It’s understandable. Summer is a busy time at the public library, and repeating a program saves work, even if it’s not the best thing for your youth participants or staff. Though your plans for summer reading are probably set, now is an opportune time to take inventory of what you’re doing, what is and isn’t … Continue reading Summer Reading Reboot
Be clear and concise. Ensure that the data you are illustrating is comprehensive and accurate. The goal is to convey the greatest number of ideas in the smallest amount of space in the shortest number of words. A good resource to review for inspiration is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. … Continue reading Design and Conquer
The Copyright Office’s future has sparked debate and controversy, specifically regarding the best location for the office. As librarians, we must seize this opportunity to advocate in favor of keeping the office within the Library of Congress (LC) and not, as some lawmakers would have it, as an independent agency under their purview. The framers of … Continue reading Keep Copyright in the Library
Finding diverse podcasts One place to look is the website of a podcast collective called Postloudness. Based in Chicago, it aims to create a community of shows by women, people of color, and queer-identified hosts. Its goal is to encourage and support underrepresented voices to produce podcasts and expand diversity in programming. You may also want to … Continue reading Diverse and Accessible Podcasts
The Research + Practice Collaboratory, a nonprofit that develops and tests new approaches to research and practice, says that such jointly conducted research “can produce tools and findings that speak directly to the concerns of educators. This approach may also represent a more ethical approach to education research by giving equal voice to the insights, … Continue reading Research–Practice Partnerships
Librarians work with students at an early age to teach the importance of documenting sources and not plagiarizing others’ work. Teaching Plagiarism Prevention to College Students: An Ethics-Based Approach, by Connie Strittmatter and Virginia K. Bratton, presents a model to address intentional plagiarism. This model does not address how to cite properly but rather seeks … Continue reading On Writing
As an Association, we advocate for a wide range of federal legislation and policy issues, from intellectual freedom and privacy to access to government information to preservation to copyright. We also advocate for funding for library programs, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), the E-Rate program, … Continue reading In D.C., It’s All about Our Values
In my columns and interviews over the past eight months of my presidency, I have focused primarily on ALA’s values and the values of our profession. As a result, I invariably receive a myriad of emphatic emails from people who often tell me that I can’t tell them how to think or what to value. … Continue reading Our Way Forward
I’ve always preferred the AND operator to NOT when trying to refine search results. NOT is too blunt an instrument for my tastes, and it’s too easy to lose good information with it; using AND provides focus and often does a more effective job of narrowing down a big retrieval set. AND has been on my mind lately. As I … Continue reading Boolean Logic
This is a climate in which we now all live. This is the climate in which my husband and I are raising our 3-year-old daughter, a Korean American, in a city that is 83% white and 8% Asian. Currently, 96% of Minnesota’s K–12 educators are white. Across the country, librarianship is 88% white. What do … Continue reading Diversify Everything
Document capture at Crowley Imaging Services The Crowley Company has been providing micrographic and digital archiving services for more than 30 years. Crowley Imaging Services uses equipment from its own manufacturing arm and other vendors to offer services to libraries and archives that don’t have an in-house digitization department. The company recently purchased two Phase One IQ3 … Continue reading Saving Your Media
When I started working at the library, we handed out time-limited computer access passes to anyone who wanted them. Users included library cardholders, people who were homeless, the residents of a local halfway house, and people who worked in the city but didn’t live there. I loved that we provided a valuable service to those … Continue reading Access and Resistance
