Knight News Challenge awards $1.6 million for ideas that help libraries serve 21st century information needs

Orlando, Fla.—June 23, 2016— The 14 winners of the Knight News Challenge on Libraries announced today by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation aim to help shape the future of libraries, meeting 21st century information needs as centers for digital learning, data sharing, community connection and discovery.

Source: Knight News Challenge awards $1.6 million for ideas that help libraries serve 21st century information needs

More Small Colleges Go with CIO to Oversee Libraries and IT

More than a tenth of college chief information technology officers are also in charge of campus libraries, a sign of the rapid digitization of scholarship and the desire of small colleges to consolidate administrative functions.About 12 percent of CIOs oversee libraries, according to annual surveys by the Center for Higher Education Chief Information Officer Studies. The surveys suggest the arrangement is appealing mostly to smaller colleges at this point. “You get smaller institutions and a good percentage are community colleges,” said Wayne Brown, the centers founder.

via Small colleges are putting the same administrator in charge of IT and libraries | Inside Higher Ed.

As this trend continues, I wonder if we’ll see it spread to law schools? Many law school IT operations live inside the library as it is, so it would make some sense. Of course it also raises the possibility of having the law library ultimately run by a non-librarian.

 

U of IL Library Project Archives Computer Games

Sometime this August, librarians at the University of Illinois will finish archiving over a dozen famous computer games, then step back to consider where to go next with their project. These programs go back over four decades, and include a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT’s Spacewar! circa 1962.

Ars Technica – Saving “virtual worlds” from extinction.

Now this is the sort of digital preservation I could get into. It will interesting to see how they solve all the issues around hardware dependency that comes with these old games, “[W]hat we’re trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game.” Big job for librarians. Seems like figuring out how to keep copies of digital texts around should be a walk in the park after this.