At “Strengthening Libraries as Entrepreneurial Hubs,” a session sponsored by the Urban Libraries Council (ULC) at the American Library Association’s 2018 Annual Conference in New Orleans in Sunday, members of ULC’s Learning Cohort discussed practices and approaches for public libraries that want to support contractors, small business, and startups in their communities. “Most businesses fail … Continue reading Libraries Helping Entrepreneurs
Smith has been traveling around the US, but instead of reading at the usual bookstores and college campuses, she’s been hitting public libraries, churches, and community centers. She said the sense of gathering in these spaces has been intimate and inspiring. For example, she read her work in a men’s rehab facility, and although the … Continue reading President’s Program Speakers Address Citizenship through Poetry, Memoir
After Fargo and Burns endured the stress and competition of the LIS job market, they wanted to see if this experience was common, but found little research on job searches within LIS literature. Their project responds to a familiar question: Is librarianship dying? Blogs and think pieces suggest that one shouldn’t pursue library school, and … Continue reading Emotions in the LIS Job Search
After discussing definitions of whiteness (a way of thinking, both intentional and unintentional, that privileges the values of white people over those of non-whites) and implicit bias (the unconscious and conscious stereotypes that we ascribe to others), Hathcock broke the near-capacity crowd into small groups to discuss an example of implicit bias and whiteness in … Continue reading Battling Racism Below the Surface
Daardi Sizemore Mixon, university archivist and special collections librarian at Minnesota State University, Mankato (MSU), and her colleague Monika Antonelli, outreach librarian, explained how, as part of the university’s 150th anniversary celebration, the MSU library produced a 50-minute documentary titled Two Weeks in May. The basis for the film was Out of Chaos (Minnesota State University Mankato Foundation, … Continue reading Lights, Camera, Libraries!
Alison Ricker, head of the science library at Oberlin (Ohio) College, said, “Librarians are all a force for science, simply by what we do.” Her message was amplified by a blue T-shirt draped over the panel’s table that read “I am a force for science.” Ricker explained it was distributed by the American Association for … Continue reading Libraries: A Force for Science
You on a Monday. https://twitter.com/teach_research/status/1011262636711972865 You asking an important question. With 36 hours of conferencing left, I just shipped 30 lbs. of books to myself. How did this happen? 🤦🏾♀️ #ALAac18 #ocpsreads #SummerReading — Ms. Garner (@GarnerDP) June 25, 2018 You making a big realization. First day of #alaac18 not working on, practicing … Continue reading Top 10 Tweets—Monday Edition
For Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms, speakers at “The Accidental Researcher: a Case Study in Librarian-led Historical Research and Social Justice” on June 24 at the 2018 ALA Annual Conference, their research on the Camp Livingston internment camps started with a May 2016 newspaper article on letters from interned World War II–era Japanese American children. Johnson, head of … Continue reading How Two Academic Librarians Became Accidental Historical Researchers
On Sunday, June 24, the governing Council of American Library Association (ALA) passed a historic resolution that “apologizes to African Americans for wrongs committed against them in segregated public libraries” and commends those “who risked their lives to integrate public libraries for their bravery and courage in challenging segregation in public libraries and in forcing … Continue reading Desegregating Public Libraries
“We made this decision in order to bring our awards program into consistency with our mission and our strategic directions,” says ALSC President Nina Lindsay. “ALSC’s core values include integrity, respect, inclusiveness, and responsiveness, and we found we needed to review the names of awards with those values in mind.” In a joint statement released … Continue reading ALSC Changes Name of Laura Ingalls Wilder Award
Nicole Cooke, assistant professor and MS/LIS program director at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Information Sciences, opened the session by detailing how she became a target after the right-wing publication Campus Reform published a story about her research project, “Minority Student Experiences with Racial Microaggressions in the Academic Library,” which received a 2017 … Continue reading Bullying, Trolling, and Doxxing, Oh My!
Weimer was joined by two other panelists to provide an introduction to spatial humanities and its potential as an aspect of library instruction and its role in student research at “Understanding and Using Spatial Humanities: Digital Mapping at the Forefront of Scholarly Research,” moderated by Leslie Wagner, chair of the Map and Geospatial Information Round Table, … Continue reading Spatial Humanities in Libraries
