The New Status Quo Inside and outside of libraries, everybody is nervous about change.  We use terms like “disruptive change” and “tipping point” to talk about the fear that we are traveling into a world where we can’t continue to do what we’ve always done.  Some people think we’ve already passed that point, and that [...]

In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes guest author Hugh McGuire, the founder of LibriVox.org, the world’s most prolific publisher of audiobooks (all read by volunteers); Iambik Audio, a commercial audiobook publisher built on a model similar to LibriVox; and PressBooks, a simple digital book-production tool. Hugh served on the Board (2002-2010) of the [...]

Summer Interlude Three years, twenty committees, twelve hundred instruction sessions, forty thousand monograph purchases, and half a million reference questions later, I’m at the point in this librarian job where I have enough experience to know how to get things done, and also enough to wonder, “What exactly am I doing?” The more you know, [...]

During the last few frenzied weeks of the academic semester last month I came across an article I reviewed quickly and put aside, but which has lingered in the back of my mind despite the fact that I can’t seem to find it again. Essentially, as a I recall, the article addressed the manner in [...]