Departments

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libraries

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    10/2/2022

    Libraries Do Face Attacks, but Not Like the "Freedom Libraries" of 1964

    As yet, public attacks on libraries over programming and books dealing with racism and LGBTQ issues have not escalated to the routine firebombing of the libraries founded by activist groups during the "Freedom Summer" to help Black Mississippians access books and political information. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    9/16/2022

    American Library Association: Book Bans Accelerating

    “It represents an escalation, and we’re truly fearful that at some point we will see a librarian arrested for providing constitutionally protected books on disfavored topics,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the office of intellectual freedom at the library association.

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    4/21/2022

    Union Organizing in the Long Shadow of the Gilded Age

    by Daisy Pitkin

    On listening to Andrew Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth" in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library as librarians perform the kind of social services Carnegie deplored (and try to organize a union, which he deplored more). 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/17/2022

    The Next Front of the Culture War? Your Public Library

    "Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures."

  • SOURCE: The Real News Network
    2/22/2022

    Save Libraries, Save the World

    Emily Drabinsky is running for the presidency of the American Library Association to defend some of our most vital public institutions. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    1/6/2022

    In Praise of Search Tools

    by Diedre Lynch

    Books by Dennis Duncan and Craig Robertson examine the history of indexing, filing, and other technologies for locating information in books and the resultant culture of research.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/6/2021

    The Fight to Ban Books

    "Pennsylvania does not have a law banning critical race theory from schools, at least not yet. In states where Republican governors have signed legislation banning critical race theory, books are disappearing from shelves."

  • SOURCE: Scholarly Kitchen
    4/2/2020

    The Internet Archive Chooses Readers

    by Karin Wulf

    To elevate the needs of the reader above all others is to dismiss the labor of archivists, authors, compositors, designers, editors, librarians, marketers, metadata creators, and all the other myriad people involved in bringing knowledge into being and into the marketplace.

  • SOURCE: Press release
    6-28-13

    National Library of Medicine launches new biomedical history blog

    The NLM's History of Medicine Division has launched a new blog, Circulating Now, to encourage greater exploration and discovery of one of the world's largest and most treasured history of medicine collections. Encompassing millions of items that span ten centuries, these collections include items in just about every form one can imagine—from books, journals, and photographs, to lantern slides, motion picture films, film strips, video tapes, audio recordings, pamphlets, ephemera, portraits, woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and lithographs. The NLM's historical collections also include items from the present day: born-digital materials and rich data sets—like the millions of records in its IndexCat database—that are ripe for exploration through traditional research methods and new ones that are emerging in the current climate of "big data" and the digital humanities.