Original - Information Matters

Zizians, an emerging and loosely defined intellectual network, hold anarchist beliefs, emphasise animal rights and veganism, and promote a non-dualistic understanding of consciousness, including the idea that the hemispheres of the brain can have different genders and conflicting interests. This perspective challenges conventional Western assumptions about individual identity, rationality, and the pursuit of knowledge. By looking into how these two communities approach information, one can better understand their impact on contemporary discussions, from scientific discourse to digital subcultures.

Education Original

February 28, 2025 Simon Mahony

Empowering Global Engagement through Research and Teaching

How might we understand the way in which research and education can be used as a positive force in bringing the world closer together? This difficult question is one that those of us within digital humanities at University College London want to address. Looking at our institutional history can help to clarify this. The history of digital humanities is gaining attention, with an increasing focus on understanding its development and recognising its role of addressing diversity, gender, race, and linguistic backgrounds in knowledge production, and promoting inclusive representation.

Featured Original

February 4, 2025 Andrew M. Cox

Academic Libraries in Northern England Support Mental Health and Wellbeing

Academic Libraries North is sharing resources about how libraries can support mental health and wellbeing, including case studies based on experience. ALN is a consortium of 33 higher education libraries in the north of England in the United Kingdom. Through collaborative activities and mutual support, they provide opportunities for their members in the exchange of knowledge and experience.

Featured Original

February 4, 2025 Lynne Bowker

Breaking the Silence on Linguistic and Gender Bias in Scholarly Publishing: What Can Librarians Do?

Creating an environment that fosters Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB) is a shared responsibility, meaning that librarians have a role to play too. The first step in addressing bias is recognizing that it exists and raising awareness among others. But once the bias has been recognized, it can be challenging to know how to go about addressing it.

Featured Original

January 29, 2025 Opeyemi Oboh

How Libraries Can Use Books to Support Mental Well-being

Today, the average person relies heavily on digital technologies, with daily survival intricately tied to these tools. While digital devices offer connectivity, they also raise concerns about mental well-being and emotional stability. Many therapeutic platforms like Calm and Woebot are also digital, deepening this reliance. However, libraries can provide stability by blending traditional methods with technological innovations. As they adapt to the digital age, libraries have transformed from quiet reading spaces into vital resources for mental health.

Featured Original

December 16, 2024 Azeez Adeoye

Librarians Do Not Take a Break from Research

Librarians are the polymaths of this century. They are voracious readers, consuming information from all fields. As information gatekeepers, their engagement in knowledge classification, cataloging, and organization grants them a birthright to know more than others. Librarians help create all professions, but no other profession creates librarians. This is a unique quality that makes librarians stand out and excel among other fields. The secret lies in the fact that librarians never take a break from research.

Featured Original

December 10, 2024 Dariush Alimohammadi

Religious Cults as Builders of Marginalized Communities

Religious cults represent the worst form of marginalization. Libraries must help people avoid falling into the trap of cults by informing them. Otherwise, it becomes almost impossible to return cult members to normal life, and even if a person leaves a cult after several decades, the effects of living in a closed system will keep them marginalized forever.

Original

November 26, 2024 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Who Belongs in the Library? Reconsidering Academic Skills Tutors and Institutional Expectations

In this reflective piece, I share my experience as a post-PhD early-career researcher navigating the challenges of the academic job market, particularly in applying for academic skills tutor roles within university library teams. Despite an academic background and a range of experiences, I encountered repeated rejections, which led me to ask: Who belongs in the library?

Featured Original

October 10, 2024 A. Miller

Healthcare UX: A Case for Inclusive Designs that Impacts Aging and Anxiety

Applying inclusive design for holistic wellness, aging, and mental health reduces elements that may aggravate symptoms of a challenge, disability, or some stress-inducing factors. This Healthcare UX design approach is a process of creating a digital experience that addresses the needs of healthcare users, including healthcare patients and their providers, plus the families and caregivers of the healthcare-services users. The bottom line is that whatever the ailment or healthcare goal is, digital healthcare products should be intuitive, effective, and useful so people get the care they need. This article looks at how healthcare can apply UX design to overcome or prevent potential challenges and frustrations from using technologies for health-related reasons.

Featured Original

August 27, 2024 Christopher Lueg

Erasing Individuality: The Uncanny Undertone of AI Writing Assistance

There is little doubt that GenAI can provide valuable services in certain areas e.g., by aiding and arguably empowering people who lack experience in say, writing business English or formatting CVs in specific ways, especially when applying for jobs that require submitting job applications online as is very common nowadays. However, it also creates uncanny language with a sensation of unease. Examples include employing idioms, phrases, or expressions that are used slightly incorrectly, or any other “slight but noticeable deviations from natural human writing can create a sense of disconnection and discomfort in the reader.” (ibid) Or, as Robertson (2024) puts it, “AI used to be weird. Now ‘sounds like a bot’ is just shorthand for boring.”