Library News, Reviews, and Views
“An american library horror story with a Happy Ending”: that’s the tagline on the winning application submitted for LJ’s 2012 Best Small Library in America Award. In today’s library world, with shrinking budgets, staff, and hours, we all understand the horror story. It’s the happy ending that’s difficult to envision.
It came as a shock to hear that Mary Dempsey had resigned as head of Chicago Public Library (CPL) this week after 18 years as the city’s library commissioner. San Francisco Public Library’s Brian Bannon (an LJ Mover & Shaker) will take over March 1. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though—not only because of the continuing budget woes Dempsey’s had to deal with over the last couple of years but also because we’d talked about her future plans.
In these dire economic times, with too many Americans out of work or living below the poverty line and too few receiving a decent basic education, governments at all levels are shifting toward outcome-based or evidence-based measurement and so, too, are the institutions and organizations, including nonprofits, that serve their communities. They’re looking at big picture issues that will move their constituents forward. They’re collaborating broadly to ascertain what it is that their community values, to determine and adopt goals, to develop and deliver needed services, and to gauge impact—and then to go back and do it all over again and again.
We’re getting our online house in order. Soon, Library Journal will have a proper home for the daily mix of news stories, reviews, articles, columns, blogs, and research we publish to the web and in our newsletters. In the meantime, you’re going to see LJ content published in a couple of different places, all still under the LJ banner.
The LJ Index of Public Library Service shows what you deliver The latest round of America’s star Libraries is here, and a record-setting 262 libraries earned three-, four-, or five-star distinction. When we launched the LJ Index of Public Library Service in 2009 (LJ 2/15/09) using the latest available Institute of Museum and Library Services [...]
A tough job market demands creativity and commitment The job picture painted in the latest LJ Placements & Salaries Survey of library and information school grads reflects the realities of an unyielding economy. “It’s tough out there!” grads across the country told Stephanie Maatta, who has written the survey since 2003. Her report mirrors what [...]
AUTHORS AND LIBRARIANS USED TO GET ALONG— and many still do. Every author I’ve heard speaking to a crowd of librarians tells fond stories about the childhood librarian who saved them and the worlds of possibility the local library opened up to them. They laud librarians for being the first to take up their book and for giving it both a push to library users and a home long past its bookstore shelf life. They organize to raise money for libraries, like Karin Slaughter and others.
THERE WAS JOY IN SOME QUARTERS OF LIBRARYLAND in late August when LJ’s Annoyed Librarian (AL) blog went down for a day and then briefly several more times in the next few days owing to a technical glitch. The jubilation came from another group of annoyed librarians, those riled by AL’s post “The Last Perk [...]
While the American Library Association (ALA) appoints task forces on ebooks that get mired in bureaucracy, the real worlds of book publishing and libraries move ahead rapidly, both struggling with budgets, changing mission, even survival. The demise of Borders, signaling the end of an era, and the explosion of ebook reading and devices, marking the [...]
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