November/December 2014

Features & Trends

Making the Most of Midwinter

By Mariam Pera

Staying up to date Experts will give the latest updates on policy, research, statistics, technology, and more in the News You Can Use sessions. Sponsors include ALA divisions and offices, the ALA Digital Content and Libraries Working Group, and high-profile external organizations. Hear your colleagues describe the latest in-house innovations at the ALA Masters Series. … Continue reading Making the Most of Midwinter →

A girl reads to Minnie from K9 Reading Buddies of the North Shore.

Dog Therapy 101

By Timothy Inklebarger

“I started pitching it at the school, and my principal was absolutely against it,” Weibling tells American Libraries. The former 3rd-grade teacher, who was then working toward her master’s degree in library science, was eager to find new ways to get students excited about reading and comprehension. “Reading therapy dog programs weren’t common knowledge to … Continue reading Dog Therapy 101 →

Reading on the Inside

By Megan Cottrell

The question startled librarian Dan Marcou. He had been sitting quietly at a small town library outside of the system where he works, waiting for his wife to finish some grad school research. When he looked up, he didn’t recognize the face immediately, a man holding the hand of a young boy. “Do you remember … Continue reading Reading on the Inside →

Rolling the Dice in an Academic Library
by Jayne Blodgett and Peter Bremer
Newsmaker: Ursula K. Le Guin
By Claire Bushey
A Home to the Homeless
By Ellyn Ruhlmann
District Library Supervisors Under Duress
By Maria R. Traska
Ferguson’s Safe Haven
By Timothy Inklebarger
Promoting Access for Blind and Visually Impaired Patrons
By Mike L. Marlin
A Novel in 30 Days
By Phil Morehart
Bookend: National Pastime

Columnists

Digital Media Labs
by Amanda L. Goodman
Drawing the Line on Data
By Meredith Farkas
Who Will Shape the Future?
By Keith Michael Fiels
Outcomes-Based Futures
By Linda W. Braun
The Convergence of LAMs
By Karen Muller
The Price of Patronage
By Jennifer Dewey
We Are Global
By Courtney L. Young
RIP, IPL
By Joseph Janes

Latest Library Links

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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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Karen O’Grady writes: “I am the embedded librarian for the Hahn School of Nursing at the University of San Diego. I am surrounded by nursing faculty, staff, and students rather than by librarians. This has proven to be an incredible gamechanger for the way I see things. Every student in my school knows me by name. I am often stopped in the hallway to answer questions. Every correct answer I give increases my authority and builds trust. Through these casual mini-lessons, this foreign animal called ‘librarian’ slowly becomes an approachable, knowledgeable person.”

College & Research Libraries News, Dec.
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ALA has selected 46 participants for its 2025 class of Emerging Leaders (EL). The EL program allows library staff and information workers to participate in project planning work groups, network with peers, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity early in their careers. The group will take part in a day-long session during the 2025 LibLearnX conference in Phoenix this January and work for six months, culminating in a poster session at ALA’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia in June, where they will highlight results of their project planning work.

ALA Office for Human Resource Development and Recruitment, Dec. 4
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On December 9, ALA announced a $25 million bequest by James W. Lewis, of Washington, D.C. The gift, the largest individual bequest in ALA’s history, will fund scholarships for aspiring librarians with demonstrated financial needs. Throughout Lewis’s career at Merrill Lynch, where he leads the Lewis Group as senior vice president and senior relationship manager, he has demonstrated his commitment to libraries and their communities by generously volunteering his time, including as a member of the Board of Visitors at the library of his alma mater, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He also served as a Library Trustee Board member at District of Columbia Public Library for 10 years.”

AL: The Scoop, Dec. 9

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