Library News, Reviews, and Views
(Editor’s Note: LJ’s Lead the Change program will be offered in eighteen additional cities in 2013 and will be in the Rochester, New York area on March 28. The upstate/western New York program is being hosted by the Rochester Public Library and Monroe County Library System and will take place at the Greece Public Library, Greece, [...]
Public libraries have struggled in New York City over the last five years, as Mayor Mike Bloomberg–in an annual ritual known wearily as the “budget dance”–has consistently proposed significant cuts, only to have the City Council restore much but hardly all of the damage. The unsustainable nature of the strategy, which wastes library resources in [...]
Eight of Maine’s largest libraries, both public and academic, are about halfway through a major and distinctive project for the shared management and archiving of their print collections and the integration of digital editions into a statewide catalog. The drivers of the Maine Shared Collections Strategy (MSCS)—lack of available space, budget cuts, low usage per [...]
The stable and predictable days of the 20th century, when research libraries could rely on their prized local collections to define their distinct and distinguished place on campus, are long gone.
The 21st-century’s user-centric networked world and the concomitant Sturm und Drang of cyber scholarship have caught research libraries in a seemingly unending flux. Traditional practices and services are no longer adequate to support scholars, but how best to reassess and redefine services, how best to reposition the library within the scholarly enterprise, how best to add new value, remains an ongoing, critical challenge.
Thirty-two research librarians gathered March 5-6 in Scottsdale, AZ, at a symposium hosted by Ex Libris to discuss this challenge, which is as prickly, vast, and shifting as the nearby Sonoran Desert.
African Americans and Hispanics are some of the strongest supporters of libraries, and yet they continue to be thinly represented among the ranks of librarians. It’s a familiar story and always a bad trade-off that hurts the profession and, more important, hurts our society.
When it comes to weeding decisions, how do libraries account for such odd sensations? Such an accounting may be an impossibility, an overly sentimental task, a romantic fetish for the codex, and yet old, physical volumes can become imbued with a moral, if not practical, quality that explains in part the deep allegiance that many private individuals feel for their local library.
The Chicago Public Library has joined the list of major U.S. libraries that have signed on with Toronto-based BiblioCommons as its discovery provider. An investment from the Chicago Public Library Foundation made possible the three-year deal that was announced Saturday. Among the other libraries where Bibliocommons’s BiblioCore catalog is live are Seattle Public Library, Cleveland [...]
On a late rainy Monday afternoon at the end of the American Library Association’s Midwinter meeting, 39 leading librarians and library vendors gathered for about 90 minutes around a horseshoe-arrangement of tables on the fourth floor of the Seattle Public Library to discuss how to create a new lending experience. The group came together at [...]
INFOdocket by Gary Price
OverDrive & Big (Private) Data | Editorial
Who owns library and patron user data? Libraries think they do but will that matter in an increasingly competitive landscape where data is very valuable?