“Writing Women Back into History” is the theme for National Women’s History Month, March 2010, the annual celebration of women in the United States. For years women’s contributions were routinely underestimated or ignored even in the history of our own profession. While this still remains the case for much of history, the second wave of … Continue reading How to Celebrate Women’s History @ Your Library
Nobel Prize and Oscar winner, former vice president and, in his own words, the man who “used to be the next president of the United States,” Al Gore delivered the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture January 16 at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting in Boston. His message: The environmental threat facing the planet as a … Continue reading Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore on the Environment and the Eternal Role of Libraries
Avid library patrons will be able to journey through distant galaxies and accompany space-walking astronauts as they attempt the most difficult tasks in history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), thanks to a new partnership between IMAX and the American Library Association. Through April 30, ALA’s public awareness website, atyourlibrary.org, will host “Explore … Continue reading IMAX Offers Library Patrons Seats to Hubble 3D Movie
Cornell University Library has introduced a voluntary, collaborative business model to support arXiv, its free online repository of nearly 600,000 research articles in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science, and related disciplines. It will remain free to submit or download articles, but Cornell is now asking the 200 institutions that download most from the repository to … Continue reading Cornell Seeks Sustainable arXiv Support
The greatest challenge to library organizations is to continuously adapt in an ever-changing, ever-more-complex environment. Library leaders need to direct the continuous redevelopment of libraries. The ability to tackle this and other institutional challenges effectively is fundamental to the success of leaders and the survival of libraries. One way to achieve this is through the … Continue reading Coaching in the Library
At Miami University’s regional campuses in Hamilton and Middletown, Ohio, we have also encountered “the textbook phenomenon” described by Bonnie Imler. However, our response to students’ confusion about the roles of the library and the bookstore has been quite different from Imler’s. Our reaction to the oft-repeated axiom that “libraries don’t purchase course textbooks” was … Continue reading The Case for Textbooks
After nearly 30 years at Booklist, the greatest pleasure of my job continues to be discovering a new writer before the rest of the world and watching a career develop over time. One of my most satisfying discoveries has been Erin Hart, a Minneapolis writer whose third novel, False Mermaid, is published this month. Like … Continue reading Discoveries
Library catalogs have evolved over time as technology has changed. The last 150 years have seen a progression from book catalogs to cards, and eventually, to online catalogs. Each of these changes has provided new capabilities that can be adopted for improved user services. The next step in this evolution is on the horizon, and … Continue reading Cataloging Horizons
Apple's announcement of the iPad tablet computer drew ample attention from the technology world. As Martin Peers wrote in the Wall Street Journal December 30: "Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it." But will that buzz translate into applications for libraries? At the January 27 introduction, … Continue reading Apple’s iPad Introduction Met with Excitement, Derision
The roots of National Women's History Month go back to “Women’s History Week,” first celebrated in Sonoma County, California, in 1978. This public celebration was scheduled around March 8, International Women’s Day, long celebrated in socialist countries, but not in the U.S. despite the fact that the first International Women’s Day was held in the … Continue reading A History of Women’s History Month
New social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter enable librarians to converse, communicate, and collaborate with patrons as never before, because they are increasingly a part of people’s everyday lives. A brochure that describes your library with a few pictures is great, but a video tour that people can watch on your website or … Continue reading 10 Technology Ideas Your Library Can Implement Next Week
Bill Mayer imagines a library without librarians. The way he sees it, his campus is filled with activity and he wants his librarians to be a part of the action. “Their role isn’t to simply go out and generate more visibility” he explains, “but to become more involved with everything that is going on around … Continue reading Change at American University
