CEF Libraries

Goodness, things are really heating up around Elsevier, or at least that’s what some people would like us to think. As reported in numerous sources, including LJ, there’s now a petition being signed by academics to refuse to publish, referee, or do any editorial work for Elsevier journals. 2300 signatures and [...]

The big news coming out of ALA Midwinter, besides the news that Dallas is a mediocre conference city, is that the “leaders” of ALA are going to meet today with at least three of the Big Six publishers. Based on the perspectives shared in the LJ article, the meeting promises to be [...]

As in a lot of places, libraries in Chicago have faced budget problems as the cities have faced budget problems, and based on this article it seems the mayor and the local union have been having difficulty finding any agreement. After all the recent closures and firings, the mayor now has a plan that will [...]

ALA Midwinter is winding down. I didn’t write about it last week because it looked like it would be pretty boring. The what’s happening page had a long list of speakers, most of which I’d never heard of but didn’t think I’d want to see, plus some others I knew enough about to [...]

Here in the United States librarians might be ignoring my advice to convert to the new religion of Kopimism, but I’m a genius in France, at least if we go by a group of French librarians who are encouraging people to visit public libraries and copy the books and DVDs they [...]

Perhaps the oddest somewhat library-related event last week was the Occupy Wall Street Library party at the New York City nightclub Works in Progress. The OWS partiers occupiers set up a library, which was supposed to “serve as outreach for the movement to a heretofore untapped demographic, while soliciting book [...]

Librarians may have found their new religion, unless they’ve already found one of the myriad old religions, but the old religions didn’t have anything to say about file sharing and this one does. By now, you probably know I’m talking about the  Church of Kopimism, which the Swedish government has finally and formally [...]

I have to say I was as surprised and annoyed as other librarians when I read about the Research Works Act, which seems to have shocked and surprised everyone in the academic community except the people who actually produce academic research. For those who missed the furor last week over a bill that [...]

After all the relatively bad news regarding ebooks and libraries, I found some hope for public libraries in this article: As The Age Of The Physical Book Retreats, The Cult Of The Physical Book Advances. It might be the case, as I’ve predicted, that with the rise of digital media, publishers of the most [...]

And a Happy New Year! Warning: this post may have been written under the influence of champagne, or perhaps a sparkling wine hangover. Many of you probably saw the Christmas Day article in the New York Times about publishers and why they hate libraries so much. That’s not quite the way they put it, but it [...]

For 2011, as one of my helpful commenters pointed out, my predictions weren’t very daring. Despite the gloomy rhetoric coming from the library community about library closings, I was pretty sure most libraries wouldn’t be closing. I was right. For 2012, I’m less sure. This might be the year when public [...]

I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday. I’m suffering from egg nog overdose, but otherwise had a lovely time. Earlier this year, I made 11 predictions for 2011. Most library seers and pundits don’t revisit their predictions, at least publicly, but darn it I’m going to. Was I right or was I wrong? Let’s [...]

For many years American librarians have had to endure propaganda about the upcoming (always upcoming!) librarian shortage from the ALA and its accredited library schools. I thought perhaps this was an exclusively north American phenomenon, but no. Check out this news story from India: Few takers for library science. It’s a [...]

Last week the biggest news in librarianship was American Libraries making the publication even less interesting than it already is, and that’s saying something. However, despite that unsurprising news, my favorite library news last week appeared in this very publication: Library Science without the Library. It’s a guest column in an amusing genre, [...]

A kind reader wrote with a question I decided to share: Do males have a any easier time getting jobs, as I have heard, or is that another library myth? I’m not sure how we could actually answer that question without extensive research. Unfortunately, librarians don’t have time to do extensive [...]

Once upon a time there was a loud and hardy cult of librarians I called the twopointopians. These giddy creatures popped up at conferences and in blog posts to declare their faith that something called Library 2.0 would be the salvation of libraries. The twopointopians had the normal trappings of a [...]

They say California is the future. If California is the future of librarianship, we’re all in trouble, because it seems to be California that produces the most Library Jobs that Suck, like this one. I haven’t done many Library Jobs that Suck posts since moving to LJ, the main reason being [...]

I noticed a notice that the ACRL NMDG wants speakers willing to travel to ALA Midwinter and talk about “things they wish they had learned in library school.” They seem very excited about it. “Who knew that you’d become a web designer, marketing director, and reference librarian all in one?!” Actually, [...]

According to a Reuters article reporting a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, Americans are “tepid about libraries.” More people try to buy locally produced food than regularly use their library, though it seems public libraries have slightly more support than George W. Bush would were he running against Obama for President, and [...]

One of the big stories in Libraryland last week was Overdrive’s announcement that Penguin had suspended the availability of their ebooks from Overdrive and the “Get for Kindle” function,” followed two days later by the announcement that previously available Penguin ebook titles would be available for checkout, but not any forthcoming ones. Penguin was [...]