IFLA Journal

Where does and should the future of libraries lie? What were once concrete, brick, and glass structures have since become a third place where community, art, and culture reside. What is next? The #searchunderoccupy exhibit in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center in New York City is a ‘living archive’ that visually displays the creative and critical responses of the New School’s student community to the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is composed not only of elements such as video, photographs, audio and performance projects, but also text-based works such as live feed tag clouds, posters, and blogs. By their very nature, libraries are poised to become forces for social change and using this exhibit as an example, libraries themselves can show the life of their communities by putting their responses on display to support their involvement in social movements, engage others, and document for the future. There are many iterations of the living archive in libraries such as the digitization of audio-visual materials or allowing people to share their memories, knowledge, photos and opinions through a virtual space. The closest to the #searchunderoccupy exhibit example is capturing the activities and conversations of designer William McDonough for the Stanford University libraries. Unlike these projects, the New School’s method allows for a greater range of self-expression through visual mediums and accounts for the technology of today. Social media is what has helped spread the social movements of the current generation and with its ever-changing nature, this version of a living archive presents a future library full of infinite possibilities.

During the 18 days in early 2011 that came to be known as Egypt’s January 25 Revolution, a group of archivists, faculty, administrators, and students at the American University in Cairo met to devise ways to document those historic events. The resulting project, University on the Square: Documenting Egypt’s 21st Century Revolution, addressed the challenge of collecting the tangible remains of the protests like banners and tear gas canisters and the many digital photographs and videos taken by observers and participants. It also launched an oral history effort to record the experiences of a wide range of participants in the uprising and the subsequent protest and political activity in Egypt. Throughout the course of its activities the involvement of the community played an important role in the initiative. This paper describes the project’s methods and what it has collected, as well as challenges faced. Other projects to document Egypt’s revolution, and a comparison of their goals with that of AUC’s efforts, will also be covered.

The German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) is developing a web-based platform for audiovisual media. The forthcoming audiovisual portal optimizes access to scientific videos such as computer animations, lecture and conference recordings. TIB's AV- Portal offers new methods for searching within videos enabled by automated video analysis with scene, speech, text and image recognition. Search results are connected to new knowledge by linking the data semantically. This paper aims at describing the TIB's portal for audiovisual media and the multimedia retrieval technologies as well as the added value for libraries and their users.

The paper identifies some desirable traits for children’s librarians and presents strategies for recruiting people to the profession. Library school curriculum is discussed in terms of learning outcomes based on the ‘Competencies for Librarians Serving Children in Public Libraries’ developed by the Association for Library Service to Children. Limitations of current graduate library education in the United States are acknowledged and examples of professional development opportunities for children’s librarians are given. Finally, suggestions are made for possible actions to advance the education and ongoing training of children’s librarians that the IFLA Section on Libraries for Children and Young Adults could take.

This paper explores the concept of agile management, revealing multiple meanings for the term. Notable innovations and developments in Australian university libraries reflect conscious (or possibly not) applications of agile management techniques. As a case study, changes at The University of New South Wales Library are examined in the light of agile management concepts.

The aim of this study is to analyze the accessibility, corrosion and half-life of URLs cited in the articles of Indian LIS conference proceedings published during 2001 to 2010. A total of 5,698 URLs cited in the 1,700 articles were examined. The percentage of URLs increased from 39.10 percent in 2001 to 73.47 percent in 2009. The study found that 50.09 percent of URLs were not accessible at the time of testing and the remaining 49.91 percent of URLs were accessible. The HTTP 404 error message – “file not found” was the overwhelming message encountered and represented 53.29 percent of all HTTP messages. The study also noticed that the average half-life of URLs of missing URLs was estimated to be 4.94 years. Even though there are various retrieval tools being used to recover vanished URLs, still there is a need to improve such tools.

This article presents research conducted in three municipalities in Sweden and Belgium. The municipalities were involved in e-Government development. The article focuses on information culture, which constitutes the attitudes and norms embraced by the municipal employees towards public information management and use. E-Government is meant to improve efficiency through the use of information technology and information. This, however, requires effective information management regimes if information is to be leveraged in a manner that will enable the municipalities to attain their ultimate goal of high quality service delivery. Despite investments in information systems this research has proved that the information culture embraced by these will have to change if the ultimate goal of delivering high quality services to the citizens and the effective use and re-use of information is to be achieved. Information culture researchers argue that there is a correlation between business success and information culture. Therefore, the attitudes, norms and how the employees value organizational information, impacts its efficient use and management. This article therefore highlights some of the challenges that are caused by the attitudes of the municipal employees like lack of information management skills, collaboration and insufficient information management systems and satisfactory information management architecture. Even though huge investments are currently being made in the development of e-services, there are soft issues that need to be seriously addressed.