unlibrarian

infoneer-pulse:

What do you get when you combine the collections from 60 major research institutions into a single, digitized library? A comprehensive collection, of course, but also a major headache for the people who have to collect, organize, preserve, and publish the information in a user-friendly manner for students, professors, and the general public.

That’s the headache that John Wilkin, associate university librarian for the University of Michigan’s Library Information Technology (LIT) department and executive director of HathiTrust at U-M. The latter is a comprehensive digital archive comprising materials from likes the U-M, Arizona State University, Baylor University, Columbia University, and Dartmouth College, to name just a handful.

At press time, HathiTrust’s digitized collection included 9.71 million total volumes, more than 5.15 million book titles, 256,000 serial titles, 3.4 billion pages, and 435 TB of information.

Wilkin gave Campus Technology a look at how the initiative started, challenges it’s faced when trying to manage huge volumes of data, and how HathiTrust has overcome those obstacles.

» via Campus Technology

Bfarn sez, “I don’t know if you’ve been following the Los Angeles Unified School District’s witch hunt, but they’ve been trying to lay off their entire staff of librarians. They’ve been conducting McCarthy-esque trials, forcing teacher-librarians to defend both their personal worth and their district-defined credentials. One brave teacher has been blogging about the experience (as retweeted by Neil Gaiman!) and was singled out by LAUSD lawyers for her efforts. They won, and lost their best teacher in the process.”

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is hosting a webinar for library professionals to discuss the central role that libraries play in cultivating the creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communications skills that individuals need to be successful in the 21st century.

Making the Learning Connection: Museums and 21st Century Skills Webinar

Tuesday, February 1, 2011 from 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET

Full details on how to join the webinar are in the original post at Beyond the Job.