Information overload is nothing new. First there were all those clay tablets, then the manuscripts, then what philosopher/librarian Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) referred to as “that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing.” In Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Ann M. Blair explores how the flood of information was … Continue reading Premodern Information Overload
Although it seems that the question of whether librarianship is a profession might have been settled when Melvil Dewey declared it to be one back in 1876 (the same year the American Library Association was formed), the debate goes on. In The MLS Project: An Assessment after Sixty Years, Boyd Keith Swigger enters the conversation, … Continue reading The MLS Project
METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council) has gathered 30 case studies for Digitization in the Real World: Lessons Learned from Small and Medium-Sized Digitization Projects. Examples range from the Chelsea (Mich.) Library District’s collection of 15,000 obituaries, created using volunteers and open source software, to Hudson River Valley Heritage, a collaborative project coordinated by the … Continue reading Digitization for the Rest of Us
When she was researching her first book, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (2006), Marilyn Johnson decided that “the most engaging obit subjects were librarians,” especially since so many of their obituaries contained some form of the sentence: “Under her watch, the library changed from a collection of … Continue reading Outside In
Intellectual freedom is one of our bedrock values, and as the intellectual freedom issues and challenges libraries face are always evolving, so must the profession’s response. The eighth edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual offers, among other updated material, three “new Interpretations” of the Library Bill of Rights; 10 revised Interpretations; resolutions on the retention … Continue reading New from ALA: September 2010
I spend a week in Door County, Wisconsin, every summer and so was interested to open Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America and find out it is based on events in Door County in the 1950s. A regional library consisting of seven existing libraries and two new bookmobiles was … Continue reading Regional Reading Places
The next time you find yourself in Canton, Ohio, make a stop at the National First Ladies’ Library, home of the Abigail Fillmore Library Room. This room replicates the first permanent White House library, established by Millard and Abigail Fillmore in 1850. Although the library remained mostly intact for more than 50 years, just a … Continue reading The First First Library
In the first edition of Developing an Outstanding Core Collection Carol Alabaster outlined her principles of adult core collections, based on her work at Phoenix Public Library. In the second, she revisits those principles to make sure they are still valid (they are) and also addresses the technological changes that have occurred since the first … Continue reading New from ALA
There are plenty of books on readers’ advisory service for adults, and in 2007 Heather Booth gave us Serving Teens through Readers’ Advisory (ALA Editions). Now comes Readers’ Advisory for Children and ‘Tweens. Service to this group requires special skills, author Penny Peck asserts. She describes some of the issues, including censorship challenges, before exploring … Continue reading Advising Tweens
Laura Bush became a librarian for the same reason many of us did—she loved books. In case you were wondering, and in case you haven’t read her autobiography, Spoken from the Heart, she does have a library science degree (from the University of Texas) and she did work as a librarian, first at a branch … Continue reading A Friend in the White House
Readers’ Advisory mavens Jessica E. Moyer and Kaite Mediatore Stover tapped the expertise of some fellow enthusiasts, and The Reader’s Advisory Handbook is the result. Sarah Statz Cords offers advice on adding nonfiction to the readers’ advisory equation, David Wright covers adult storytime, and Heather Booth discusses expanding readers’ advisory service to young adults. These … Continue reading New from ALA
Espionage and library science seem an odd mix, but it’s certain, according to Rosalee McReynolds and Louise S. Robbins, that Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, who were called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950, were spies. As related in The Librarian Spies: Philip and Mary Jane Keeney and Cold War … Continue reading Librarian Spies
