With the fall election season gearing up across North America, it seemed that the staff of the Calgary (Alberta) Public Library was doing its part to get out the vote when the Canadian Broadcasting Company reported August 25 that the library had launched a “Don’t Be an Idiot” PR campaign to promote its upcoming mayoral-candidate forums and political resources.
The need in Ethiopia is great but the vision and perseverance of Yohannes Gebregeorgis is greater, which helps explain why a new library worthy of any developed country opened August 20 in Mekele, the first of its kind in this small and grindingly poor city. The Segenat Children and Youth Library in the region of Tigray is located in a sturdy, free-standing building donated by the municipal authorities. It’s fully loaded with some 10,000 books and a computer room with 10 workstations; two e-book readers and 8,000 more books are on the way.
With library budget woes continuing unabated in many parts of the nation, three public library systems found themselves in role-reversing showdowns with municipal officials this summer. Ironically, two libraries—those in Trenton, New Jersey, and Wheaton, Illinois—were forced to fight in favor of sharply reduced services in order to balance their budgets while city leaders ordered the libraries to maintain the status quo.
Mashup artists, smartphone users, academics, and people who are visually impaired are all winners, thanks to the latest exceptions made by the Librarian of Congress to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Since its enactment in 1998, the impact of the DMCA on fair use of digitized materials has been subject to review every three years by the Librarian of Congress, who is administrative head of the U.S. Copyright Office, in consultation with LC’s Register of Copyrights.
The much-hyped OCLC Web-scale Management Services (WMS) moved from pilot phase to production last month with the release of acquisitions and circulation components to around 30 early adopters.
Within four days of the Camden (N.J.) Free Public Library board voting August 5 to shutter the entire three-branch system and empty the facilities of their collections and equipment by the end of December, Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd announced that she is in talks with the county to have the city libraries absorbed into the county library system. “After learning that the library board’s only solution was to close our libraries, I knew I could not let that happen,” Mayor Redd said at an August 9 press conference, according to a report from KYW News Radio–Camden.
Some six months after Burlington County, New Jersey, resident Beverly Martinelli appeared before the Rancocas Valley Regional High School Board of Education seeking the removal of Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology from the school library collection, a Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that the Burlington County (N.J.) Library System has removed the book at Martinelli’s informal request—and indeed may have done so several weeks before the s
Despite the continued economic downturn, at least three significant construction projects in Virginia are continuing as originially proposed.
Plans for a new main library in are “on schedule,” Norfolk (Va.) Public Library Director Norman Maas told American Libraries July 13. “We hope to have the new building open in the next 36 months, and another year of renovation to follow on the original historic library structure.”
ProQuest unveiled plans at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., to roll out a completely redesigned platform this summer. The ground-up redesign promises to unify all ProQuest content into a single framework, while also connecting users to non-ProQuest databases through ProQuest Extended Search, and adding infrastructure to aid users in gathering, sharing, and creating content in ways not possible with its current platform.
Several nonprofits in San Joaquin County, California, are sounding the alarm as the county board of supervisors considers the privatization of the management of Stockton–San Joaquin County Public Library (SSJCPL).
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Look, I would suggest you go from here directly to the library. Get a copy of the Bill of Rights and you’ll realize that everybody has a right to say what they want to say.
—New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, responding to a journalist asking why he supports the construction of an Islamic center several blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan, “The Mayor, the Mosque, and Public Response,” New York Times: City Room Blog, August 18, 2010.
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