LISNews: Hawkish On Libraries Since 1999

From The New York Times:

The two-day event, called the MTA Zine Residency, had been organized by a librarian and an archivist at the Barnard College library, which they said has the largest circulating collection of zines in an academic library. After producing zines on the F train, the group was planning to reconvene Monday on the Staten Island Ferry to put the finishing touches on their creations. The organizers of the residency said they hoped that the participants would sell or donate copies of their completed zines to the Barnard collection.

Jenna Freedman, the zine librarian at Barnard, said that the relative quiet and lack of phone and Internet connections made the subway a natural place to compose zines.

“There really is a pleasure to writing while you’re in motion,” she said. “I’ve always felt that time is most my own.”

http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/06/dylans-desk-watch-this-multi-billion-dollar-industry-evapo...

Indeed, Academia.edu, PLOS, and Arxiv.org are doing something remarkable: They’re mounting a full-frontal assault on a multi-billion-dollar industry and replacing it with something that makes much, much less money.

They’re far more efficient and fairer, and they vastly increase the openness and availability of research information. I believe this will be nothing but good for the human race in the long run. But I’m sure the executives of Elsevier, Springer, and others are weeping into their lattes as they watch this industry evaporate.

Maybe they can get together with newspaper executives to commiserate.

http://www.elkharttruth.com/news/schools/goshen-college/2014/05/19/Goshe.html

A member of the Goshen College staff has resigned in part because of the college’s policy against hiring people in GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer/questioning) relationships.

Tabi Berkey, who worked in the college’s library, resigned Monday, May 19, and posted an open letter on Facebook explaining her decision.

Within two hours, the post had garnered more than 100 likes and had been shared 40 times.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/05/college_libraries_should_keep_their_boo...

This is, then, one way in which books are far from obsolete: They are the best intellectual chaperones money can buy, both the creators and the preservers of the contemplative space that every university needs if it’s not to turn fully into a strip mall with frats. Yes, it is expensive to house a robust, accessible collection of what will soon be a forgotten format. But it would be more expensive to come up with an adequate replacement that still had the same irreplaceable effect on students—so expensive and involved, in fact, that it wouldn’t be worth doing at all. Not when the boosters could pay good money to use that space on game day, for a 95-foot TV.