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In this article, we provide a brief overview of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs). We then propose eight critical questions that libraries should ask when exploring this technology and its implications for their communities. We argue that libraries have a unique role in facilitating informed and responsible use of GenAI, as well as safeguarding and promoting the values of access, privacy, and intellectual freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of utility and technical quality, open-source software solutions have become a common option for many libraries. As barriers to adoption have been reduced and systems such as FOLIO appear poised to change the landscape of LIS technology, it is worth examining how the use of open source can support the normative core values of librarianship and to outline a strategy for critical engagement with the technology that is beneficial to patrons and libraries. Such a strategy will require further codification, institutionalization, and investigation of open source at many levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to understand the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has tested the effectiveness of library-based equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts. In the early days of the pandemic, libraries closed their doors and pivoted to digital services and programs, resources often inaccessible to BIPOC and low-income users. Since reopening, libraries have found that the lack of diversity in their ranks and information curation is compromising their ability to actualize the equity, diversity, and inclusion goals—objectives that are critical to closing the socioeconomic gaps that the pandemic has only widened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to examine the potential of Information Ethics (IE) to serve as a coherent ethical foundation for the library and information science profession (LIS profession). Design/methodology/approach: This study consists of two parts: the first part present IE's central theses and the main critiques it has received; the second part offers the authors' own evaluation of the theory from the LIS perspective in two steps: (1) assessing its internal consistency by testing its major theses against each other; (2) assessing its utility for resolving frequently debated LIS ethical dilemmas by comparing its solutions with solutions from other ethical theories. Findings: This study finds that IE, consisting of an informational ontology, a fundamental ethical assertion and a series of moral laws, forms a coherent ethical framework and holds promising potential to serve as a theoretical foundation for LIS ethical issues; its inclusion of nonhuman objects as moral patients and its levels of abstraction mechanism proved to be particularly relevant for the LIS profession. This study also shows that, to become more solid an ethical theory, IE needs to resolve some of its internal contradictions and ambiguities, particularly its conceptual conflations between internal correctness, rightness and goodness; between destruction, entropy and evil; and the discrepancy between its deontological ethical assertion and its utilitarian moral laws. Practical implications: This study alerts LIS professionals to the possibility of having a coherent ethical foundation and the potential of IE in this regard. Originality/value: This study provides a systemic explication, evaluation and field test of IE from the LIS perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over the existence of a "public sphere" in China's Late Qing/Early Republican era began nearly three decades ago, but it has yet to generate a special socio-cultural review on the "Confucian social imaginary" of the Chinese people. The article builds on existing "economic-political approach" and "idea-communication approach" to argue decisive factors hindering the development of a Habermasian "public sphere." These includes (1) people's traditional-collectivist lifestyle, (2) lack of understanding of "universal equality," (3) conservative self-positioning during social transition, (4) regionalist attitude toward outsiders, (5) lack of access to Enlightenment ideas, (6) disregard for parliamentary systems, and (7) ignorance of the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Record levels of materials challenges have affected libraries in both Canada and the United States in recent years, but despite the apparent swell in censorship efforts, the large majority of challenges go unreported. This study aims to identify factors contributing to the low rate of challenge reporting through a participation survey distributed to over 500 Canadian public libraries. Results indicate low awareness reporting mechanisms is likely the largest obstacle to greater participation, but obstacles related to library policy, including delegation and challenge policy structure, also exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Potato Center (CIP) has collaboratively implemented various demand‐pull and supply‐push interventions since 2006 to develop the seed system for biofortified orange‐fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) (Ipomoea batatas) varieties in Malawi. Consequently, the adoption of OFSP varieties has increased to 30%. Nevertheless, the actual adoption rates, the contribution of these interventions to the seed system development, and the extent to which the current policy and regulatory environment facilitated or impeded the availability and access to quality planting materials by smallholder farmers are not well understood. This study explored these critical issues using desk reviews and qualitative information with OFSP subsector stakeholders. The results reveal that most of the critical nodes of the OFSP seed system are underdeveloped. However, CIP backstopping interventions to the national research systems contributed significantly to building Malawi's capacity for producing clean early‐generation seed materials. In addition, CIP has played a critical role in developing the community‐level capacity to produce and disseminate clean vines through the introduction of decentralized vine multipliers and commercial vine multipliers. The study recommends integrating formal and informal seed systems for vegetatively propagated crops to improve access to quality planting materials by farmers. Second, government and development partners (CGIAR centers, Nongovernmental Organization) should progressively