American Libraries

DURING MIDWINTER, SAN ANTONIO PL HOSTS ONE OF 10 TRAVELING EXHIBITS ALA HAS DEVELOPED SINCE 1983 Among the many delights San Antonio offers to ALA Midwinter Meeting visitors is a vibrant and eclectic music scene. The San Antonio Public Library adds...

Annie on the Shelf. Some two years after the Olathe, Kansas, school board ignored its own materials review policy and ordered high-school librarians systemwide to pull Nancy Garden's gay-positive novel Annie on My Mind, a federal district court has...

I knew it was time to write about libraries and community networks when, sitting in a meeting for Huron Valley Community Network, an information system just coming online in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I realized that half the folks in the room were librarians....

AFTER CREATING HIS DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM AND FOUNDING ALA, MELVIL DEWEY PUT HIS DECIDEDLY BUSINESSLIKE SPIN ON LIBRARY EDUCATION By 1889, Melvil Dewey had already left a trail of innovative reform, business debts, and antagonized enemies....

There is no end in sight to the letters I've been receiving from reference librarians responding to the survey in my July/August column (p. 736), and there's also no end in sight to the accounts of weird, offbeat, and just plain dumb reference experiences...

Adieu to Dui After nearly 150 years of an active existence, it is, at last, time that poor old Melville (sorry, Melvil) Dewey (sorry, Dui) is laid to rest. While a hardy band of Dui-ites and spelling reformers hope that he may survive well into...

ALA'S HARDY "LIBRARIES CHANGE LIVES" THEME INSPIRES ANOTHER ROUND OF HEARTFELT GRATITUDE FROM LIBRARY USERS Definition of the impossible: attempting to include in this small space the thousands of ways libraries have changed people's lives. But...

Blaming budgetary problems, the Library of Congress has postponed a major exhibition of its holdings from the archives of Sigmund Freud, originally scheduled for this December. However, the planned exhibition had been attacked by critics of Freudian...

What's Wrong with "Family Friendly Libraries"? In recent years the library community has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism, being described as advocates of feminism, homosexuality, pornography, and a host of other "anti-family" social...

More than 100 public library directors, library educators, and foundation representatives met at the Library of Congress Dec. 8 to come to a conclusion most of them had already reached: The shift of the public library from a print-based service to...

Fred W. Weingarten, senior policy advisor at ALA Washington Office, offers a traffic report Change in the underlying technologies that manipulate, communicate, present, and store information will accelerate into the foreseeable future, say the scientists...

Between 1889 and 1899, Dewey served as regents' secretary for the University of the State of New York, which most people would have considered a full-time job. But Dewey also had responsibilities as state librarian and director of the New York State...