digital content Archives | American Libraries Magazine

Two children sit on the floor listening to audio while reading books

Transform Your Library into a Community Hub

August 21, 2024

Playaway Products, an innovator of the preloaded-library market, knows libraries play a vital role in communities. Originator of the acclaimed Wonderbook read-along and Playaway audiobook, Playaway Products offers more than 500 Spanish and bilingual stories to help meet the growing demand for Spanish-language content and language-learning materials. With no need for Wi-Fi or downloads, these … Continue reading Transform Your Library into a Community Hub →

Lightening the Librarian’s Load

July 9, 2024

At OpenAthens, we’re all about connecting people to information. And we’re focused on supporting librarians, which is why the OpenAthens complete solution offers you a tool that provides your patrons with smooth access to high-quality digital content from trustworthy sources—regardless of where they start their search journey. It is a fully managed service that provides … Continue reading Lightening the Librarian’s Load →

SLACK Journals Select: The Key to Content Your Way

September 13, 2023

NURSING Our nursing token bundle offers access to articles in Journal of Gerontological Nursing, Journal of Nursing Education, Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, Research in Gerontological Nursing, and The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing. SLACK’s nursing journals are a premier source of practical, useful, and timely information directed toward today’s nursing … Continue reading SLACK Journals Select: The Key to Content Your Way →

Portrait of Dispatches author Monika Glowacka-Musial

Visualize This

By Monika Glowacka-Musial | March 1, 2021

Digital collections, however, are not simply representations of physical collections but resources in their own right. Unlike physical collections, their digital counterparts feature detailed metadata. Often, they also feature full text, thanks to optical character recognition conversion of text images into machine-encoded data. Both metadata and data can be mined, analyzed, and visualized—not only opening … Continue reading Visualize This →

One Country, One Collection

By Mirela Roncevic | November 2, 2020

This open digital library not only introduced users to a new way of engaging with digital content but also offered a sustainable business model to publishers, authors, libraries, and those who wished to support it financially. The idea for the national library did not come overnight. It was the result of working on various projects … Continue reading One Country, One Collection →

Digital Legacy Planning

By Heather Moorefield-Lang | September 1, 2020

The themes of afterlife and legacy have become prominent in popular media over the past few years, but the lifecycle of our digital footprint is less understood. The Digital Legacy Association, a British organization that hosts annual conferences on the topic, defines digital legacy as the digital information left behind when a person dies. How … Continue reading Digital Legacy Planning →

Preservation as Risk Management

By Erin Baucom | September 3, 2019

The best type of program is an interlocking system of policies, workflows, technical solutions, and efforts meant to keep digital objects usable in the long term. Digital objects are made up of bitstreams—sequences of 1s and 0s that require specific software and hardware environments to remain accessible. Some are born digital (those materials with no … Continue reading Preservation as Risk Management →

Saving Your Digital Life

By Carrie Smith | June 25, 2019

Katlin Seagraves is the digital literacy associate at the Tulsa City-County Library where she manages the library’s Digital Literacy Lab. At “Save As: Preserving Your Digital Life” on June 24 at the ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in Washington, D.C., Seagraves educated attendees on methods for preserving born-digital personal data like photos and social media. … Continue reading Saving Your Digital Life →

Mobile phone with Demco DiscoverMobile app.

Reaching Patrons on the Go

By Carrie Smith | June 1, 2018

DiscoverMobile by Demco The recently launched DiscoverMobile app connects communities to everything their libraries have to offer. The app is available to all types of libraries and is designed to run on both Android and iOS devices. The app is hosted and maintained by Demco—libraries manage only their own content and branding. Libraries can add … Continue reading Reaching Patrons on the Go →

In the plenary session, Sarah Burnes, Jennifer Brier, Nell Taylor, and Luis Herrera discuss how archives are put together.

