because they constituted his first public challenge to McCarthyism—an ethos enveloping the country at the time and fed by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who inferred communist conspiracies everywhere in American culture, including books on the shelves of 194 information libraries that the US State Department operated in 61 foreign countries. Like-minded … Continue reading The Freedom to Read

Librarian responses to the survey question: "What does the best model look like for the digital humanities?"

How Librarians and Faculty Use Digital Humanities

The sea change brought about by digital humanities (DH) resources is still rippling through academia. As Stewart Varner and Patricia Hswe write in their special report on “Digital Humanities in Libraries” (American Libraries, Jan./Feb. 2016), libraries are “unsure how they should respond as DH attracts more and more practitioners and its definition evolves to cover … Continue reading How Librarians and Faculty Use Digital Humanities

ALA officials stand in front of the Hall of Congresses at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904: (left to right) ALA President-Elect Ernest Cushing Richardson, former ALA President Reuben Gold Thwaites, and ALA President Herbert Putnam. Richardson wears one of the white buttons that identifies him as an ALA conference attendee. Credit: ALA Archives

Meet Me in St. Louis

Imagine a conference where, after listening to a “characteristic address” by Melvil Dewey—“full of the enthusiasm of invention and the ardor of prophecy, which never fails to kindle a responsive spark in his audience”—you venture out to ride on the biggest Ferris Wheel in the world, eat some new-fangled ice cream cones, watch Alexander Graham … Continue reading Meet Me in St. Louis

Erik Mitchell: Dispatches from the Field

A Linked Data Landscape

Data licensing. The common practices that LAM communities have created to develop open source tools and support of open access are now influencing how we publish open data. Even though institutions are choosing different open-use licenses, open data is supporting new and broader uses of data. The Getty Museum, University of Pennsylvania, and University of … Continue reading A Linked Data Landscape

Opening image from The Story of the Stuff

In the Wake of Tragedy

University of Tennessee Digital Humanities Librarian Ashley R. Maynor has created a multimedia web documentary, titled The Story of the Stuff, that looks at what motivates people to send physical memorials to the victims and survivors of such tragedies. After Newtown, Maynor says she “witnessed firsthand the growing phenomenon in global culture that we’ve seen … Continue reading In the Wake of Tragedy