On September 6, the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) launched its fourth annual One City One Book effort with something different—a “book mob,” using blogs and local online arts calendars to alert people to form flash mobs. Some 60 people showed up; a clever anchor was the SFPL bookmobile, with the ile on the word bookmobile [...]

“Any time you need me, you can call on me. I’ll come again to help you to make this library survive,” Ray Bradbury told a crowd of 300 filling the Long Beach Public Library’s auditorium last Friday at a victory celebration for saving the facility from closure. The 88-year-old author earlier had come to the [...]

Xbox 360 console owners can now register to vote, participate in presidential polls, and voice their opinions through Xbox LIVE®, the world’s largest TV–connected online social network. The initiative, which went into effect on August 25, the first day of the Democratic National Convention, is the result of a partnership between Microsoft Corp. and Rock [...]

As I was leaving for my recent trip to Ireland, I received an excellent message straight out of Twitter-land, one that under different circumstances could have made all the difference between a terrible journey and a wonderful one. The message I got that day was enough to make a believer out of me, and to [...]

Authors are always saying how much they love libraries, but some of them actually do something about it. Ray Bradbury blasted the proposed closing of the Long Beach Main Library to help balance the city’s budget, calling it a “heartbreak and an outrage” in an op-ed appearing in the Press Telegram. “Is Long Beach at war [...]

On July 26, the crowd at downtown Cleveland’s House of Blues went wild as 13 rockstars rushed the stage. It would perhaps be more accurate to say, not rock stars, but pleasantly mannered and modestly dressed library/consortia representatives attending Digipalooza ’08, OverDrive’s second-ever user conference. In any case, they were on stage accepting from the full-service distributor their Digital Pioneer [...]

Something I learned at Digipalooza’s Publisher Roundtable, in which reps from BBC Audiobooks America, Books on Tape, Brilliance Audio, HarperCollins Publishers, and John Wiley & Sons participated: You can legally excerpt up to three minutes of any audio clip. So that, say, jazzing up your site with this exactly-three-minute-long clip of the LJ Best Seller [...]

Attendees of OverDrive’s second-ever Digipalooza conference, held at downtown Cleveland’s Renaissance Hotel last weekend, got an early look at the full-service digital media distributor and supplier’s Digital Bookmobile, whose debut the New York Public Library will be hosting in Central Park August 10th. Additional stops—at public libraries in cities including in Boston, Phoenix, Seattle, and Washington, DC—are planned through [...]

When Queens Library’s Kathy Degyansky heard that New York City had a high school drop-out rate somewhere between 30 and 40 percent (depending on whose statistic she looked at), she couldn’t ignore the problem those numbers represented, and she started thinking about how libraries could help these young adults find their way in the world. She [...]

At a family reunion in Salt Lake City this weekend, a cousin of mine (who happens to be the chair of her library’s board) and I discovered a mutual passion in our affection for the many smart librarians we know and in our mutual disdain for those whose censorious actions masquerade as selection. Our conversation took [...]