Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Version corrected on 2019-01-05, in light of comments from Riccardo Ridi, which I gratefully acknowledge.)  Italian perspectives In the English-speaking world, we are not sufficiently aware of the huge amount of professional literature published in other languages. My eyes were opened … Continue reading →

The latest instalment of my Library ABC, which I started in 2008, has been distributed. It is for the letters D, E and F and features pictures taken in three libraries. D:  DOK, Delft, the Netherlands; E: Elsie van Rensburg … Continue reading →

 This is a slightly expanded version of my column of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information, which appears in LIASA-in-Touch, the newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa Maps and … Continue reading →

We tend to take the World Wide Web for granted. We use it to look up professional, scholarly, educational and day-to-day information, communicate with friends and colleagues, do shopping, book travel, plan vacations, download videos and music, play games, and … Continue reading →

A brief video interview about my book, International and comparative librarianship: concepts and methods for global studies, done during the August 2019 IFLA World Library and Information Conference in Athens, has been released by IFLA.  In the interview, I give … Continue reading →

Alarm in South Africa Alarm bells started ringing in the South African library profession in late May 2019 when news broke that the National Librarian and CEO of the National Library of South Africa (NLSA), Professor Rocky Ralebipi-Simelang, who had … Continue reading →

Today I chanced to see a post on Barbara Fister’s blog, Library Babel Fish, on the site of the American magazine, Inside higher ed.  Ms Fister subtitles her blog “a college librarian’s take on technology”. I generally like her posts, … Continue reading →

In an earlier post I referred to the development approach known in the development literature as “transformational aid” (Riddell 2014), and which in our context of LIS I prefer to call systemic aid (Lor 2019, sec. 12.7). This involves interventions aimed … Continue reading →

In August 2014 IFLA’s Library History Special Interest Group (SIG) held a post-Congress Satellite Conference on the History of Librarianship at the École Normale Supérieure des Sciences de l’Information et des Bibliothèques (Enssib) in Lyon. Attempts to publish the papers … Continue reading →