promote/create demand for OFSPs among consumers because of the strong association between the biofortified OFSP varieties and nutrition. Lastly, there is need for government and development partners to establish and increase OFSP interventions in the Northern and Central regions of Malawi. Core Ideas: Access to certified seed for vegetatively propagated crops is low in Sub‐Saharan Africa.Various interventions were implemented to develop the seed system for orange‐fleshed sweet potato.Seed system for orange‐fleshed sweet potato is still in infancy stages.Integrations of formal and informal seed systems are critical to ensuring availability and access to quality seeds.Demand creation for orange‐fleshed sweet potato as a nutritious food will trigger improvements in the seed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The requirement for Australian initial teacher education (ITE) providers to administer a Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA) highlights a tension between policymaking directives and academic independence. It has raised fears of entrenching simplistic notions of measurement and evidence into a professional field distinguished by its complex relationship with intellectual and academic labour. Drawing on focus group data and reflections of academics co-designing an Australian TPA, this study considers how intellectual labour intertwines with its operational field, wherein co-construction of knowledge, critical thinking, and reflection define both academic and teachers' work. Our analysis explains how education academics, as principle-designers of an assessment instrument, might also negotiate the intellectual premise of a TPA within their own ITE programs. We find that Australia's initial TPA policy framework has been mediated with ITE academics. This offers opportunities for building knowledge to understand more precisely the TPA in its contexts, including admissible evidence to measure classroom-readiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is written by Marci Wicker, a Public Services Law Librarian and Assistant Professor of at the University of Mississippi School of Law. She holds a JD from the University of Mississippi, is a Registered Nurse, and will soon have an MA in Higher Education from the University of Mississippi. This article explores a case study that highlights how the Grisham Law School Library actively cultivates academic exploration and safeguards the intellectual freedoms of its patrons, encompassing both students and faculty. This commitment is particularly pronounced against the historical backdrop of civil rights challenges in Mississippi and the University of Mississippi, exemplified by the 1962 riot. In negotiating these historical intricacies, the library adopts a nuanced approach, transparently acknowledging the past without causing undue distress. Through meticulous archival and collections scrutiny, bolstered by educational initiatives and collaborative endeavors, the library not only underscores its enduring consistency but also demonstrates remarkable resilience as the flagship law school and law library in Mississippi. The Grisham Law School Library, striking a delicate balance between historical awareness and forward-thinking initiatives, emerges as a beacon of adaptability, dedicated to preserving legacies and nurturing learning for the benefit of both current and future legal scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Librarianship's dominant conception of the freedom to read is governed by a liberal principle of noninterference, wherein free readers are those who face no intentional intervention in their choice of materials. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how this account fails to adequately capture systemic threats that impoverish people's reading lives. Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper deploys informal argumentation to expose a flaw in the dominant account of the freedom to read. The author uses a case study of comparative titles or comps, an editorial decision-making and justificatory convention that reproduces racial inequality in Anglophone trade publishing. Findings: Comps present one example of how everyday norms and practices of literary production render people's reading lives pervasively unfree, even absent some intent to interfere in them. The going account of the freedom to read calls, at best, for a greater diversity of book-commodities from which consumers may choose. However, the comp case suggests that this distributive remedy will be insufficient without relevant changes to the institutional arrangements that condition readers' choices in the first place. Originality/value: This paper draws together insights from Library and Information Science, political philosophy and print culture studies to illuminate limitations in librarianship's standard conception of the freedom to read. This reveals the need for an alternative, structural account of that freedom with significant implications for practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the life and work of Phillis Wheatley and her interlocutors to consider how African-descended people conceptualized liberty and formed an intellectual community during the American Revolution. Her poetry and epistolary exchanges, shared with a range of acquaintances in the Atlantic World, reveal an intellectual universe that she created for herself and one that drew her into the political spotlight. Leaders of the founding generation began to question the intellectual possibilities for an African girl in ways that held political implications for the future of slavery. I argue that Wheatley's life and work opens critical avenues for exploring intellectualism as an aspiration of Black life in early America, and that her world of ideas sheds light on the possibilities of Black girlhood in the late eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the same day that Russia launched its genocidal invasion of Ukraine, the I New York Times i decided to publish an editorial written by a professional far right provocateur who attacked libraries for providing books that represent the true diversity of human experience and identity.[1] As with so many critics of access to information, his objections were over access to very specific kinds of information; he used emotive but malleable terms like "woke" to critique librarians who help patrons understand systemic structures that promote inequities and injustices. In the intervening time, the American Library Association (ALA; [3]) has revealed 2021 to be the worst year for challenges to and bans of books since such challenges have been tracked. The beloved librarian who just months ago was valiantly facilitating curbside book pickups and running outdoor distanced-learning activities for children in the community, despite the pandemic, is now a monster corrupting and "grooming" the children with forbidden books. As the ALA ([3]) revealed in its I State of American Libraries i report, 1,597 books had been challenged by the end of 2021 with proposed bans, an exponential increase from previous years' numbers. [Extracted from the article]

