As start-up companies reimagine components of the scholarly communication system, are observers too quick to assimilate the new into the known? This presentation discusses the case of the social-network and document-sharing platform Academia.edu and the debates it has stirred. Academia.edu has been subsumed into discussions about scholarly…[Read more]

Organizational realignment between libraries and campus IT is challenging. It is also an opportunity to rethink library services. This presentation highlights the benefits of expanding a service portfolio and strategies to shift, sharpen, and share staff skills for success in providing enhanced electronic resources and discovery systems support.

The adoption of institutional diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs in recent decades highlights an ongoing need for structural and cultural change within higher education institutions. It also raises questions around gender, race and disability politics, the decolonisation of diversity and neoliberal management of higher…[Read more]

This report is intended as a guide to facilitate the development of the Transgender Media Portal (transgendermediaportal.org). The Transgender Media Portal aims to make audiovisual work by trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people more available to artists, activists, festival programmers, researchers, instructors,…[Read more]

In light of the Fan Studies Network’s statement regarding fan studies being overrun with whiteness, we are in a unique position to engage in scholarship that challenges the overwhelmingly white and Global North–centric structures that define how we study fan cultures. Multidisciplinarity, which may be understood as disciplines laid side by side, s…[Read more]

Over the course of the last year the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (Roshan Institute-UMD) have begun collaborating with the Raja of Mahmudabad family on the preservation of their important manuscript collection. The project will help protect the…[Read more]

The goal of this paper is twofold: first to define “research data” in a humanities context through a discussion of the ways in which humanities researchers create and aggregate image collections, and second to address the processes by which academic libraries and information professionals can play an active role in supporting the treatment and per…[Read more]

Purpose: – The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the impact of public library activities on the health and wellbeing of library users. Concentrating on five library activities; knit and knit, rhyme time, learn my way, reading group and adult craft and calming colouring. It seeks to examine the implementation of the joint action path…[Read more]

Het streven naar Open Access (OA), de vrije toegang tot wetenschappelijke publicaties, heeft de laatste tijd een nieuw elan gekregen door een aantal initiatieven van overheden en onderzoeksfinanciers. Toch kan men zich de vraag stellen of het niet om oude wijn in nieuwe zakken gaat. Er is al twee decennia sprake van OA – waarom zou er deze keer e…[Read more]

The world is ablaze with colour, and for artists and designers the spectrum is both a vital tool and highly informational. Whether found in the circadian rhythms of nature, contemporary works of art or art & design libraries, colour’s kaleidoscopic lens allows us to observe, experience, and communicate the tessellation of information present in o…[Read more]

Purpose: investigate the information behaviour of hobbyist book collectors as serious leisure participants and how it relates to information behaviour models and theories.
Objectives: study how hobbyist book collectors seek and use information, what their sources are, why they seek information in these ways, what difficulties they encounter, how…[Read more]

Description of the exhibition Japan’s Book Donation to the University of Louvain. Japanese Cultural Identity and Modernity in the 1920s.

The American Religious Sounds Project, a joint effort from Michigan State University and Ohio State University, has been gathering sound recordings of American religious life since 2014. The project is undertaking a dual process of expanding to other institutions and ingesting the collection into the Vincent Voice Library at MSU.
With thousands…[Read more]

The user experience movement is gaining momentum in libraries, but its adoption and adaptation into an organizational culture may present unexpected challenges. In June 2014, the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries created a User Experience unit and in a short time, established a solid and reputable team of practitioners. This success,…[Read more]

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement.…[Read more]

Semantic and syntactical judgments play a central role in the development of classification systems. Syndetic relationships are relationships between indexing terms, sometimes referred to as cross references. Due to the extensiveness of synonyms for different concepts in natural languages, subject indexing has historically focused on developing…[Read more]

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant…[Read more]

Social organizations, institutions, governments, and bureaucracies are all manifestations of power distribution. Many contemporary theories on power are at least partly informed by notions that were introduced in General Systems Theory. Public libraries are open systems. In an average organization, a hierarchy divides tasks, sets rules, and…[Read more]

What Do You Mean?” was an undeniable bop of its era in which Justin Bieber explores the ambiguities of romantic communication. (I pinky promise this will soon make sense for scholarly communication librarians interested in artificial intelligence [AI].) When the single hit airwaves in 2015, there was a meta-debate over what Bieber meant to add t…[Read more]