Summer associate preparation
With the summer associate season upcoming, Caren Luckie offers suggestions to participants on how to maximize the in-person and virtual services and resources that will be available to them.
Category «Libraries & Librarians»
Black and Hispanic people more ‘engaged’ with books than most Americans are: New report from Panorama Project
David H. Rothman, cofounder of LibraryEndowment.org, discusses the new Panorama Project report that covers a variety of topics, ranging from piracy to synergies between books and other media. Specifically significant to Rothman is the report’s data indicating that avid book engagers (4+ books/month) are more ethnically diverse and younger than the general survey population.
Online Research Browsers and Data Visualization Tools 2021
This guide by Marcus P. Zillman focuses on free and feed based research browsers and data visualization tools for research and analysis. These resources can be used to support legal research, legal marketing, business and competitive intelligence research, knowledge management and knowledge discovery, and data mining.
Public Domain Day 2021: Honoring a lost generation
John Mark Ockerbloom elucidates the significance of promoting and protecting literature, the public domain and open access to publications In the age of COVID-19.
Looking on the Bright Side: Four Ways Zoom Makes Legal Research Instruction Better
As many of you have surely experienced this semester, teaching legal research virtually poses a number of challenges, but Matthew Flyntz found that it also provides a few benefits over traditional in-person instruction. In a world of negativity, Flyntz looks on the bright side and focus on those positives in this article.
How the well-connected Panorama Project could help give us a national library endowment
David H. Rothman advocates on behalf of the Panorama Project which he says is not just an effort of librarians even though it’s benefiting from the input of Alan S. Inouye, the ALA’s director of public policy. Among the others involved have been people from the Book Industry Study Group, independent booksellers, Penguin Random House, and OverDrive, the largest supplier of books for libraries and schools. One of the recurring themes in the project’s research is that synergies can exist not only between books and other media, but also between the library and retails models. For example, among several thousand readers surveyed, “38.31% of respondents had bought a book online that they first found in a library (within the last 12 months.” Local bookstores also benefited, and the project intends to explore this further. The findings are just preliminary, but based on earlier work by researchers for OCLC and OverDrive, Rothman doubts there will be surprises in regard to synergies between libraries and retail.
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 31, 2020
Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Ransomware Guide; Police are using facial recognition for minor crimes because they can; COVID-19 clinical trial: real or fake? Learn how to tell the difference; and Here’s how companies got your phone number and a way to prevent future calls.
Increased ebook lending popularity leaves publishers worried, librarians still dissatisfied
Chris Meadows was Editor and Senior Staff Writer at TeleRead, a site focusing on e-book and library news. It is with sadness that I share one of his last articles – he passed away last week after a hit and run accident. Chris was an expert on all facets of digital content issues, and the son of two librarians. I have included more information in my editor’s note at the end of the article. He will be missed. My deepest condolences to his family.
Investing in Libraries is the Right Thing for Administrators To Do, Even if There Are Fewer Resources Overall
Todd A. Carpenter advocates for libraries at this critical juncture when remote learning is now pervasive for academic institutions around the country. Although digitized resources delivered via IP-based authentication were the norm before the pandemic, users of library resources were only vaguely aware that the services they regularly use are provided by the library because of IP-based authentication. Carpenter argues that the need for budget cuts must be weighed against the expanded and critical need for students and faculty to have uninterrupted access to digital resources provided by their libraries.
Internet Archive Open Library lawsuit moves forward; arguments set for November 2021
Chris Meadows discusses the ongoing case by four publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House, against the Internet Archives Open Library respective to the scanning, public display, and distribution of entire literary works. As noted, this is “a potentially sensitive, and complex litigation.” The future of the Internet Archive may hang in the balance. This case is shining light on the heightened importance of evaluating fair use during a pandemic that is keeping vast books collections out of users reach for the unforeseeable future, while most education is confined to distance learning.