librarylinknj:

Rita Meade’s response to Michael Rosenblum’s recent piece in the Huffington Post, “What’s a Library?”:

Honestly, I wouldn’t give articles like these a speck of my attention other than to roll my eyes IF the authors hadn’t been given a voice in a widely-read forum. As I have written in previous posts months ago about Terry Deary andTony Lee, it’s less about trying to change their minds and more about not letting those misconceptions of libraries to be sitting out there in the spotlight, unchallenged. It always has been and will always be my opinion that where there is ignorance, people need to counter it with knowledge. And, incidentally, libraries just happen to be great places to gain knowledge.

(via thelifeguardlibrarian)

thepinakes:

librarean:

One of my aunts is a sort of freelance historian and archivist who has spent the last several years of her life working primarily on her own to more fully document and record the history of a Native American tribe in our state. Over the years, this has meant…

thelifeguardlibrarian:

Oh, just ideas. For librarians you might know and love dearly and want to shower with classy, expensive, bookish presents.

thelifeguardlibrarian:

fotzepolitic:

thelifeguardlibrarian:

More sad news from the UK.

This is the intriguing part: “Visits to libraries declined by six per cent, while borrowings for all books fell apart from children’s fiction, which saw a very small increase.” Which libraries? Where are they located? Is something keeping people from these libraries? Six per cent out of what greater number? Is six per cent a national average? This article not giving us a lot other than, “Libraries are in trouble and here’s some depressing info.” Thanks, but this is a glorified press release. Give us some links and not just the word of whoever obviously just cut and pasted this shit online for the Telegraph.

You have to subscribe to CIPFA for that level of access. It is, indeed, a press release. But an important blip on the news radar worth taking note of.

thelifeguardlibrarian:

infoneer-pulse:

Anger has been growing in the past few months over developments at the Bodleian Libraries that have led to vast humanities collections being rehoused, including the History Faculty Library being incorporated into the main collections. Matters came to a head last week with a discussion in Congregation — Oxford’s academic “parliament” — about “the libraries and their future.”

Sarah Thomas, Bodley’s librarian, described how “since 2000 six new libraries have been constructed and 19 libraries have been merged into larger units.” But Hugh Doherty, a fellow in history at Jesus College, Oxford, worried that current trends threatened to turn “a multiplicity of integrated libraries, specialized, browsable and staffed, into a series of flagship book depositories, clean, cheap and faceless.”

Georgy Kantor, tutorial fellow in ancient history at St. John’s College, Oxford, warned that “if we do not take care with how we’re changing our libraries,” the university risked their losing their “attractiveness.”

» via Inside Higher Ed

Continues:

Gill Evans, emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge and a regular user of Oxford’s collections, noticed at the start of term that staff in the reading rooms with “embarrassed expressions” were sporting big yellow badges saying “ask me.”

“They were issued with T-shirts too, though a fair few of those could be seen discreetly hung over the back of chairs.”

But the library responded that the badges and T-shirts were not worn under duress and were designed to “enhance the visibility of staff” and aid “apprehensive” users. “We wanted to find a simple way to reduce that apprehension and encourage readers to seek assistance when needed,” a spokeswoman said.

My uninformed, knee-jerk reaction: get over it, Oxford.

cc: Zach

I love that your knee-jerk reaction was “Get over it.” :-D

arriere-boutique:

A fiery Jeanette Winterson has called for the hundreds of millions of pounds of profit which Amazon, Starbucks and Google were last week accused of diverting from the UK to be used to save Britain’s beleaguered public libraries.

In an impassioned speech at…