tag: ALA

The promise of the American Library Association annual conference is the opportunity to learn from many different colleagues, especially about issues that span public, academic, and research libraries. This year’s conference, held June 22-27 in Chicago, continued this cross-collaboration on a number of important topics. Discussions around intellectual freedom were front and center at this year’s conference. While ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom documented a record 1,269 demands to censor books or other materials within 2022, data gathered by the…

The American Library Association (ALA) will be holding its annual conference next week (June 23-28) in Washington DC, in person for the first time since 2019. The conference theme, “together again,” points to the critical importance of building and sustaining community, and I am especially excited to see that the conference schedule has multiple sessions that will provide opportunities for librarians who serve incarcerated people to connect and learn. Even in an increasingly censorius national…

Diversity, equity, and inclusiveness are vital issues for society in the United States and beyond. National policy discussions have catalyzed concerns that our higher education institutions are not providing the leadership on these issues that we would like to see. Ithaka S+R is today announcing our latest project examining diversity in cultural organizations, this time focusing on academic libraries.   The Spring 2016 ARL meeting provided ample evidence of the importance…

As part of a panel organized for the recent annual conference of the American Library Association in San Francisco, I was invited to talk about future trends in higher education. This was something of a fool’s errand, I realize, since we are bombarded every day by the media with higher education’s most pressing challenges and opportunities:   Low completion rates New pedagogies that meet more of today’s students’ needs—online learning, competency-based education, etc. Need for a higher education ecosystem…

At the ALA Annual Meeting this past weekend, I participated in two workshops that, while on very different topics, provide an interesting snapshot of how libraries are changing today. ACRL is continuing its interest in analyzing the value of academic libraries by hosting a workshop with library leaders to develop a future research agenda for this area of work. Spearheaded with Megan Oakleaf’s major literature review on the value of academic libraries and continuing more recently with summit meetings…