Libraries as Social Service Hubs

Social services teams – Health and Safety Associates (HASAs) in San Franscisco, support staff and help patrons with services information. They have, for example, found stable housing for over 130 patrons so far. It has inspired other public library systems like Denver to establish a HASA team. The HASA team in turn recommended hiring a social worker. In 2012, one was hired with further social workers bringing it to 4 for 2019! Just wonderful.

Possible British Library North

Board meeting minutes identify there are plans afoot to open what is currently referred to as British Library North in the UK city of Leeds. The British library has had a presence in the Yorkshire town of Boston Spa for a long time. It wants to improve and expand its presence. The aim is to increase access to the national instituion’s assets to many in the north of the UK. Early days but a great plan.

What Side of the Debate Would You be On

The 24th of March 2019 That’s Debatable topic was “Will Technology Save Us?”. Before the debate started more than 50% of a 150 strong crowd answered Yes to believing it would. After listening to the debate between industry experts, the vote changed to only 25% of the crowd believing it will save us! What do you think?

Information is a Strategic Asset – Deriving Value, Managing, Sharing, and Protecting

The authors discuss the work done by 4 partners, CILIP, KPMG, CIO Connect and IK Springboard to produce an updated version of The Hawley Report called Hawley for Today. The original report identified the importance of business’ information assets and called for organisations to “ensure these assets to be well and legally managed, and deployed to best advantage”. While most organisations believe their information is a strategic asset of real value they were not equipped to ensure the asset was managed for “optimum benefit”. Not much seems to have changed over the last 20 years.

TOW Report on News Archiving in the Digital Age

A TOW report into how or if news outlets (and other news producing agencies) were archiving their digital content was recently completed. Worryingly, it appeared from interviewee responses that no organisation has a “holistic record” of what their organisation produces. Additionally, there is no formal policy on archiving their material. In fact, most believe digital backup and storage on Google or CMCs is effectively archiving!