Archives

Patrons: Your New Partners in Collection Development

By Suzanne M. Ward | April 30, 2014

Librarians have always welcomed users’ suggestions for titles to add to the collection. When those titles meet the guidelines on subject matter, format, and price, librarians are happy to buy patron-suggested material. Some libraries even offer suggestion forms on their website. However, in the same way that many librarians have moved away from title-by-title selection … Continue reading Patrons: Your New Partners in Collection Development →

Going Beyond Google Again

By Jane Devine and Francine Egger-Sider | April 28, 2014

It seems unlikely that people will give up their reliance on general-purpose search engines or their practice of beginning a search using Google or one of its competitors. But people should be encouraged to use other research tools when needed, such as databases and more specialized search engines—otherwise known as the Invisible Web. What makes … Continue reading Going Beyond Google Again →

Asking the Right Questions

By Meredith Farkas | April 23, 2014

Way back when, a library I worked at had a standard survey we gave to every student at the end of an instruction session. It included a bunch of Likert scale questions like “How satisfied were you with the session?” and “How useful was the session?” We dutifully collected the surveys and someone went through … Continue reading Asking the Right Questions →

Fired Up for Retirement

By Will Manley | April 21, 2014

Above all, every library director with a standard seven-member board of trustees knows one fact of life: the rule of four. It takes only four votes to get you fired. If you’re unlucky, your board has only five members. Things can get very dicey when it takes only three votes to get you fired. So … Continue reading Fired Up for Retirement →

Newsmaker: Judy Blume

By Claire Bushey | April 15, 2014

I know you’re not supposed to ask this of writers, but how’s the current book going? Slowly! It’s never good for me to stop and start, and with this book I’ve had to do that several times. Two years off to write and produce the Tiger Eyes movie. Months away from it for other reasons. But … Continue reading Newsmaker: Judy Blume →

Leading from All Sides

By Joseph Janes | April 8, 2014

I’m in a meeting as I write this. (It happens; don’t tell anybody I work with, okay?) Don’t get the wrong idea … all of our meetings are vital and gripping, and everybody looks forward to them. Just like yours, right? In all seriousness, though, as I sit here, I’m struck by the various roles … Continue reading Leading from All Sides →

Emerging Leaders

By Phil Morehart | April 2, 2014

These are the American Library Association’s Emerging Leaders of 2014. Initiated in 1997 as a one-year program under former ALA President Mary R. Somerville and revived in 2006 under former ALA President Leslie Burger, the Emerging Leaders program recognizes the best and brightest new leaders in our industry. It’s open to librarians under 35 years … Continue reading Emerging Leaders →

Reading Wildly

By Abby Johnson | March 31, 2014

Can you provide excellent readers’ advisory without reading widely yourself? This question, posed to my Twitter followers (whose replies shared a refrain of “No way”), led me to rethink the way I train my staff on readers’ advisory. Of course there are ways to become familiar with books without actually reading entire works—reviews, first chapters, reliance on … Continue reading Reading Wildly →

Melvil Dewey, Compulsive Innovator

By Joshua Kendall | March 24, 2014

This native of New York State’s burned-over district never could stop thinking about the number 10. As an adolescent, Dewey fell hard for the metric system, whose “great superiority,” as he wrote in a high school essay, “over all others consists in the fact that all its scales are purely decimal.” Considering 10 a magic … Continue reading Melvil Dewey, Compulsive Innovator →

The More We Change

By Karen Muller | March 18, 2014

In 1887, the Newberry Library in Chicago opened its doors as a public research library, with ALA charter member William Frederick Poole at the helm. The Newberry 125: Stories of Our Collection highlights 125 objects in the collection. The array of objects—from beautiful illuminated medieval manuscript Psalters to Thomas Bewick print blocks to a photograph … Continue reading The More We Change →

Meet the 2014 Candidates for ALA President

March 17, 2014

Maggie Farrell maggiefarrell.com As I neared completion of my library science degree, a professor of mine, Ed Miller, encouraged my class to join the American Library Association. He spoke about the importance of ALA in advancing our professional values of intellectual freedom, privacy, and inclusion. As a member, I have benefited from ALA’s strong advocacy … Continue reading Meet the 2014 Candidates for ALA President →

One Product, Many Users

By John G. Dove | March 11, 2014

Terry Winograd, professor of computer science at Stanford University, is one of the top leaders in human-computer interaction. For a dozen years, he has collaborated with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the D School) at Stanford University to present a course on the design of computer- and telecommunication-based applications. All of its courses are … Continue reading One Product, Many Users →

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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