Tag Archive for 'COVID-19'

Learning and sharing globally: Interview with Mario Coffa

We interviewed Mario Coffa, the man behind the Library World Tour project that is collecting interviews with leading library actors and thinkers around the world, building up a great collection of insights into the present and future of our field. This interview complements the article already published in the bulletin […]

Read full post…

COVID has forced us to think again about service provision: can it offer longer term lessons for how we serve persons with disabilities?

Tomorrow, the 14th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities starts, in New York and online. It will have, as an overarching theme, ‘building back better: COVID-19 response and recovery; meeting the needs, realizing the rights, and addressing the socio-economic impacts […]

Read full post…

Cut, maintain or invest: three choices for library funders

While public libraries are often organised as a specific service within local or regional government, or at least linked to it, in reality they support delivery of priorities across the board. There are countless stories of library staff receiving questions related to other policy areas, such as health or access […]

Read full post…

Libraries in the Post-Pandemic Future of Cities

UN HABITAT, the United Nations Programme for Human Settlements, recently released Cities and Pandemics: Towards a More Just, Green and Healthy Future. Drawing both on the organisations’ long experience of supporting sustainable urban development – most notably through delivering on the New Urban Agenda – and lessons learned during the […]

Read full post…

Caught in the Backwash? Six things worth retaining from the time of the pandemic

When IFLA’s Trend Report was released in 2013, the strapline was ‘Riding the Waves or Caught in the Tide’. The Report focused on long-term trends affecting the way we live, work, interact and learn. Today, libraries are of course faced with the very immediate question of how to provide services […]

Read full post…

How HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) supports Libraries in pandemic times

By Sara R. Benson, Copyright Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Check out Sara’s podcast titled Copyright Chat at https://go.illinois.edu/copyrightchat It’s Fair Use/Fair Dealing week and that means it is once again time to let folks know about exciting developments with the HathiTrust Digital Library. Last year on Fair […]

Read full post…

(Pre)Conditions for Success: What Governments Need to Do to Fulfil Libraries’ Potential

Much library advocacy at the moment is focused on how libraries can contribute to the response to, and recovery from, the COVID-19 pandemic. In previous blogs here, and from libraries and library organisations around the world, there has been a focus on what our institutions can do to build back […]

Read full post…