Voices from Simmons - SLIS West Director & SLIS Alumnae/i
- iSchools News
- 5 days ago
- 1 min read
Director of the Simmons School of Library and Information Science SLIS West program Eric Poulin published an editorial in The Shoestring, “Opinion: Federal library funding cuts will hit rural areas the hardest.” In the article, Poulin warns that funding cuts to social services will result in a lack of access to electronic resources that will disproportionately hurt small, rural communities and their schools.
“Data from the MBLC confirms that school-aged individuals account for 60% of the usage of these databases,” notes Poulin. “Without access to them, it appears that Massachusetts students will be learning to conduct college-level research woefully underprepared.”
In February, Viv Williams '19MS, a graduate of the Library and Information Science: Archives Management Concentration from the School of Library and Information Science, joined the staff of the Boston Public Library (BPL) as Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts.
Her work will focus primarily on the BPL's Anti-Slavery Collection, which includes (per the BPL blog post) "archives, collections of books, ephemera, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, and other formats, many of which were donated by leading figures in the nineteenth-century American abolitionist movement."
Williams stated, "The Anti-Slavery Collection is one of the largest institutional holdings documenting the nineteenth-century abolition movement and is integral to our understanding of American history. I'm so grateful for the support that the Associates is providing to allow me to make this foundational collection, as well as many others, more accessible to our researchers."