What’s New in Open Shelf: May 1, 2016

What’s New in Open Shelf? is a Table of Contents of sorts. Open Shelf publishes when we have compelling new material. Every two weeks is our plan.

In this release we feature Free Little Libraries, budget pressures and successes, Islandora, and open access.

Jane Schmidt has been thinking about neighbourhood book exchanges, especially Free Little Libraries. In The Trouble with Twee she suggests “There are many ways to build community – a box of books is one of them, to be sure, but there’s more to the story than appears.”

Budget woes are a common refrain. How about a success story instead? In Making an Inadequate Budget Do Extraordinary Things Haliburton County Public Library CEO Bessie Sullivan says “being poor makes us creative.”

Managing digital collections is complex but the right tools make a difference. In Using Islandora to Build Digital Collections Kelli Babcock, Dan Lerch, and Kim Pham outline how they use Islandora in their workplaces to address the challenges.

Open access publishing is an existential issue for scholarly publishing and academic libraries. So that’s why a recent development left me gobsmacked and prompted this editorial: Open Access, Culture, and Modeling the Way.

As always, let us know what you think of Open Shelf.

…Mike Ridley
Editor-in-Chief, Open Shelf
@OpenShelfOLA