LISNews - News For Librarians

Wayne State University is set to offer a new experimental school library certificate to address student demand and a general shortage of certified school librarians in the state.

The Detroit-based university plans to offer a 15-credit program through its School of Information Sciences, said Matt Fredericks, academic services officer for the school. The course load is designed to equip students with the necessary media specialist skills without requiring the typical 36-credit master’s program.

From Wayne State to roll out fast-track librarian certificate amid shortage, student demand

As an array of recovery efforts launched over the past five months attest, the beloved Rio de Janeiro institution’s story is far from finished: Just two weeks after the fire, museum staffers gathered in the front of the burned building to host a temporary exhibition of surviving artifacts, and at the end of the year, Google Arts & Culture immortalized the pre-fire building in a comprehensive virtual tour. The museum even opened an exhibition in mid-January, titled When Not Everything Was Ice: New Discoveries in the Antarctic Continent, at the Museum of the Brazilian Mint, which served as the national institution’s home back in the 19th century.

From Around 2,000 Artifacts Have Been Saved From the Ruins of Brazil’s National Museum Fire | Smart News | Smithsonian

A visual exploration of how a critical piece of social infrastructure came to be. This month, CityLab’s visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger shares the story of how America’s public libraries came to be, and their uneven history of serving all who need them.

From How American Cities Got Their Libraries – CityLab

In recent years, archaeologists and historians have awakened to the potential of ancient DNA extracted from human bones and teeth. DNA evidence has enriched—and complicated—stories of prehistoric human migrations. It has provided tantalizing clues to epidemics such as the black death. It has identified the remains of King Richard III, found under a parking lot. But Collins isn’t just interested in human remains. He’s interested in the things these humans made; the animals they bred, slaughtered, and ate; and the economies they created.

From The Lab Discovering DNA in Old Books – The Atlantic

some reference and book questions stick out more than others. They stand out either because they were truly great questions or because they were absolutely ridiculous. Either way, patrons never fail to keep me on my toes. Just when I think a decade of public libraries has allowed me to see and hear it all, another question or situation leaves me stunned. Here are some of my most memorable patron interactions:

From Librarians and Their Memorable Patron Interactions | Book Riot

President Franklin Roosevelt was trying to figure out a way to resolve the Great Depression of the 1930s. His Works Progress Administration created the Pack Horse Library Initiative to help Americans become more literate so that they’d have a better chance of finding employment.

From Female Librarians on Horseback Delivering Books, ca. 1930s | History Daily

BEHIND A LARGE CAUTION SIGN on a locked door inside the Houston Metropolitan Research Center at Houston Public Library’s Julia Ideson Building downtown, you’ll find the vault. It’s not filled with money or an arsenal, but it does contain the world’s most valuable currency and deadliest weapon—the written word. Researchers must apply to peruse the rare, often centuries-old books and other artifacts inside the room, which is kept at a crisp 60 degrees and cared for by preservation librarian Elizabeth Mayer. We asked her to share some of her favorite rarities with Houstonia readers, and she obliged.

From Some of the Rarest Books in the World Can Be Found in This Downtown Library | Houstonia

Studies of menus, however, are a little trickier to find. Menus as scholarly artifacts have come a long way in recent years — traveling from the libraries of antiquarians and sentimental dilettantes to invocations in academic monographs about everything from environmental history to immigration patterns to changing trends in graphic design. The New York Public Library’s collection of over 45,000 menus is getting a lot more traffic than it used to, while To Live and Dine in L.A. (2015) — a collaborative project sponsored by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles that resulted in an exhibition and a book — celebrated the menu collection of the Los Angeles Public Library.

From Menu Matters: On Alison Pearlman’s “May We Suggest” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Last summer, University of Michigan art and design librarian Jamie Lausch Vander Broek acquired 20 Slices—a squat, square volume composed of 20 plastic-wrapped Kraft singles sandwiched between bright yellow covers. “For me, a lot of the purpose of the collection is engaging with people who usually have never seen an artist’s book before,” she explains. “So I have tailored my selections away from subtlety. It’s really important to me that people get excited about the work that I buy, and that it happens quickly.”

From Every Page of This Book Is a Slice of Cheese – Gastro Obscura