Last week the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) released the 13th edition of its Global Innovation Index (GII). This looks to bring together different indicators that can help governments and others understand how different countries are doing in promoting innovation, which is taken to be a key source of growth and progress towards wider development […]
Read moreFor all that anyone would like to be purely objective or rational, we are all influenced by our attitudes. Consciously or sub-consciously, we tend to have preferences for certain ideas, values, or types of behaviour, which help shape our decisions. This is why such a key focus of library advocacy is how we change people’s […]
Read moreCopyright can all too often seem complicated, scary, or both. Yet having a sense of what it does, and does not permit can help avoid accidental infringements, as well as preventing situations where library users do not take full advantage of the possibilities open to them. Chris Morrison, at the University of Kent in the […]
Read moreThe shock of cultural institutions shuttering is beginning to wear off. The world of social distancing might begin feeling like the new normal, even as, depending where in the world you are, there is talk of memory institutions re-opening. For the past months, we have been living in a world without cultural institutions as public […]
Read moreAround the world, library and information workers are doing their best, both personally and professionally, to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Even as some libraries are – cautiously – beginning to loosen restrictions, others are seeing them come into place. Naturally, the focus is on the short term – how to keep staff, patrons safe, how to keep […]
Read moreInformation has long been political – who has it, who should have it, and how can it be used to shape decision-making. However, it is only relatively recently that this has been recognised. On the philosophical side of things, much comes from the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, who explained the power that […]
Read more“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Freedom of access to information and freedom of expression is guaranteed under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human […]
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