This paper presents the major findings from a nationwide survey about sexual and reproductive health information services in public libraries. The survey was conducted between March 3 and May 1, 2022 through an online survey. The participants were library professionals who work in public libraries. This analysis reviews data from 179 respondents from 12 states. Most survey participants believe that their library needs to increase sexual and reproductive health information services. However, findings from the survey reveal the complicated nature of providing this information, including intellectual freedom and self-censorship issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) and societies require openly accessible high-quality knowledge as input into transparent and accountable decision-making and informed societal action. Open Science1 supports this requirement. As both enablers and logical consequences of the paradigm of Open Science, the ideas of Open Access, Open Data, and FAIR publishing principles revolutionise how academic research needs to be conceptualised, conducted, disseminated, published, and used. This 'academic openness quartet' is especially relevant for the ways in which research data are created, annotated, curated, managed, shared, reproduced, (re-)used, and further developed in academia. Greater accessibility of scientific output and scholarly data also aims at increasing the transparency and reproducibility of research results and the quality of research itself. In the applied 'academic openness quartet' perspective, they also function as remedies for academic malaises, like missing replicability of results or secrecy around research data. Against this backdrop, the present article offers a conceptual discussion on the four academic openness paradigms, their meanings, interrelations, as well as potential benefits and challenges arising from their application in data-driven research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on rethinking Australian identity through paradoxes of being 'here and elsewhere,' delving into the concept of 'supplementary' identity and the role of translation in cultural traffic between old and new worlds. It examines Peter Beilharz's shift in intellectual identity, questioning the traditional narrative of Australian settlements and proposing a counter-narrative that emphasizes a cultural divide between rural and urban areas, challenging the unity envisioned.

Today's debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida's deconstructive engagement with Kant's Conflict of the Faculties in the context of recent legislative developments and political interference which imperil these foundations. To do so, it makes a turn to the ear and to the multiple senses of 'hearing' as auditory perception, responsiveness and judgement to explore an alternative basis for defending academic freedom that radicalizes Kant's position and liberates scholarly inquiry from its closures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual freedom is one known core value in the LIS profession, but there needs to be more clarity over how to define it and apply it to the actual work. In the Philippines, this concept only exists as a clause or a section of a broader guideline or policy, and a formal framework has yet to be specifically dedicated to it. This study offers insights into how intellectual freedom is perceived in Philippine academic libraries. Academic library directors (N = 44) in Southern Tagalog, composed of Regions IV-A and IV-B, were asked about their knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding this principle. It was found that the respondents know what intellectual freedom means and consider it highly important despite its challenges. Based on their responses, they are likely to express support for intellectual freedom but still exhibit some degree of censorship tendencies during selection. This study underscores the complexities LIS professionals face as they navigate the challenging terrain between their intellectual freedom advocacies and their roles as gatekeepers of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this dissertation is to measure the role of philosophy in contemporary society, and to express the urgency that it must be present in the Venezuelan educational system, without distinction of disciplines in order to achieve an interdisciplinary, holistic and comprehensive approach that can be related to different topics related to the modern/contemporary world. This research arises from the need to reflect on the importance of philosophy as a space of encounter, dialogue, confrontation of ideas and the emergence of critical thinking, leading to rational, fair and humane choices. It is about creating a legal and regulatory framework whose purpose is to promote and guarantee the exercise of philosophy by creating mechanisms to act, defend and function, protected by the national constitution and existing organizations established to guarantee freedom of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity are hotly debated topics in academia, marked by an increase in legislation focusing on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity within academic settings. This study explores the impact of Florida House Bill 233 on public universities, including academics' morale. House Bill 233 purports to support intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity through four components: prohibiting shielding of students, staff, and academics from certain speech; requiring an annual assessment on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity; creating a cause of action for certain video- or audio-recordings; and revising provisions related to protected expressive activity, university student governments, and codes of conduct. This study sampled 187 academics from four state universities. Findings indicate that while academics support intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity conceptually, most academics suggested the bill has negative impacts on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity and faculty morale. Implications for future research and policy development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatism, political equality, recognition, democracy, engaged scholarship Keywords: pragmatism; political equality; recognition; democracy; engaged scholarship EN pragmatism political equality recognition democracy engaged scholarship 872 876 5 10/03/23 20231001 NES 231001 Reading this set of responses to my work left me feeling profoundly awed and humbled, ready to settle into a deep silence. Chambers is right to say that in the U.S. our politics currently involves not only polarization but also radicalization. