2013
20
Nov
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9 Comments
Creative Destruction in Libraries: Designing our Future
In Brief: Joseph Schumpeter defines creative destruction as a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” As libraries struggle with how to position themselves to thrive in the digital age, how can we balance the traditional elements of librarianship like... Read More
2013
6
Nov
New literacies, learning, and libraries: How can frameworks from other fields help us think about the issues?
In Brief: In the library world, we may look to other fields to help us make sense of new digital literacies. Their frameworks may offer us new perspectives, challenge our assumptions, or give us greater clarity on the issues. Transliteracy is one non-library-centric framework that has been promoted for this purpose. It has also been... Read More
In Brief by Hugh Rundle The early founders of free public libraries intended them to achieve particular outcomes: a place for working people to access the wisdom of the classics, to socialise and to become more informed and educated citizens and avoid spending their time idling, lonely or drunk. There is, however, little incentive for... Read More
2013
9
Oct
The Library as Incubator Project wants YOU to look at Programming as Collection Development
In Brief: The Library as Incubator Project is a web-based project that seeks to promote and facilitate creative collaboration between libraries and artists of all types, and to advocate for libraries as incubators of the arts. Through founding and maintaining the project, we began to see that not all knowledge worth collecting for a library... Read More
Download this article as an EPUB for reading on mobile devices. In Brief This article explores the professional award structure (formal and informal) of librarianship. The goal in doing so is to discover what the field values in terms of bestowing honors at the individual level, and in which ways the awards system is... Read More
In brief by Phil Minchin For various reasons, libraries have largely ignored the volume of new content whose creation has been enabled by the internet. We have failed to recognise that the same systems that created all those creative opportunities also offer opportunities for us. Among those potential boons are tools that could help us deal... Read More
In Brief: The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has emerged in the past few years as the poster child of the online higher education revolution. Lauded and derided, MOOCs (depending on who you ask) represent the democratization of education on a global scale, an overblown trend, or the beginning of the end of the traditional... Read More
In Brief: The HarperCollins boycott, which was intended to demonstrate to the publisher that “self-destructing ebooks” was a bad idea, has not been successful. This article describes the intent behind the BoycottHarperCollins.com website, and also what the experience of boycotting HarperCollins was like for a public library in New Jersey. The goal of the article... Read More
In Brief: Weeding a library collection, while an absolutely essential part of collection management, is a much more complex issue than library literature—and library practitioners—would like to admit. It is not just an intellectual and physical process but an emotional one, wedded to deep psychological, cultural, and even metaphysical issues. This article explores some of the reasons... Read More
2013
10
Jul
An Interview with Steve Roggenbuck
In Brief: An interview with poet and blogger Steve Roggenbuck about publishing, social media, writing, and, of course, libraries. by Erin Dorney Introduction How many poets do you know who have an entry on KnowYourMeme.com? Steve Roggenbuck, a 25-year old poet and blogger from Michigan, is one of them. Boasting 9,801 Twitter followers (for comparison,... Read More