Eugène Morel (1869-1934) was a French Librarian who, along the lines of such eminent public library pioneers as Edward Edwards and Melvil Dewey, made a remarkable contribution towards the development of public librarianship in France. Morel was genuinely interested in all facets of librarianship and played a dominant role in molding the development of most of them. His writings on the profession made a fitting testimony to the life's work of a very active library pioneer. His relationship with the British and American Library Associations helped to bring closer the French professional association to both of them. Morel had an "avant-garde" view on the automation of libraries and was the first to encourage the employment of women in French libraries. This book is the first biography of Eugene Morel to appear in the English language.

Eugene Morel: Pioneer of Public Libraries in France

Biographies & Memoirs

Benoit, Gaetan M.

Historical

Litwin Books

According to most histories of French archives and libraries, the nineteenth century was a period of slow but steady recovery from the trauma of the revolutionary era. In contrast, Moore argues that the organization of archives and libraries in nineteenth-century France was neither steady nor progressive. By following the development of the Ecole des Chartes, the state school for archivists and librarians, Moore shows that conceptions of "order" changed dramatically from one decade to the next. More important, she argues that these changing notions of "order" were directly connected to contemporary shifts in state politics. Since each new political regime had its own conceptions of both national history and public knowledge, each one worked to "restore order" in a different way.

Restoring Order: The Ecole Des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870

History

Moore, Lara Jennifer

Europe

In Library of Walls, Samuel Collins engages the heterogeneities of information society at the Library of Congress through ethnographic fieldwork, suggesting that "information society" is best understood at the locus of conflicting modalities imbricating text, space, work and life. During the 1990's, the Library of Congress was beset with challenges to its traditional roles in cataloging and scholarship while at the same time re-inventing itself as a library "without walls." The "order of books" was threatened on several fronts: in the explosive growth of accessions, in the challenges of online materials and different container types, and in fundamental disagreements about the role of the Library vis-à-vis the nation. But rather than analyze these as separate etiologies, Collins sees them as the expression of an inherently Janus-faced information society that limits information and forecloses debate even as it multiplies avenues of access. Collins considers multiple sites at the Library-its spaces, its artifacts and organization-as contested sites where varied actors negotiate information, knowledge and nation amidst an institution whose own shifting priorities synecdochally mirror the ambiguities and unease of contemporary society.

Library of Walls: The Library of Congress and the Contradictions of Information Society

Politics & Social Sciences

Collins, Samuel Gerald

Social Sciences

Slow Reading examines the research in voluntary slow reading, from the earliest references in religion and philosophy, to the practice of close reading in the humanities, and the recent swell of interest associated with the Slow Movement. It looks at the diverse angles from which slow reading has been approached in education, library sciences and media studies. Research in psychology and neurophysiology provides a tentative explanation for the ongoing role of slow reading. The theme of locality in the Slow Movement provides insight into the importance of physical location in our relationship with information. Most of all, Slow Reading represents a rediscovery of the pleasure of reading for its own sake.

Slow Reading

Literature & Fiction

Miedema, John

History & Criticism

From Polders to Postmodernism is a broad ranging history of the conception and development of the theories that have guided archivists in their work from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. Narrated through the controversial thread of archival appraisal theory, the book examines how archivists have engaged with theory through the tension between keeping records that reflect objective history "as it happened" and subjective decision making in the archive. Through an interpretive reading of archival theory, distinct periods emerge, with each paradigm contributing unique responses to difficult archival, historical, and theoretical contexts.

From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory

Ridener, John

Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era highlights press criticisms during the Progressive Era (1890-1920) that aimed to enhance the role of the press in a democracy, limit corporatization, and better utilize the press' capacity as an agent for social change. This collection of essays by critics of the news media includes historical perspective and an extensive introduction to the period. The press critics republished in this collection of essays includes Charles Edward Russell, Moorfield Storey, Oswald Garrison Villard, Donald Wilhelm, Roscoe C.E. Brown, anonymous editorial writers at The Public and The Nation, and others. Their ideas and challenges to the corporate/commercial press model are as relevant today as they were nearly a century ago.

Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era

Reynolds, Amy

Hicks, Gary

Americas

In Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, Richard J. Cox argues that personal archives might be assuming a new importance in society. As the technical means for creating, maintaining, and using documents are improving and becoming more cost-effective, individuals and families are seeking to preserve their old documents, especially traditional paper forms, as a connection to a past that may seem to be in risk of being of being swallowed up in the immense digital gadgetry in our Internet Age. There is a reversal to other technologies as well, such as leather bound journals and fountain pens, by some individuals resisting or protesting the increasingly digital world they reside in. Behind these very different approaches are similar impulses, and, these divergent paths raise identical questions about the role and purpose of traditional archives dating back two centuries and more. Personal recordkeeping raises a remarkable array of issues and concerns about records and their preservation, public or collective memory, the mission of professional records managers and archivists, the nature of the role of the institutional archives, and the function of the individual citizen as their own archivist. Archivists need to develop a new partnership with the public, and the public needs to learn from the archivists the essentials of preserving documentary materials. We are on the cusp of seeing a new kind of archival future, and whether this is good or bad depends on how well archivists equip citizen archivists.

Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations

Cox, Richard J.

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Joseph Weizenbaum is best known in the English-speaking world for his 1976 popular critique of artificial intelligence, Computer Power and Human Reason. His reputation in Europe continued to flourish, however, as he wrote and spoke for German-speaking audiences until his death in 2008. Islands in the Cyberstream: Seeking Havens of Reason in a Programmed Society is an extended interview with Weizenbaum, originally published in German in 2006. Imaginitive, iconoclastic, and always insightful about the role of computing in society, this book is a great introduction to the thought of Joseph Weizenbaum as it has evolved over the decades.

Islands in the Cyberstream: Seeking Havens of Reason in a Programmed Society

Weizenbaum, Joseph

Wendt, Gunna

The sixth annual Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI), hosted by the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences in July 2014, brought together doctoral students and faculty engaged in Archival Studies from around the world, although principally from the United States. Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, these institutes are designed to strengthen education and research, as well as support academic cohort building and mentoring in the archival community. This publication features fifteen essays by both emerging and established archival scholars and faculty from four continents. Subjects include: dictatorship archives in Brazil, affect and agency in the archives of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, archival images in recent movies, archival systems interoperability research, cross institutional usages of EAD 2002 , Ernst Posner and archival scholarship in Washington, D.C., technical infrastructures and digital heritage preservation, the challenges of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, enabling Big Data curation in a non-archival organization, personal archiving of Web pornography, the history and future of archival education in the United States, innovative archival teaching methods in China, rights in records as a platform for participatory archiving, and archival readings of Derrida's Archive Fever. These contributions reflect the range of new archival research, the continuing maturation of archival education, and the growing international collaboration among archival scholars and faculty.

Archival Research and Education: Selected Papers from the 2014 AERI Conference (Archives, Archivists, and Society)

Open access has transformed the traditional way of scientific communication. Open repositories and open access journals provide large and free access to articles, theses and dissertations, reports, working papers, proceedings and books but also to other unpublished items, multimedia files and raw data. Fifteen years after the landmark Budapest Declaration, this book invites the reader to a critical assessment of the concept and the reality of open access, with a special attention to its impact in the countries of the Global South.
The success of open access for the dissemination of scientific information cannot be denied. Yet, the growing numbers of OA journals, articles and books should not keep the scientists and librarians from a critical posture towards the reality beyond figures and statistics. Most publications on open access give the impression that there are only benefits and no alternatives to open access. It is time to abandon this blend of marketing, politics and technology-driven ideology and to return to a more scientific and critical stance.
This book brings together seventeen short critical studies by scientists and librarians from different continents, all interested in open access, most of them supporting and accompanying the open access projects and initiatives since many years, each one with the motivation to better understand (and make understood) the ongoing transformation of scientific communication. Some topics: the discursive staging of open access, mis/trusting open access, the promise of reducing digital divide, open access and the Global South, business models of open access, predatory publishing, open access as a symbolic gift.
ULRICH HERB is project manager and scientific publishing expert at Saarland University and State Library (Germany). His focus areas are electronic publishing, science communication &amp; infrastructure, scientific publishing, scientometrics and science research. He is publishing regularly in a variety of professional bodies in the fields of Information Science and Science Research.
JOACHIM SCHÖPFEL is lecture of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Lille 3 (France), director of the French Digitization Centre for PhD theses (ANRT) and member of the GERiiCO research laboratory. He was manager of the INIST (CNRS) scientific library from 1999 to 2008. He teaches library marketing, auditing, intellectual property and information science. His research interests are scientific information and communication, especially open access, grey literature and research data.

Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access

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