2013
20
Nov

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...
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2013
23
Oct

What We Talk About When We Talk About Public Libraries

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...
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2013
9
Oct
, and

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...
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2013
25
Sep

Rewards and Recognition in Librarianship

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...
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2013
24
Jul

Killing Sir Walter Scott: A Philosophical Exploration of Weeding

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...
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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,...
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