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines Shiv Kumar Batalvi's Luna and how it documents various shades of Punjabiyat with reference to memes and archetypes. Richard Dawkins postulated the idea of memes almost four decades ago. When Jungian archetypes are prefixed with memes, the flippant tone analogous to the latter as a genre disperses. Archetypes and memes are both cultural reflectors and informative models. By examining archetypal discourses in relation to contemporary ones, memes offer an opportunity to record the literary and cultural evolution of a society. In Luna, Shiv recounts the legend of a community that has been displaced, destabilized and yet gathered itself from the fragments of the past. Luna strives to reinstate the crushed individual from the communal periphery to designated positions. Shiv titles his work after the female protagonist and shifts the paradigm from Puran to Luna. The archetypal female voice becomes a figural meme for the congested territory womankind has been relegated to. Shiv helps Luna to spread her revolution and gradually the archetypal feminine voice mimics the voice of the Punjabi community articulating its suffering. The characters inhabiting the discursive space are archetypal memes of dreams, aspirations, and freedom of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored rates of publication of peer-reviewed articles on Intellectual Freedom between the years of 2008 and 2022 across three primary LIS-related databases: Library & Information Science Source, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (ISTA), and Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA). These databases were searched for the key phrase "Intellectual Freedom" and limited to peer-reviewed sources. A total of 681 articles were identified with 103 publishers and 267 authors contributing to that total. Regarding the nature of bibliometric analysis, the data suggests both Lotka's Law and Bradford's Law applied to this analysis identifying that the majority of authors only publish once on a given topic and that a disproportionate share of articles on a given topic are published in a few core journals. Given the rise of book bans and censorship within libraries across the United States, this study aimed to identify if there had also been a growth in research relating to Intellectual Freedom and identified a notable growth in articles starting in 2016 and continuing onward. While this study identified that there has been an increase in Intellectual Freedom within LIS-related literature, further research could help to better identify what exactly is being said regarding Intellectual Freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the challenges English teachers face in addressing censorship, particularly in the context of book challenges and red-flagging. Topics discussed include the impact of censorship on students' right to read, the fear it instills in educators, and practical actions teachers can take to promote intellectual freedom.

Background: Challenges to books are surging across the United States, and books that portray diverse human experiences are particularly targeted. Censorship has deleterious consequences, such as undermining children's intellectual freedom and influencing educators' book selections. In a climate of censorship, when educators face the realistic possibility of a challenge, diverse voices may be silenced, and real-world issues avoided. Despite the impact that book challenges have, the experiences of educators who have faced them are understudied. Purpose: This study investigates the self-reported experiences of seven educators who have been involved in book challenges within K–12 public schools within the United States. Its goal is to yield new insights about how educators perceive the experience of censorship and what resources they leverage as they defend children's right to read. It is significant because the lessons learned from these educators may be instructive for novice and veteran teachers and school librarians who are facing censorship—an increasingly likely possibility in contemporary times. It also highlights the range of forms that censorship takes within today's schools. Research Design: This research employs a collective case study design. Seven teachers and school librarians from K–12 public schools across the United States were interviewed about their experiences with book challenges and other forms of censorship. Interview transcripts were qualitatively analyzed using Pierre Bourdieu's types of cultural capital as a framework. Within-case and cross-case analyses are presented. Conclusions: Participants drew from various forms of cultural capital in their efforts to defend children's intellectual freedom, including their professional ethics, school policies, and institutional knowledge. The study emphasizes the importance of building cultural capital among pre- and in-service educators within university preparation and professional development programs. It also calls on professional groups within education and librarianship to take an organized stand against censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dissent has its own special place in art education. It has two stereotypical, polarized faces. The first is a classical institution modelled on Italian and French academies. As official places, they aimed at elevating art to the rank of science and making it an expression and instrument of power. The opposite image of the school is an oasis of intellectual freedom, a space for inventiveness, a place for applying unusual teaching methods and organizing the academic community. The most famous examples are avant-garde acctivities. This historical division is unreliable