The axiom to “do more with less” in university research libraries is increasingly untenable, as budgets continue to shrink and demand for novel services continues to rise. The impacts of such existential uncertainties are self-evident and widely discussed in the current literature—staff burnout, lowered morale and increased toxicity, weakened local collections, and limited capacity for ambitious and genuinely innovative work. Like many institutions, the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries has found itself reinventing many of its services and initiatives to meet the increasingly technical needs of students and researchers in our campus community. New services and positions for research data services, GIS librarianship, discovery services, and digital scholarship are all popular and increasingly central to the information service mission of the Libraries. Like many more institutions, demand for such services often outstrips the Libraries’ operations and collections budgets, as well as labor capacity for project-driven initiatives and highly technical service requests.

According to ALA’s State of America’s Libraries 2018 report “in the past five years, more than 58% of all academic libraries have changed their reference staffing models, with the most popular chan…

When we think about crime, terrorism, and warfare in cyberspace, it can be tempting to draw parallels with their conventional equivalents. While these kinds of allegories can sometimes help us understand the more hard-to-grasp concepts of what’s happening inside computer networks, they can also be dangerously inaccurate. (Comparing any system compromise to the attack on...

What does a good information security incident response plan look like?

Simultaneously with their growing online presence, companies and individuals become increasingly susceptible to cyber-security attacks. Most organizations

En julio de 2009, el secretario del Instituto Smithsoniano, G. Wayne Clough, habló sobre el futuro...

Bobby Braun, the new dean of the University of Colorado’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, thinks his school is the best kept secret on the Boulder campus — and he’s do…

With the support of a Research Data Strategy since 2010, the Library has been active in services for research data for a number of years. This work has included European-funded projects such as ODE, ODIN and THOR; Providing the DataCite UK service and involvement in other activities such as data...

In Privacy on the Ground, the law and information scholars Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan showed that empowered chief privacy officers (CPOs) are pushin

Vinopal knocks another one out of the park.