A new service for people interested in finding out what Scotland’s libraries, museums and archives holds was soft launched today. The interesting thing about the service is the use of a geographical interface using a Google mashup. Check it out at: http://www.scotlandsinformation.com Is your library, museum or archive on the map? if not, ...

Not everybody likes what they work with. Still, it’s always a bit of a surprise to realise quite how much many career librarians hate books and reading. And silence. ~ David Sexton. The sound of silence is all we want in our libraries. Evening Standard, 26 September 2008 ; quoted in Library & Information Update’s new [...]

Busy week this week (hence the lack of posts here), culminating in leading a workshop at Brentwood Library last night as part of the Essex Poetry Festival. The theme of this year’s National Poetry Day is “Work”, so I designed some activities on “Finding Inspiration in Your Library” exploiting Brentwood’s ...

Indeed, the state of the art in used-book selling these days seems to be less about connoisseurship than about database management. With the help of software tools, so-called megalisters stock millions of books and sell tens of thousands a week through Amazon, AbeBooks and other online marketplaces. Some sellers don’t even own their wares. They ...

According to the seminal BMJ editorial on the subject, “Evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients,” while “The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best ...

I’ve not been able to access the full report yet, but this strikes me from the executive summary of the latest ACRL SPEC Kit :  When asked about the impetus for implementing social software, 80% of the survey  respondents said it was a grassroots effort by individual librarians or other staff. Slightly more than half said it [...]

Roll over, Hollywood Librarian - Denver Public Libraries presents an ethnographic film project depicting its role in the community: I Am - The Library is an ethnographic video project, which documents the everyday ways a public library is used. Set in and around the Denver Central Library a few weeks before the 2008 Democratic National ...

Thanks to Anna Ercoli Schnitzer for highlighting the new report from Ithaka [1], which the ACRLog is calling “essential reading for all academic librarians.”[2] Ithaka’s 2006 studies of key stakeholders in the digital transformation in Higher education “presents some of the more interesting findings” from ...

On Fri 15 Aug, the Guardian featured an article on the “noisy row” between librarians on either side of the overdue fines debate. The article provides an overview of the issues surrounding fines within a UK wide context and also points to some interesting alternatives. According to the report, a New Zealand library [...]

The link between economic decline and increased public library use has been discussed by US commentators for many years. Some sources date the first reference to this linkage as a statement in the 1880 Annual Report of the Chicago Public Library (Lynch, M. J. (2001)). More recently, the American Library Association (ALA) has [...]