As the out-going chair of the IFLA Library Services for Multicultural Populations Section, I shared this manifesto with participants at the IFLA 2017 conference, held in Wrosclaw, Poland last August. This interactive session, Multicultural Library Manifesto Toolkit – Case studies and illustrations from a global perspective – Library services for multicultural populations, attracted over 100 participants…

At the 2017 Computers in Libraries conference, a librarian asked “Do you use your 3D printer, as a service or resource?” This seemed like a strange question to me at the time, but not now. I realize now that the distinction between service and resource—like Open Shelf columnist Jennifer Brown’s distinction between product and process—fundamentally…

Complete surprise and appreciation: this was my first reaction to reading a response to an article I had written for Open Shelf last spring.  I write about our school’s library learning commons journey for a variety of reasons but, occasionally forget that someone outside of elementary school libraries may find connections to their own experiences.…

B. Mabel Dunham (1881-1957) was the president of the Ontario Library Association in 1920. In her presidential address, she spoke bluntly about the opportunities that library work offered to women in the 1920s and the risks of the profession, calling library work “a profession by courtesy only.” In this interview with local reporter Ernest Fletcher,…

We love to compare books and their screen adaptations … plot and people, pace and perspective. Which version is better, the movie or the book? In this limited series podcast, Trish O’Flaherty and Alana Skwarok take up the challenge of reading, watching and deciding which medium tells the story better. Their first conversation is about…

October 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution which began a new stage in the development of librarianship by creating the objective prerequisites for free access to books, knowledge and information on behalf of the working class. Under these new economic and political conditions the traditional library had to be radically transformed. As…

Practice makes perfect—or at least staff can benefit from targeted readers’ advisory training, particularly when they have time to practice and reflect on their learning experiences. A few years back, staff at the Hamilton Public Library sought to re-invigorate in-house training. This move reflected our ongoing commitment to employee development and the recognition that it is…

How can we demonstrate, through action, that LGBTQ+ people are welcome in libraries? In the first article in this limited series of conversations, Amanda Wilk and John Vincent will explore this question by looking at how well libraries are providing for LGBTQ+ people. These conversations will take place over the next two years, include six…