Reading Time: 3minutesIpswich County Library, the second oldest municipal library in the UK
I noticed a lack of any timeline of library history in the recent introduction The Library: A Fragile History (2022), and I didn’t see one in Wikipedia either, so here …
In many countries, especially the UK, the public library is under threat. Despite the establishment of public lending right over 100 years ago, the very existence of public libraries is coming into question: public libraries are underfunded and being closed by …
What are libraries for? This question was prompted by being given a copy of The Library: A Fragile History (2021), by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, for Christmas (full disclosure: I asked …
Now that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are widely used across academic publishing, how can we make informed assessments of these utilities? One problem is that new utilities appear almost weekly. It’s challenging for any academic to keep up with what is …
This is the story of a tragedy: a step forward for the academic community that was resisted and then blocked. It’s difficult to imagine, but Along Came Google (Princeton, 2021) is as gripping as any thriller – except for the conclusion.…
Reading Time: 6minutesNational Library of Greece, Athens (photo by Georgios Liakopoulos)
What are libraries for? If you are going to have a public discussion, why not start with the big questions, and that question came up repeatedly at the 2022 Fiesole Retreat, the …
OCLC have published an interesting-sounding report. The full title of this report is: Social Interoperability in Research Support: Cross-Campus Partnerships and the University Research Enterprise, a bit of a mouthful. The term “social interoperability” is defined as “the creation and …
When you use an academic library catalogue, what are you actually searching?
The graphic shows the main search screen of Cambridge University Library, called iDiscover (actually powered by Primo). The user is presented with, as you might expect, a simple search …