in fact. Dissent or even rebellion can be an instrument of morality and principles that could be followed. Quite unexpectedly, a peculiar anarchism can be found in the first art academy run by the Carracci. The name 'academy' popularized among the Italian humanists and Marsilio Ficinno, drew attention to the informal nature of scientific associations, opposing the fossilized formula of the university existing since the Middle Ages. It is surprising then that Joseph Beuys just created the Free International University. The very name of school and its understanding indicate a significant dichotomy not only in art education, but also in art theory. The point is not that the model of education has simply loosened over time. The above-mentioned facts reflect great disputes about the essence of art, about its relationship with science, everyday life, and practical application. An analysis of specific programs will allow us to see the sense of the mutual connections between rebellion and principles in modernizing artistic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent scholarship, a widely agreed upon definition of post-truth has proved elusive, particularly because the term is used in tandem with so-named alternative facts, fake news, misinformation, and references to an anti-expert, anti-intellectual climate. This paper will consider recent educators' efforts in the Australasian region to address the political and cultural disruption that post-truth has evoked, by inquiring into how their pedagogy mirrors or differs from that used in public spaces by protest movements. In the first section, scholarship on post-truth will be examined for how it constitutes a form of revisionist history, in which the present has been corrupted over time by comparison to a more idealised and distant past. The second section will focus on how theories about the construction of knowledge, such as Latour's notion of hybridised modernity and notions of historical consciousness, can be used to frame forms of activism as means to educate the public and disrupt the dominant political ideologies. The focus in the last section will be on examining how educators might enable learners' critical literacy so they can accommodate and overcome the negativity, cynicism, and disempowerment which characterises a post-truth paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the problems associated with the current state of intellectual freedom, particularly in relation to academic freedom and the impact of external factors such as political, economic, and military goals. It explores the need for a more comprehensive understanding of intellectual freedom and the application of human rationality in evaluating and solving societal problems. It also discusses the challenges posed by the "project era".

The article discusses the role of young adult literature authors in the conversation about censorship. It highlights the importance of authors speaking out against censorship, the changing landscape of censorship tactics, and suggests new tactics for reframing the conversation about diverse literature, such as having policies in place, focusing on craft and content, and treating all books equally.

For nearly three years the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) has been accused as a "purveyor of pornography" for its cooperative purchasing services – licensing resources from EBSCO, Gale/Cengage, ProQuest and OverDrive – saving money on behalf of libraries and schools across the state. In October 2018 a lawsuit was filed against EBSCO and CLiC by the parents of a student who claimed that their middle-school-aged child was able to access ,"hardcore porn" through the school district's database subscription. This first–person account details how the controversy began and evolved into a full–scale crusade to ban digital content in Colorado's schools and public libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although exclusive common pool resource management regimes have locally been applied since time immemorial in many coastal and fjord areas, in the legal conceptualization of space, the oceans and their living resources were traditionally treated as a "global commons." The idea of restricting access to coastal oceanic resources and delegating their governance to state instruments has become increasingly popular since the middle of the previous century when political economy models predicted the eventual overexploitation or degradation of all resources used in common. While state jurisdictions overall continue to preserve the idea of common access to marine living resources for a state's people, the rapid privatization of marine living resources and the subsequent development of aquaculture over the last few decades, often confront this understanding, leading to enclosure of a delineated maritime area that was initially intended to be accessible to the public. Enclosing the sea for the purpose of aquaculture development leads to a semantic change in property institutions that govern coastal areas and provides for a form of enclosure of the commons in key locations designated for marine aquaculture development. This article explores the concept of "ocean commons" and debates how the enclosure of common areas for the purposes of aquaculture development may collide with Indigenous and local conceptions of common pool resource management. The article applies this theoretical investigation on two examples from Canada and Norway, and suggests that rethinking aquaculture development in coastal waters through the lens of "ocean commons" may provide a guiding ethos for revisiting current approaches of access to the sea and ensuring the harmonious coexistence between aquaculture development and local/Indigenous traditional activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous investigations have examined anchoring effects, but most of them studied individuals from similar cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Replication studies have shown that anchoring heuristics have heterogeneous effects across different cultural groups. In the present investigation, we examined this heterogeneity by looking for associations between effect size and cultural values orientation. We conducted pre‐registered meta‐analyses of four anchoring tasks, using open data provided by previous works and collected from 6,344 participants in 10 countries. The analyses confirmed that anchoring effects display strong heterogeneity between cultures. Moreover, specific cultural values orientations