Town officials in Enfield, Connecticut, have been accused in the court of public opinion of censoring the public library by forcing the library director to postpone indefinitely the January 21 screening of the Michael Moore film Sicko. Ironically, the controversy over the exposé of the American healthcare industry began two days before the U.S. House … Continue reading Observers Sickened by Connecticut’s Sicko Controversy
In what looks very much like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández recently visited American Library Association Headquarters in Chicago, accompanied by First Lady Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, to talk with ALA staff about libraries. Fernández spoke passionately, but pragmatically, about his plans for developing a superior public library system … Continue reading Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez on Libraries
“The Detroit Public Library is in the midst of a fiscal crisis that is unprecedented in magnitude and is likely to continue beyond this fiscal year,” DPL Executive Director Jo Anne Mondowney said in a January 18 memo to all employees. The erosion of funding will result in a drastic reduction in personnel and other … Continue reading Detroit Faces Unprecedented Fiscal Crisis; Workforce Reduction Inevitable
The war was over, soldiers were returning to civilian life, and governments were beginning to rebuild. Beneath the euphoria, though, the Cold War was gathering steam, and a peculiar mood–a mix of relief, ennui, and alienation–was taking hold in the minds of survivors. Out of this cauldron of emotions came film noir, which critic Nicholas … Continue reading 1946
The promise of a fresh start is part and parcel of the beginning of a new year, particularly when hardship has darkened your door in the year just past. Although no one in the library community realistically expected their institution’s fiscal standing to magically move from strapped to solvent, a new study conducted by the … Continue reading Spread the Word: There’s New Evidence of Libraries’ ROI
Just a few years out of Harvard, Avi Steinberg left his job writing obituaries for the Boston Globe and applied for a position as a prison librarian, even though he was not a librarian and had never been inside a prison. As he tells it in Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison … Continue reading The Accidental Prison Librarian
When I first received my library degree, I religiously kept up with blogs and journals in my areas of professional interest. I’d read blogs through an RSS reader—in my case, Google Reader—and I’d try to remember to read the journals I was most interested in when they came out. Now, as the mother of a … Continue reading Keeping Up, 2.0 Style
Over the past few months, I have been contacted by a variety of media. Quite a few of my interviews with them were about the privatization of libraries. Interest in this subject was initiated by LSSI, a private-sector firm with contracts in place to manage the operations of nearly 70 public library branches, whose president … Continue reading Outsourcing: Turning a Negative into a Positive
Just months after rolling out its newly redesigned search and discovery platform, ProQuest announced January 6 that it has acquired e-book pioneer ebrary, setting the stage for the company’s plans to offer greater depth of access to content from a growing variety of sources and media types. The agreement adds a pool of a quarter-million … Continue reading ProQuest Acquires ebrary
I have just entered the seventh decade of my journey through life and I have yet to encounter a true “morning person.” Maybe they exist. Maybe they are those people you see jogging at 5:30 a.m. on those atypical days when you have to rise extra early to catch an early morning flight. My guess … Continue reading Your Morning Metaphor
Just in time for the switch from AACR2 to the new RDA (Resource Description and Access) standard designed specifically for the digital environment comes Chris Oliver’s Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics. Readers looking for a how-to will need to look elsewhere, but this book provides a useful overview on RDA, its alignment with … Continue reading New from ALA
