Losing archives has significant implications in a country like South Africa with a fraught and contested history because voices from the past, which may carry alternative histories, are lost.
Nikki Luman works part-time for a public library in Sycamore, Ohio.
AP Photo/Tony Dejak
The mass production of religious items such as rosaries and holy cards poses a problem for the curators of religious artifacts at libraries and museums. How do you dispose of unwanted donations?
Lockdown life accelerated the role of digital technology in the virtual classroom, but there is still no substitute for physical books in children’s lives and learning.
COVID-19 has intensified the UK’s digital divide.
Juliya Shangarey/Shutterstock
During the coronavirus pandemic, digitizing archives can help increase access. But in addition to the labour and financial costs, issues of privacy, copyright and resources need to be considered.
Many important Australian books have found themselves out-of-print and hard-to-find. The Untapped project aims to change that, bringing classics to a library near you.
Kate Winslet in the 2015 film The Dressmaker. The film was based on the novel by Australian writer Rosalie Ham.
Screen Australia, Film Art Media, White Hot Productions
Literature funding has been cut brutally in recent years and writers’ incomes are disastrously low. Yet books shape our national identity, forming an often invisible bedrock for the wider economy.
Policymakers should mandate Canada’s national library to archive the entire Canadian web domain so future reserachers can make sense of 2020 and ongoing responses to the pandemic.
Despite an increasinly online-only world, libraries can still reveal the lives of the people who once owned the books within them.
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What stories will we tell about library collections in the future? As digitization takes over libraries, margin notes and scribbles are still part of the research process.
A sign of the times.
Geraldine Wilkins/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Literacy researchers analyze cross-Canada favourite books for kindergarten to Grade 2 readers, and suggest great “gritty” reads that can help normalize conversations surrounding failure and growth.
Libraries, archives, museums and galleries have finally been included in South Africa’s contested new proposed copyright bill.
Reading and books are more important than ever for contemporary society. Here an image of The Rose Main Reading Room at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (also known as New York Public Library Main Branch) – an elegant study hall in the heart of Manhattan.
Patrick Robert Doyle /Unsplash
Today’s libraries build communities and provide space for learning new technologies but it is critical that they continue to be about books and reading too.
Public libraries can use their status as community hubs to engage the public in scenario planning for the future.
Mosman Library/Flickr
We commonly think of libraries as repositories of knowledge accumulated over centuries. But the public library also connects people in ways that can enable communities to plan for their future.
For now, it’s going to be trickier for the University of California community to access some academic journals.
Michelle/Flickr
The UC libraries let their Elsevier journal subscriptions lapse and now the publisher has cut their online access. It’s a painful milestone in the fight UC hopes may transform how journals get paid.
ParentsNext requires places like libraries and public pools to monitor parents’ attendance at activities. This undermines their role as spaces of inclusion and support.