explained substantial amounts of variability in anchoring effect sizes between cultures: Intellectual Autonomy and Egalitarianism were negatively correlated with anchoring effect size, as we had expected. Surprisingly, Harmony was also negatively correlated with anchoring effect size, whereas Mastery had a positive association. These results suggest that cultural differences can play an important role in observed anchoring effect size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 1769, William Falconer (1732-70), then a purser with the Royal Navy, boarded the I Aurora i accompanied by a group of East India Company commissioners. Janet Sorensen's essay, "Of Reef Tackles and Halyards: "Marine Language" and the Technologies of Immediacy in William Falconer's I The Shipwreck i ", examines Falconer's linguistic and stylistic strategies to bring a sense of immediacy to a narrative that occurs at a great physical - and experiential - distance from its reader. Moving between meditations upon the ruins of previous empires and the technically specific depiction of the sailors' efforts to prevent their own destruction, Falconer's poem ennobles the work of the sailors. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the trend of library and information technology (IT) mergers in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the United States. It highlights the challenges and failures of these mergers, including the negative impact on librarians and the dissolution of merged departments after the departure of the chief information officer (CIO). The article questions the reasons behind these mergers and criticizes the negative portrayal of librarians in a 1996 article that influenced the perception of the profession. It emphasizes the advancements and contributions of librarians in managing technology, promoting diversity and inclusion, and defending intellectual freedom. The article concludes with a call to support and defend libraries and librarians in the face of current threats and challenges. [Extracted from the article]

Book challenges have a profound impact on communities, but what about the effect these challenges have on librarians? Our pragmatic hybrid approach based on narrative and grounded theory documents librarian perspectives and forms the basis for a broader future investigation of how intellectual freedom work impacts librarians. Interviews with five Missouri public librarians derived from a purposive sample were conducted and addressed through open and axial coding processes. The results include a code book with six major themes and 59 individual child codes, as well as a collection of compelling narratives. The negative impact intellectual freedom challenges have on public librarians is clear. Participants underscore their commitment to the ethics and norms of professional librarianship, but also emphasize the need for more timely support from national organizations and local political structures and the importance of educating governing bodies on the centrality of intellectual freedom to the mission of libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers' capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers' intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanism is one of the contemporary ideas that affect Western thinking with its various orientations. Humanism has appeared as reactions against the dominance of Christian Church over social and scientific life. Humanism so soon took on an anti-religious situation. However, modern humanism has general principles that may not openly announce hostility to religion, but it does have hostility towards religion by rejecting the religious teachings, being satisfied only with human sciences and establishing ethical foundations that do not depend on religion. Humanism has founded a worldview, in which man would be the axis of everything, and that God would have nothing to do with man's life, saying that religious beliefs have no influence on life; and so, religion is of no importance to man. Therefore, religious and irreligious people are the same according to the humanistic thought. Although the religious thought believes that God is the axis of everything and that man is not but a slave (to God) who should manage his life according to the divine orders; it gives too much regard to man's capabilities and role in life, but to limit man's ability and life to the material side. Religious thought says that the loss of morality leads to a savage life full of fighting and aggression over transient pleasures. The study follows the descriptive, analytical approach in showing humanism, and the analytical-critical approach to criticize the principles of humanism and their consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Intellectual Rights in the Qurʾan is a necessary extension of its respect for the value of human beings. It is regarded as an instrument with the primary purpose to guide one to happiness in this world and the Hereafter. Based on the belief that Islam is a religion applicable to all in every circumstance, we selected Sample of Qurʾanic verses to illustrate how Islam perceives and defends intellectual Rights. The study aims to clarify the types of intellectual rights that Qurʾan granted to humans and to be a direct response to those who perceive Islam as a religion of repression, inertia, and hyperbole. The author notes that the freedoms admitted in the Qurʾan are not absolute, but constrained by methodological and moral principles, taking into consideration the interests of the individual and the community while also avoiding extremism and negligence. The study's comparison between the freedoms granted by the Qurʾan to Intellectual Rights and such as exist in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is based on rational standards, and not only on religious texts. This is achieved by identifying the theoretical and practical applications of the freedom of Intellectual Rights in the Qurʾan and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and their implications. The study found that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights failed to achieve human dignity and preserve communities' rights and freedoms due to its insistence of the absolute freedom of thought, belief, and expression. Such freedoms were not subject to controls and were not provided with direction. The theoretical grounds upon which these freedoms were articulated were flawed leading to gross abuses in practical reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]