Huber founded the management consulting firm of J. Huber and Associates in 1986, and Potter is library director and CEO of Mid-Continent Public Library in Independence, Missouri. An excerpt from their book was published in the July/August issue of American Libraries. What made you want to write this book? HUBER: Libraries are under pressure to … Continue reading A Conversation with Authors John Huber and Steven Potter
You grew up in the inner city of Detroit. How did you discover literature? My mother was and is an extremely literate woman who read voraciously, and I picked up that habit from her. My Sunday school teachers encouraged literacy by recitation of set pieces in Sunday school. My 5th-grade teacher, Mrs. James, really jump-started … Continue reading Newsmaker: Michael Eric Dyson
What made you want to write this book? Well, frankly, I didn’t want to write it—I wanted to read it! I wanted to pick up something in writing that I could point to and say, “Yes! Here are some real answers to the daily issues we keep bemoaning, such as how to entice nonusers, how … Continue reading A Conversation with Author Debra J. Knoll
“We were both trying to instill a volunteer culture in an environment that didn’t have that culture,” says Gorman, assistant dean for special collections and university archives. “[Yet] there were people in the community who were very educated, highly motivated, with a range of skills I could leverage.” Along with Smith—a photographs, artifacts, and textiles … Continue reading Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers
“In the library sector, we always want to make sure that we are addressing the needs and interests of those who we serve in our communities, and in most of our communities, the older adult population has increased,” says Fatima Perkins, director of community outreach and advocacy at the Western Reserve Area Agency on Aging … Continue reading An Aging Population Reshapes Library Services
“It’s a very depressed area economically,” Gromalski says of Mahanoy City. “The coal region, which is made up of small towns, used to be booming. Now the mining industry has been gone for several decades, older people are getting older [and] younger people are moving away because there are no jobs.” To re-create pride in … Continue reading Community Reporting
A few days ago brought a minor news item describing refinements Google has made to the process to request the removal of links in search results that are “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant,” popularly known as the “right to be forgotten,” in response to a 2014 ruling by the European Court of Justice. Ever … Continue reading Forget Me Not
The statistics are disturbing: San Diego is one of the 13 highest child sex trafficking areas in the nation, according to the FBI. And the city’s sex trafficking industry—estimated at $810 million—is the second largest underground economy after the drug trade. But San Diego Public Library (SDPL) Director Misty Jones and her staff want to … Continue reading Out of the Shadows
What made you want to write this book? Library weeding has always been something I enjoy—and that I’ve had lots of experience with—so when I came to Booklist, I started writing a series of online columns called Weeding Tips. The response to it was huge, so turning those columns into a book seemed like a … Continue reading A Conversation with Author Rebecca Vnuk
As all doctoral candidates know, dissertations are rites of passage that facilitate a student’s transition into independent scholar, and to earn this passage, he or she must make an original contribution to the knowledge of the field. Sadly, dissertations are often overlooked as a source of information within our profession. While the topics vary, these … Continue reading Notable Dissertations 2016
Indeed he did. A lot of names were circulating, of people who would be great and a few that made my hair stand on end. Mercifully, we don’t have to contemplate a future with a Librarian of Congress with just a background in business or technology—though as director of a major urban public library, Hayden … Continue reading One of Us
What made you want to write this book? I spend a lot of time scanning the library environment to identify new directions in library services that I can use at my library. Over time I started to notice that truly new ideas popped up occasionally in the library world but that, as a profession, we … Continue reading A Conversation with Author Elisabeth Doucett
