David Rothman is a consistent, expert advocate for funding a national digital library endowment, and his enthusiasm has been strengthened with the appointment of Dr. Carla Hayden as the new librarian of Congress.
Greg Lambert eloquently gives voice to truth which has been delivered through action by many fellow professionals throughout the course of our respective (some decades long) careers – we are not “gatekeepers” nor do we impede the purchase and distribution of innovative, subject matter focused, effective, forward moving technologies, services and resources within our respective organizations. To the contrary, change and disruption are often associated with the work of law librarians, knowledge managers and research professionals in firms.
David Rothman warns of a new trend exemplified by a Kansas school district. It is replacing licensed elementary school librarians with regular teachers with technical training who oversee makerspaces.
At the beginning of the spring semester, Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law school transitioned to a new website with a more modern look but a much more rigid architecture. As often happens with new website launches, there were obstacles to overcome – 404 errors to fix, a new navigation to learn, resources to update – as well as old website simply not transferring to the new site. In this article Ashley Ahlbrand describes some key issues her team faced and how they were addressed as a Lessons Learned for other groups pursuing the same transition.
Chris Meadows shares the facts about an interesting and significant uptick in audiobook production. He notes that digital audiobooks have been growing more popular ever since the introduction of the iPod, but in the last five or six years audiobook production has boomed, rising from 7,237 titles produced in 2011 to 35,574 titles in 2015.
Greg Lambert Chief Knowledge Services Officer at Jackson Walker, LLP in Houston calls out the proactive, expertise, and tangible roles law library leaders must undertake in light of changes in organizational roles, including outsourcing.
Author, librarian, and professor Bruce Rosenstein’s article clearly articulates key deliverables that librarians and information professionals can frame, communicate about and deliver – specifically expert knowledge services, data curation, research, training and leadership skills – to organizations in a wide range of sectors.
Zena Applebaum, a law firm competitive intelligence director, defines an important development in the way that critical business information is shared within laws firms and similar organizations. Applebaum defines and aligns the role of “content curation,” a practice and skill wherein information from all the content in the world is provided to stakeholders through a precise, focused and filtered process with the result of direct benefits to specific groups, teams and projects.
E-book pioneer and advocate David Rothman’s commentary shines a critical light on the reading habits of Microsoft founder Bill Gates who reads his average 50 books each year, in print format. The potential impact of Microsoft in the e-book market as well as in funding support of e-books for public libraries has been muted. Rothman’s insights include hope to win over much needed support for free public sector digital libraries.
Sabrina I. Pacifici’s comprehensive current awareness guide focuses on leveraging a selected but wide range of reliable, topical, predominantly free websites and resources. The goal is to support an effective research process to search, discover, access, monitor, analyze and review current and historical data, news, reports, statistics and profiles on companies, markets, countries, people and issues, from a national and a global perspective. Sabrina’s guide is a “best of the Web” resource that encompasses search engines, portals, government sponsored open source databases, alerts, data archives, publisher specific services and applications. All of her recommendations are accompanied by links to trusted content targeted sources that are produced by top media and publishing companies, business, government, academe, IGOs and NGOs.