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Material that supports the study of how libraries and knowledge professionals are trained, how they share their skills, and how their peers view them.

How values guide our understanding of trends and transition

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Center for the Future of Libraries | Library Trends | Core Library Values

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For many futurists and trend spotters, “futuring” is fundamentally about the study of change.

“We can learn a great deal about what may happen in the future by looking systematically at what is actually happening now,” wrote Edward Cornish, one of the founders of the World Future Society.

We study change so we can prepare for the many futures that might happen. We start seeing what’s coming next. We study so that we won’t be surprised. And we study so that we’ll be better prepared to start creating the future.

That’s good news for library and information professionals. We are expert in finding, organizing, processing, and prioritizing information. From wherever we are in our organizations, we all have opportunities to observe changes in our communities and consider the implications over the long term.

But observation is simply not enough. One of the biggest lessons my colleagues and I have learned while developing the Center for the Future of Libraries is that studying change is useless without considering values. We need to look at trends and changes with consideration of our own professional values (confidentiality and privacy, diversity, equitable access, intellectual freedom and expression, preservation) and the values that we seek to provide to our communities (a civic commons, democracy, discovery, education and literacy, public discourse).  And so, looking at changes, we need to ask ourselves what they might mean for intellectual freedom, for education, for equitable access, or for any of the other values that drive our work. Read more….

Preserving U.S. Government Websites and Data as the Obama Term Ends

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Archives | Internet |Government websites

Jefferson December 15, 2016

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Long before the 2016 Presidential election cycle librarians have understood this often-overlooked fact: vast amounts of government data and digital information are at risk of vanishing when a presidential term ends and administrations change.  For example, 83% of .gov pdf’s disappeared between 2008 and 2012.

That is why the Internet Archive, along with partners from the Library of Congress, University of North Texas, George Washington University, Stanford University, California Digital Library, and other public and private libraries, are hard at work on the End of Term Web Archive, a wide-ranging effort to preserve the entirety of the federal government web presence, especially the .gov and .mil domains, along with federal websites on other domains and official government social media accounts.

While not the only project the Internet Archive is doing to preserve government websites, ftp sites, and databases at this time, the End of Term Web Archive is a far reaching one.

Read more…

How to Stand Up to the Boss (And Not Get Fired)

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Career Advice | Mentoring

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Published on February 13, 2017

by Dorothy Tannahill Moran

As things go, one of the more difficult things to do is to confront or push back on the boss. A lot of people won’t do it because they fear it would cause them to get fired or minimally get on the bad side of the Boss.

While it’s an understandable concern, its also unfounded. Your brain is making up false assumptions appearing as real (F.E.A.R.). Unless you know without a doubt that your boss is too sensitive for well-executed confrontation, you need to add this to your toolkit.

Let’s first look at reasons why Standing Up to the Boss, can be a good skill:

a) The Boss isn’t always right

Read more…

 

Philosophy can teach children what Google can’t | Charlotte Blease

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With jobs being automated and knowledge being devalued, humans need to rediscover flexible thinking. That starts in schools

3500 Ireland’s president Michael D Higgins: ‘The teaching of philosophy is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children.’ Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

At the controls of driverless cars, on the end of the telephone when you call your bank or favourite retailer: we all know the robots are coming, and in many cases are already here. Back in 2013, economists at Oxford University’s Martin School estimated that in the next 20 years, more than half of all jobs would be substituted by intelligent technology. Like the prospect of robot-assisted living or hate it, it is foolish to deny that children in school today will enter a vastly different workplace tomorrow – and that’s if they’re lucky. Far from jobs being brought back from China, futurologists predict that white-collar jobs will be increasingly outsourced to digitisation as well as blue-collar ones.

How should educationalists prepare young people for civic and professional life in a digital age? Luddite hand-wringing won’t do. Redoubling investment in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects won’t solve the problem either: hi-tech training has its imaginative limitations.

In the near future school-leavers will need other skills. In a world where technical expertise is increasingly narrow, the skills and confidence to traverse disciplines will be at a premium. We will need people who are prepared to ask, and answer, the questions that aren’t Googleable: like what are the ethical ramifications of machine automation? What are the political consequences of mass unemployment? How should we distribute wealth in a digitised society? As a society we need to be more philosophically engaged.

Amid the political uncertainties of 2016, the Irish president Michael D Higgins provided a beacon of leadership in this area. “The teaching of philosophy,” he said in November, “is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected, and uncertain world.” Philosophy in the classroom, he emphasised, offers a “path to a humanistic and vibrant democratic culture”. Read more…

New McCarthyism starts against librarians in Trump’s America?

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Naomi Schaefer Riley

In Donald Trump’s America, you might have to wave good-bye to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, with budget given as an excuse—not the best of news for the rural people who voted for him.

But there is also another possible danger: McCarthy-style witch hunts against librarians, along with the questioning of the need for the current number of them.

Today a New York Post columnist named Naomi Schaefer Riley took potshots at librarians worried about about the Trump administration’s threat to such trifles as free expression and diversity. None other than an acquaintance of mine, Sarah “Librarian in Black” Houghton, was among those in the crosshairs.

In Why quiet-loving librarians can’t shut up about politics, Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote:

Read article: New McCarthyism starts against librarians in Trump’s America?