Take Part in World Environment Day 2022: Build and share your Earth Action Number

On World Environment Day (June 5), the Only One Earth campaign calls “collective, transformative action on a global scale to celebrate, protect and restore our planet”. This campaign, led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and hosted in 2022 by Sweden, is the largest international day focussed on the environment. This year’s call to […]

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A Right to Be Remembered: A Task for Copyright Laws

Ever since the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to allow people to request the removal of articles that violate their right to a private life from search results about them, the notion of a ‘Right to be Forgotten’ as entered the language. It is not uncontroversial. Supporters highlight the possibility […]

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Library Stat of the Week #29: Mexico, Slovakia and Lithuania have high numbers of academic librarians both per student and per researcher

Last week’s Library Stat of the Week looked at how many researchers and students each academic or research library worker had to serve. A point mentioned in the conclusions was the fact that from one country to the next (and indeed, from one institution to the next), there may be more focus on teaching students […]

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Library Stat of the Week #25: At Similar Levels of GDP, Countries with More Academic Librarians See Higher Numbers of Publications

In the past two weeks, we have explored the figures that IFLA’s Library Map of the World offers us on the subject of academic libraries and library workers. We have looked at how many there are in different parts of the world, including relative to population, and last week, as correlations between numbers of libraries […]

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Library Stat of the Week #17: Greater Numbers of Librarians Per Public Library Are Associated with More Equal Societies

Last week, in the first of a sub-series looking at library and equality data, we explored the connection between the number of public and community libraries in a country, and how equal it is according to the Gini Coefficient (an indicator of inequality used in the Development and Access to Information Report). Crossing the data […]

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Library Stat of the Week #9: Globally, one in every 1525 workers is a member of library staff, but it’s 1 in 613 in North America, and 1 in 237 in Estonia!

Last week, we looked at the number of librarians for every 100 000 people around the world, with Oceania coming in highest at 84 – that’s one in every 1190 people. But what about library staff in the workforce? How big a share of jobs are as librarians and related staff members (defined as librarians, […]

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