ALA's Finest Moments Archives | American Libraries Magazine

“Baseless Hysteria”?

By Wayne A. Wiegand | May 31, 2016

Section 215, which became known as the “library records provision,” not only allowed law enforcement agencies to secretly monitor electronic communications emanating from libraries, it also required librarians to turn over patron information if requested and even imposed a gag order on those forced to comply, thus preventing them from telling anyone. ALA opposition to … Continue reading “Baseless Hysteria”? →

ALA's first permanent headquarters at 50 East Huron Street opened in 1963.

The Saga of Huron Plaza

By Wayne A. Wiegand | May 5, 2016

ALA hoped to add 25,000 square feet of office space by taking title to the ground and six floors in the new building, then lease three of those six floors to offset expenses for furnishing and finishing the new space and renovating 50 East Huron Street. Many doubted the wisdom of the move. That ALA … Continue reading The Saga of Huron Plaza →

National Library Week

By Wayne A. Wiegand | April 13, 2016

By any measure, the event was a huge success: Some 68 million subscribers to 22 national magazines could read well-placed articles about libraries. A total of 170 million homes served by radio and TV could hear or view 14 network programs on libraries. Readers could glean 11,607 stories celebrating libraries running in newspapers at the … Continue reading National Library Week →

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey at the Dartmouth College commencement, June 14, 1953. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library

The Freedom to Read

By Wayne A. Wiegand | March 15, 2016

Eisenhower’s words shocked many because they constituted his first public challenge to McCarthyism—an ethos enveloping the country at the time and fed by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who inferred communist conspiracies everywhere in American culture, including books on the shelves of 194 information libraries that the US State Department operated in 61 foreign countries. Like-minded … Continue reading The Freedom to Read →

ALA officials stand in front of the Hall of Congresses at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904: (left to right) ALA President-Elect Ernest Cushing Richardson, former ALA President Reuben Gold Thwaites, and ALA President Herbert Putnam. Richardson wears one of the white buttons that identifies him as an ALA conference attendee. Credit: ALA Archives

Meet Me in St. Louis

By George M. Eberhart | February 19, 2016

Imagine a conference where, after listening to a “characteristic address” by Melvil Dewey—“full of the enthusiasm of invention and the ardor of prophecy, which never fails to kindle a responsive spark in his audience”—you venture out to ride on the biggest Ferris Wheel in the world, eat some new-fangled ice cream cones, watch Alexander Graham … Continue reading Meet Me in St. Louis →

First page of War Libraries: Official Organ of the War Service Committee, American Library Association, 1918.

The Library War Service

By Wayne A. Wiegand | February 18, 2016

The ALA established its Library War Service in 1917 to provide books and library services to US soldiers and sailors both in training at home and serving in Europe. This second book drive in early 1918 generated 3 million books, many going overseas, others ending up on the shelves of 36 training-camp libraries erected through … Continue reading The Library War Service →

Card from the first American Library Association conference in Philadelphia, October 4-6, 1876, possibly showing the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Present at the Creation

By Wayne A. Wiegand | January 29, 2016

The forces that brought them together were diverse. In 1875, US Commissioner of Education John Eaton was looking for a venue to announce a Special Report on Public Libraries he planned to publish the next year. On July 2, he asked Boston Public Library Director Justin Winsor about a library conference. (We don’t know whether … Continue reading Present at the Creation →

Latest Library Links

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Genevieve Trainor writes: “The Guinness World Record holder for Most Prolific Book Thief is Ottumwa (Iowa’s) Stephen Blumberg. The 23,600 volumes he accumulated between the 1970s and his arrest in March of 1990 were all stashed in his 17-room home. Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, got involved with Blumberg as part of the FBI’s efforts to return the stolen manuscripts and rare books to their museums and libraries. Referred to as the Omaha Project, the information science proving ground involved four weeks, 44 catalogers and reference librarians and 600 volunteer hours to determine who might be the rightful owners.”

Little Village (Dubuque, Iowa), Dec. 4
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Casey Newton writes: “At the moment, no one knows for sure whether the large language models that are now under development will achieve superintelligence and transform the world. And in that uncertainty, two primary camps of criticism have emerged. The first camp, which I associate with the external critics, holds that artificial intelligence (AI) is fake and sucks. The second camp, which I associate more with the internal critics, believes that AI is real and dangerous. Today I want to lay out why I believe AI is real and dangerous.”

Platformer, Dec. 5
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Latia Ward writes: “One way to keep current with what students think of the library and its services is through Student Library Advisory Committee meetings. These meetings are a way to gather feedback and reinforce the library as a welcoming place. How do librarians create a welcoming environment within Student Library Advisory Committee meetings? Librarians create a welcoming environment through community, purpose, and dedicated space.” Also see part 1 of this blog post.

RIPS Law Librarian Blog, Nov. 13, Dec. 5
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Eleanor Hecks writes: “Few things are as frustrating to a user as when a site won’t respond. Unfortunately, it’s also an all-too-common scenario. Graceful degradation is a design approach that ensures the basics of a website will still function even if specific individual parts of it stop working. The approach removes single points of failure: just because one thing stops working doesn’t mean the system as a whole fails. A site following this principle fails in pieces instead of all at once, so the most important features remain available when some components encounter an error.”

Smashing Magazine, Dec. 6
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Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

WVLT-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.), Dec. 4
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Joe Foley writes: “Copyright rules vary from country to country and have changed over time. In the US, works created between 1929 and 1963 that gave notice and renewed copyright have 95 years from their first publication date. That means that on January 1, 2025, a host of works from 1929 will enter the public domain. This means that copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster’s first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye.” Other notable works entering public domain in the United States include the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, contralto Marian Anderson’s first record, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Creative Bloq, Dec. 7; Everybody’s Libraries, Dec. 3, Dec. 7; Public Domain Review, Dec. 10
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Brittany Adams writes: “The digital landscape of libraries is expanding rapidly, with an increasing shift towards electronic resources and online services. As members of the library community, we’re witnessing a transformative era where physical collections are complemented—and sometimes replaced—by digital ones. This transition offers new opportunities for enhancing accessibility and engagement, but it also presents challenges, especially for young patrons and their families. It is essential to equip children and their caregivers with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate this evolving space confidently.”

ALSC Blog, Dec. 9

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