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
Over the years, librarians and researchers have studied the usage of books, journals, meeting rooms, photocopiers, programs, and just about any other resource or service libraries have chosen to provide. The reasons for doing so are simple: Librarians wish to provide their communities with resources and services of the highest utility, effectively foreseeing which materials … Continue reading Measuring E-Resource Use: Standards and Practice for Counting Remote Users
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 … Continue reading New Youth Library in Ethiopia Makes Impossible Dream Reality
Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School professor and founder of Harvard Law’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, serves as one of several celebrity honorary co-chairs of the American Library Association’s Spectrum Presidential Initiative, an effort to raise $1 million in scholarships for minority students pursuing a master’s degreee in library and information science. … Continue reading Charles Ogletree on Race, Reading, and the Presumption of Guilt
Last time, I discussed QR codes and how they can link you to content that provides further information about an object. But what if you didn’t have to put barcodes all over everything you wanted people to scan? What if all it took to get that content was to walk up to an item or … Continue reading Your Reality, Augmented
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 … Continue reading City Officials Fight Library Backers in Trenton, Suburban Chicago
We strive to provide great customer service, yet few of us actually use the “C” word. We have many names—patron, borrower, user, reader—but “customer” remains controversial and typically we avoid it. Not so at Howard County Library, located in the Baltimore suburbs. At HCL, they embrace the term, feeling that it accurately conveys the relationships … Continue reading The Customer’s Always Right
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 … Continue reading LC Unlocks Doors for Creators, Consumers with DMCA Exceptions
“Our Authors, Our Advocates” was launched at my Inaugural Banquet during Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., in June. I was deeply honored to have as my special guests four wonderful authors who spoke so eloquently. They were, by turns, funny, passionate, compelling, and thoughtful, and they illustrated how authors can partner with us to advocate … Continue reading In Their Own Words
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. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has posted an ambitious timeline that would make it the first institution to go live with the product on August 30; … Continue reading OCLC’s Web-scale Management Services Released to 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 … Continue reading Camden City Libraries May be Rescued by the County System
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
