Global Gleanings # 20: Celebrating Books, reading, and libraries

Posted on 2024-06-10 by Peter Lor

This column of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information, was written in April and appeared in the June 2024 issue of LIASA-in-Touch, the quarterly newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa. (Events have overtaken us. The South African general election is behind us, and coalition talks are under way.)

Books are for sharing

As I write this, we’ve just had World Book and Copyright Day, 23 April. It was first celebrated in Spain on 7 October 1926, the birthday of Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra (1547-1616), Spanish author of what is thought to be the first great Western novel, Don Quixote (from which we derive the word ‘quixotic’, meaning idealistically impractical). In 1995 UNESCO created “World Book and Copyright Day”, choosing 23 April to celebrate it because both William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Cervantes died on that day, and it was also the birthday of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616). De la Vega, born in Peru as the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, was an important chronicler of the Inca civilization and the Spanish conquest of Peru.

 

In establishing commemorations or events of this kind, UNESCO usually tries to make Continue reading →

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La biblioteconomia comparata: New Italian contribution to comparative librarianship

Posted on 2024-05-02 by Peter Lor

Bilotta, Anna. 2022. Principi, approcci e applicazioni della biblioteconomia comparata. Florence: Firenze University Press.

Cover of new book by Anna Bilotta

It’s difficult to keep up with all the topics I would like to blog about. Often interesting opportunities pass by uncommented. But better late than never, I want to draw attention to the recent publication of a book by Anna Bilotta (Bilotta 2022). Bilotta, who holds a PhD in documentation science from Sapienza University of Rome, teaches library management at the University of Salerno. A scholar with a solid record of publications in library and information science, she has written an admirably concise and readable text on comparative librarianship. I’m envious; maybe this is the accessible and less intimidating book I should have written had I not gotten bogged down in the massive doorstop I ended up producing (Lor 2019). Continue reading →

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Global Gleanings # 19: More disruption: perplexity and ‘burstiness’

Posted on 2024-04-01 by Peter Lor

This column of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information, appeared in the March 2024 issue of LIASA-in-Touch, the quarterly newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa.

Since I wrote about AI (artificial intelligence) and ChatGPT in Global Gleanings #16, the literature on it has burgeoned. At the 2023 IFLA World Library and Information Congress, I counted at least eleven sessions dealing with some aspect of AI. I was reminded of the impact of ChatGPT when, in a Zoom meeting with international colleagues, the editor of a respected LIS journal mentioned that he had been receiving article submissions with fake references, i.e., references to sources that do not exist, probably generated by AI. Continue reading →

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Sjoerd Koopman’s Library Postcard Collection

Posted on 2024-01-18 by Peter Lor

My friend and former colleague, Sjoerd Koopman, retired in 2010 as Director of Professional Programmes at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). A great communicator, throughout his career Sjoerd built up an extensive network of colleagues and friends. In 2000 he started collecting postcards depicting libraries throughout the world. Recently, he was interviewed by Kathleen McCook for her blog, Ebla to E-books: The Preservation and Annihilation of Memory. By the time of the interview Sjoerd had collected 17,594 postcards.

Sjoerd receives many duplicates. He donates all his duplicate postcards of US libraries to the American Library Association Archives, at the University of Illinois-Urbana, where they have been digitized. They can be viewed online free of charge. Continue reading →

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Global Gleanings #18: From Paris to King Louis I

Posted on 2023-12-20 by Peter Lor

This quarterly column of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information, appeared in the December 2023 issue of LIASA-in-Touch, the newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa.

 

It all happened in Paris

Rugby players and their fans were not the only important visitors to Paris recently. In September, King Charles III and Queen Camilla were in Paris on a state visit to renew ties with Britain’s ancient adversary and Twentieth Century ally. On the second day of the visit, Queen Camilla and French First Lady, Mme Brigitte Macron, launched a new UK-France literary prize. The Prix Entente Littéraire (Entente Literary Prize) is for young adult fiction and it is hoped that it will promote the translation of such fiction across the English Channel (Casassus 2023). Its name recalls the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which ended a millennium of rivalry and conflict between the two countries (“Entente Cordiale” 2023). Symbolism and optics! That’s part and parcel of diplomacy. To add French prestige to the occasion, the launch took place in the magnificently restored seventeenth century building of the Bibliothèque nationale on the rue Richelieu in the heart of Paris. (It is a peculiarity of French spelling that in the names of corporate bodies, only the initial words and proper names are spelled with capital letters.) Continue reading →

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Global Gleanings #17: South African contributions to the international LIS literature

Posted on 2023-09-07 by Peter Lor

This quarterly column of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information, appears in LIASA-in-Touch, the newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa.

Screen capture from Google serach

Lost to local colleagues?

