Inside Oodi, Helsinki’s new flagship library

Not just books - how renting a sewing machine from the library can improve democracy

Finland's libraries are increasingly being valued not by how many books they lend, but how they help societies function.

Consumers Are Worried About the Loss of Physical Media Ownership. Libraries Are Leading the Conversation. — Association of Research Libraries

Sally Sax is head, Collection Strategy and Partnerships, MacOdrum Library, Carleton University. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article about Sony’s plan to end physical sales of PlayStation console games, Will...

Library

Books on my shelf that I enjoy

OAPEN Home

OAPEN is based in the Netherlands, with its registered office in the National Library in The Hague.

For The People

We all love libraries, and we all love reading - but that’s not enough. It’s essential that more leftists become involved in their local libraries. We’re being out-organized by a right-wing movement that’s focused on taking over public institutions to privatize & weaken them.

Everything is Miscellaneous

I’m at a Hubweek event called “Libraries: The Next Generation.” It’s a panel hosted by the Berkman Center with Dan Cohen, the executive director of the DPLA; Andromeda Yelton, a developer who has done work with libraries; and Jeffrey Schnapp of metaLab

We’ve launched an open access platform, Historical Photographs of Hong Kong!

New resource alert! We’ve launched an open access platform, Historical Photographs of Hong Kong. We’ll be bringing online increasing numbers of digitised slides, prints and negatives donated to the Hong Kong Collections in the University of Bristol Library

A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues

As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.

What Libraries Actually Do – Libraries as Epistemic Institutions

One of the biggest challenges for libraries telling their story is that the library means something different depending on who’s in the room. For a student, it’s a place to study and a staff full of people who want them to succeed. For a faculty member, it might be the invisible infrastructure that delivers electronic articles or the subject liaison who visits their class each year. For a graduate student, it’s often something more: a research partner, a data collaborator, a guide through the methodological expectations of a discipline. And that’s before accounting for the larger information environment that those users are already swimming in, where disciplines publish at high rates; trade publications and newsletters and Substacks produce sense-making content daily; and social media, messaging apps, and community channels add still more. The information environment is a flood around us, and the library is one stream of that flow.

As we may think

As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.

Euro-Office, Europe's open-source alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs, launches June 9

European tech firms will ship the first stable release of Euro-Office next month, giving governments and businesses worldwide a ready-to-run, sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.

Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons

<I>Publishing Beyond the Market</I> argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication. By deploying theoretical literature on science and technology studies, care ethics, and the commons, the book critically interrogates open access and reimagines a more ethical future for researcher-led publishing. A case study of Plan S—the multifunder European policy for open access publishing—explores its tendency to rehearse all the failures of commercialisation. Through critical engagement with the open access landscape, the book reveals the shortcomings of market-centric and policy-based approaches to open access book and journal publishing, particularly their tendency to reinforce conservatism, commercialism, and private control of publishing.<BR /><BR /> Going forward, <I>Publishing Beyond the Market</I> explores the importance of collectivity and democratic governance within the transition to open access publishing. It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through a series of presses that are each managed by working academics could offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access and subscription publishing. In weaving themselves together in order to "scale small" these publishing initiatives would act as a counter-hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care. By illustrating how these projects build toward a commons-based publishing future, and how they may complement other approaches to publishing within university presses and libraries, the book culminates in an argument for the infrastructures, policies, and forms of governance needed to nurture such a collective vision.

LibGuides: Open Access Publishing : OA Journals, Books and Repositories

This guide provides guidance in open access scholarly publishing for researchers in all disciplines.