DPLAfest: Inclusion, Community, and Outreach

By Carrie Smith | April 25, 2017

In the same rooms where the final planning sessions establishing the DPLA were held five years ago, Executive Director Dan Cohen announced that the archive now held more than 16 million items from 2,350 member institutions and is on track to have hubs in all 50 states. The Open eBooks program, launched in 2016 to provide free access … Continue reading DPLAfest: Inclusion, Community, and Outreach →

The Future of Library Cards

By Kaitlin Throgmorton | January 3, 2017

At many libraries, digital “cards”—which usually consist simply of numbers that patrons use to access digital items—have become standard. The Harris County (Tex.) Public Library (HCPL) introduced its version, the iKnow Digital Access Card, as a way to “reduce as many barriers as possible,” says Library Director Edward Melton. IKnow card holders can access the … Continue reading The Future of Library Cards →

Improving Library Websites

By Carrie Smith | January 3, 2017

Syndetics Unbound Syndetic Solutions and LibraryThing for Libraries were designed to make online library catalogs more informational and interactive. ProQuest has now combined these two services into Syndetics Unbound, which provides 16 different catalog enrichment elements in one service. Many of the features will be familiar to those who are used to shopping for books … Continue reading Improving Library Websites →

Latest Library Links

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Genevieve Trainor writes: “The Guinness World Record holder for Most Prolific Book Thief is Ottumwa (Iowa’s) Stephen Blumberg. The 23,600 volumes he accumulated between the 1970s and his arrest in March of 1990 were all stashed in his 17-room home. Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, got involved with Blumberg as part of the FBI’s efforts to return the stolen manuscripts and rare books to their museums and libraries. Referred to as the Omaha Project, the information science proving ground involved four weeks, 44 catalogers and reference librarians and 600 volunteer hours to determine who might be the rightful owners.”

Little Village (Dubuque, Iowa), Dec. 4
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Casey Newton writes: “At the moment, no one knows for sure whether the large language models that are now under development will achieve superintelligence and transform the world. And in that uncertainty, two primary camps of criticism have emerged. The first camp, which I associate with the external critics, holds that artificial intelligence (AI) is fake and sucks. The second camp, which I associate more with the internal critics, believes that AI is real and dangerous. Today I want to lay out why I believe AI is real and dangerous.”

Platformer, Dec. 5
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Latia Ward writes: “One way to keep current with what students think of the library and its services is through Student Library Advisory Committee meetings. These meetings are a way to gather feedback and reinforce the library as a welcoming place. How do librarians create a welcoming environment within Student Library Advisory Committee meetings? Librarians create a welcoming environment through community, purpose, and dedicated space.” Also see part 1 of this blog post.

RIPS Law Librarian Blog, Nov. 13, Dec. 5
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Eleanor Hecks writes: “Few things are as frustrating to a user as when a site won’t respond. Unfortunately, it’s also an all-too-common scenario. Graceful degradation is a design approach that ensures the basics of a website will still function even if specific individual parts of it stop working. The approach removes single points of failure: just because one thing stops working doesn’t mean the system as a whole fails. A site following this principle fails in pieces instead of all at once, so the most important features remain available when some components encounter an error.”

Smashing Magazine, Dec. 6
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Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

WVLT-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.), Dec. 4
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Joe Foley writes: “Copyright rules vary from country to country and have changed over time. In the US, works created between 1929 and 1963 that gave notice and renewed copyright have 95 years from their first publication date. That means that on January 1, 2025, a host of works from 1929 will enter the public domain. This means that copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster’s first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye.” Other notable works entering public domain in the United States include the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, contralto Marian Anderson’s first record, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Creative Bloq, Dec. 7; Everybody’s Libraries, Dec. 3, Dec. 7; Public Domain Review, Dec. 10
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Brittany Adams writes: “The digital landscape of libraries is expanding rapidly, with an increasing shift towards electronic resources and online services. As members of the library community, we’re witnessing a transformative era where physical collections are complemented—and sometimes replaced—by digital ones. This transition offers new opportunities for enhancing accessibility and engagement, but it also presents challenges, especially for young patrons and their families. It is essential to equip children and their caregivers with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate this evolving space confidently.”

ALSC Blog, Dec. 9

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