Many scholars in the Global South prefer to publish their work in what were seen as prestigious ‘international’ journals rather than locally. In many countries, having work published in prestigious ‘international’ journals is a precondition for career advancement (Abrahams et al. 2008, 25; Meneghini, Packer, and Nassi-Calò 2008). Such journals can set very high standards, rejecting a large percentage of article submissions. But for an ambitious author, this makes it even more desirable to get published in them even though this may take much time and effort. Non-native English speakers face a further obstacle (Amano et al. 2023). There may be other impediments (Lor 2023).

By publishing in an international journal, South African authors can reach colleagues world-wide who can appreciate their specialist contributions, but this comes at a cost. Continue reading →

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Update on Satellite meeting of IFLA Library History SIG

Posted on 2023-07-24 by Peter Lor

The latest and final programme has been released at http://expositions.mundaneum.org/en/conference/preserving-our-origins-world-library-and-information-congress.

A reduced student registration fee has been introduced. At EUR 60 it includes refreshments, coffee breaks and lunch on Thursday 17 August and Friday 18 August.

 

 

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Satellite Meeting of IFLA’s Library History Special Interest Group

Posted on 2023-07-17 by Peter Lor

Are you interested in the Belle Époque, internationalism, and the history and archival sources of libraries, library associations, documentation and information science more generally?  Here is an update on an upcoming meeting, announced earlier, which you should not miss.

From 17 to 19 August 2023 the IFLA Library History Special Interest Group (Lib Hist SIG), in collaboration with the Ass0ciation for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is holding a preconference Satellite Meeting in Mons, Belgium, focusing on Preserving our origins: Approaches to the organization, curation, and historiography  of the record of national and international organizations in libraries, information and documentation.

This event takes place in Mons, Belgium, in the Mundaneum. Continue reading →

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A Milestone: Danton’s Dimensions of Comparative Librarianship published 50 years ago

Posted on 2023-06-15 by Peter Lor

The 1970s saw the publication of several noteworthy contributions to the theory and methodology of comparative librarianship. The first was Simsova and MacKee’s (1970) Handbook of comparative librarianship, a pioneering but ultimately disappointing work, of which a revised edition followed in 1975 (Simsova and MacKee 1975). I call it ‘disappointing’ because barely seventy of its 548 pages, “Part 1, Comparative librarianship and comparative method”, dealt with theory and methodology, and that rather superficially. Simsova was strongly influenced by pioneers of comparative education such as George Z.F Bereday (1964) and followed his rather mechanistic approach to comparisons between countries. The remaining 460 pages of the book is devoted to an eclectic “Guide to sources”, contributed by MacKee, and organized mainly by country. Nevertheless, this book was influential in stimulating international and comparative librarianship studies in the United Kingdom.

The second work that should be mentioned is an entry on “Comparative Librarianship” by Dorothy Collings in the Encyclopedia of library and information science (Collings 1971). Collings pioneered the teaching of the subject in the USA, where she taught it as Columbia University from 1956-1971. For her course she had developed an “Outline  for the study of a foreign library system”, which was later reprinted by Simsova (1982). This inventory is still useful, albeit very outdated. After Columbia she returned to Jamaica, where she established a library science course at the University of the West Indies.  Her career and influence have been discussed by Jackson (2001).

Joseph Periam Danton (1908-2002) (C) Guggenheim Foundation

Having missed the anniversaries of these two pioneering works, I come to a true golden jubilee, that of J. Periam Danton’s Dimensions of comparative librarianship (Danton 1973).

Joseph Periam Danton (1908-2002) had a long and distinguished career in library education and international librarianship. The latter should be no surprise, given his educational and working background. His parents were German language educators who moved to Beijing in 1916 and stayed there for ten years. In 1924 he enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio to study German. He spent an academic year in Leipzig, Germany, where his parents were then teaching. After graduating with a BA in German, Danton obtained a BS in Library Science at the library school of Columbia University. He then studied part-time for a master’s degree in German. In 1930 he was recruited by the ALA as secretary to its chief executive, Carl Milam, who was active in IFLA and in other international initiatives. Continue reading →

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Global Gleanings # 16: More disruption: chatbots in the news

Posted on 2023-06-10 by Peter Lor

This quarterly column of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information, appears in LIASA-in-Touch, the newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa.

Generative artificial intelligence

Image: ChatGPT Hub, https://www.chatgpthub.com.br/quem-e-dono-do-chatgpt/

What is ChatGPT? Image: ChatGPTHub, https://www.chatgpthub.com.br/quem-e-dono-do-chatgpt/

What is ChatGPT?At time of writing the big tech news is about ChatGPT-4, the latest version of a generative artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot launched in November 2022 by a OpenAI, a partly non-profit and partly for-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory based in San Francisco, California. Elon Musk was a co-founder, but has in the meantime pulled out. Microsoft made a large investment in this project, whilst other dominant IT companies such as Google and Amazon are rushing to bring out their own generative AI systems. It has generated much excitement and some apprehension.

Continue reading →

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