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The digital age is burning out our most precious resources and the future of the past is at stake. In After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, Trevor Owens warns that our institutions of cultural memory—libraries, archives, museums, humanities departments, research institutes, and more—have been “disrupted,” and largely not for the better. He calls for memory workers and memory institutions to take back control of envisioning the future of memory from management consultants and tech sector evangelists. 

After Disruption posits that we are no longer planning for a digital future, but instead living in a digital present. In this context, Owens asks how we plan for and develop a more just, sustainable, and healthy future for cultural memory. The first half of the book draws on critical scholarship on the history of technology and business to document and expose the sources of tech startup ideologies and their pernicious results, revealing that we need powerful and compelling counter frameworks and values to replace these ideologies. The second half of the book makes the case for the centrality of maintenance, care, and repair as interrelated frameworks to build a better future in which libraries, archives, and museums can thrive as sites of belonging and connection through collections.

According to 2016 Pew Research Center survey data, Millennials are more likely to have visited a public library in the past year than any other adult demographic. But despite being core library users, millennials and other younger generations are often underrepresented on library boards and library advocacy groups, including Friends groups and Foundations.  But you can change that, with the help of this planner’s hands-on worksheets, brainstorming activities, checklists, and expert advice. Using this toolkit from United for Libraries you will

• understand generational differences and commonalities through statistics and analysis of Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z/post-Millennials;
• learn how to navigate the challenges of fundraising with the “debt generations” by persuasively answering the question “what’s in it for me?”;
• master the ABCs of recruitment and retention, tailoring them to fit your library;
• craft several customized pitches, giving you confidence no matter the situation or audience;
• discover how to cement buy-in from two key groups, current organization members and your new recruits, thereby ensuring acceptance and enthusiasm all around;
• work towards defining and managing diversity for your advocacy group; and
• use tried and true methods for successful onboarding of volunteers, including a Board Member Orientation Checklist and guidance on mentoring.

Using this resource, libraries of all kinds will be empowered to grow and strengthen their recruitment, retention, and training of Trustees, Friends, and Foundation members.

Understanding the systems that shape what societies remember, archive, and forget.

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge.

In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age, Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices.

This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century.

How digital networks and services bring the issues of archives out of the realm of institutions and into the lives of everyday users

Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. Electronic files, search engines, video sites, and media player libraries make the concepts of “archival” and “retrieval” practically synonymous with the experience of interconnected computing. Archives today are the center of much attention but few agendas. Can archives inform the redistribution of power and resources when the concept of the public library as an institution makes knowledge and culture accessible to all members of society regardless of social or economic status? This book sets out to show that archives need our active support and continuing engagement. 

This volume offers three distinct perspectives on the present status of archives that are at once in disagreement and solidarity with each other, from contributors whose backgrounds cut across the theory–practice divide. Is the increasing digital storage of knowledge pushing us toward a turning point in its democratization? Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle? Is there a downside to the present-day impulse toward total preservation? 

This is volume 40 issue 2 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 41 issue 1 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 41 issue 2 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 42 issue 1 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 42 issue 2 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 43 issue 1 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 43 issue 2 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 44 issue 1 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 44 issue 2 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

This is volume 45 issue 1 of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal presenting issues of concern to librarians working within art history, art criticism, the history of architecture, archaeology, and similar areas. The journal has established itself as a vital publication for art information professionals, acting as a forum for issues relating to both the documentation of art and the practice and theory of art librarianship and visual resources curatorship. Art Documentation will publish articles pertinent to issues surrounding the documentation of art and the use of visual resources in academic and special libraries and museum settings. It is a key resource for professionals entering the field as well as those more seasoned professionals.

Foreword by Tracie D. Hall

Community engagement isn’t simply an important component of a successful library—it’s the foundation upon which every service, offering, and initiative rests. Working collaboratively with community members—be they library customers, residents, faculty, students or partner organizations— ensures that the library works, period. This important resource from ALA’s Public Programs Office (PPO) provides targeted guidance on how libraries can effectively engage with the public to address a range of issues for the betterment of their community, whether it is a city, neighborhood, campus, or something else. Featuring contributions by leaders active in library-led community engagement, it’s designed to be equally useful as a teaching text for LIS students and a go-to handbook for current programming, adult services, and outreach library staff. Balancing practical tools with case studies and stories from field, this collection explores such key topics as

• why libraries belong in the community engagement realm;
• getting the support of board and staff;
• how to understand your community;
• the ethics and challenges of engaging often unreached segments of the community;
• identifying and building engaged partnerships;
• collections and community engagement;
• engaged programming; and
• outcome measurement.

Project Outcome for Academic Libraries, acrl.projectoutcome.org, is a free toolkit from the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) designed to help academic libraries understand and share the impact of essential library programs and services. The toolkit provides simple surveys and an easy-to-use process for measuring and analyzing outcomes. The standardized surveys allow libraries to aggregate their outcome data, compare against similar institutions, and analyze trends over time by service topic and program type.
 
In celebration of Project Outcome’s fifth anniversary, Assessment and Advocacy: Using Project Outcome for Academic Libraries collects case studies demonstrating how a variety of libraries have used Project Outcome to make improvements in their practice and highlighting the value the toolkit has brought to institutions and the academic library profession. Chapters capture ways to use Project Outcome to make small changes, like the optimal arrangement of a library’s study room furniture, to using Project Outcome data in conversation with datasets from other sources to provide greater insights into the contributions of academic libraries to student learning and success, as well as evidence that can be used in advocating for institutional, state, and federal funding.
 
Academic librarians know that their work makes a difference. You set students on the road to success and researchers on the road to results, providing valuable skills and access to knowledge that help our colleges and universities thrive. The challenge for libraries can be capturing meaningful data to support that story. Since 2019, the Project Outcome for Academic Libraries toolkit has helped library workers measure learning outcomes to drive change, make data-informed decisions, and demonstrate the impact and value of academic libraries. Learn how to use this data in your library, institution, and the profession with Assessment and Advocacy, all proceeds of which go to keeping Project Outcome free.