Librarian Sharice Towles checks in books at the main branch of the Reading Public Library circulation desk in Reading, Penn.
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Librarians are defending the rights of readers and writers in the battle raging across the US over censorship, book challenges and book bans. That conflict has even changed how librarians are trained.
As the pandemic continues to pose new challenges, libraries are finding ways to better meet the needs of their communities.
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A scholar of literature for children and young adults shares her insights on how to better connect children with literature and libraries with their communities.
There was a surge in book banning in 2021.
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A free speech expert defines censorship and applies that lesson to current political struggles in the US to ban books from public schools and libraries.
Nearly 80% of high school students struggle to verify the credibility of a source, a 2016 study found.
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The number of school librarians in the US has dropped about 20% over the past decade, a recent study found. Here are four ways school librarians prepare students for today’s world.
People are warned that what they post on the internet will live forever. But that’s not really the case.
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Portions of the internet disappear every day. Preservation of this historical record requires a proactive approach by archivists and everyday citizens.
Scholars can be more reliable than search engines.
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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.
The success of ‘Maus’ made the genre more visible.
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There’s a long history of books being banned from public and school libraries.
China’s five-storey Tianjin Binhai Library occupies an area of 33,700 square metres with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves which can contain up to 1.2 million books.
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In our world of pervasive consumerism, libraries continue to be founded on humanism. Their core purpose as accessible places is vital – yet they are also now popular tourist destinations.
Archivists put an immense amount of work into organizing, digitizing and maintaining repositories.
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South Africa has a history of burning books. The ashes of burnt books tell of the barbarism to which a society can descend.
The much heralded ‘death of the book’ has nothing to do with the death of reading or writing. It is about a radical transformation in reading practices.
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Essays On Air: Why libraries can and must change.
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The much heralded 'death of the book' has nothing to do with the death of reading or writing. It's about a radical transformation in reading practices, as explained in this episode of Essays On Air.
Unstacked allows us to see what others’ are searching for among the 6 million items in the State Library of NSW’s collection.
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A new website allows you to see what other people search for in the State Library of NSW’s vast collection of artefacts – and discover things you’d never think to look up in the first place.
Australia’s librarians are a vital component of our research institutions.
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The research libraries attached to Australia’s art galleries are one of the nation’s great cultural assets. But the National Gallery of Australia’s library is losing crucial staff as ‘efficiency dividends’ hit home.
Banned Books Week highlights books that have been challenged or permanently removed from library shelves.
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While legal precedent makes banning books difficult, it still happens.
Since 1982, over 11,000 books have been challenged by individuals seeking to have them banned from schools or libraries.
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