American Libraries

When Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska, shut down its operations last year, among the many logistical questions was what to do with the 48,000 items held by its Stratton Library. The oldest institution of higher education in the state, the 130-year-old...

Following accusations by conservative political writer Stanley Kurtz that the University of Illinois at Chicago blocked his access to documents that might portray Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama in an unpatriotic light, the university...

Have you ever worked in an organization where: The materials aren't shelved for a week? Some employees cannot handle rush times at a service desk so they are only given desk time during "slow" periods? The organization provides a service that patrons...

In planning a library building, there are a million design details to consider, but none is more important than parking. In our auto-obsessed society, public service institutions live and die by their parking lots. You won't learn this fact in library...

In The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer, one of the challenges Gary Paulsen's anonymous 16-year-old protagonist faces is hunger. The boy, as Paulsen calls him throughout this brief and intense work, survives by completing all sorts of grueling...

On the eve of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed or damaged libraries and schools throughout the Gulf Coast region, Hurricane Gustav hit land September 1, but the area was spared the predicted destruction that had prompted...

"If you are of the view that book reading in a public library is nothing but a tryst with dust and worms, think again." News item on plans for a new state library in Chennai, Tamil Nadu State, India, Times of India, Aug. 14. "Think of the library...

A U.S. district court ruled September 8 that Michigan publisher RDR Books could not proceed with the print publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a 400-page reference work by former school librarian Steven Vander Ark based on the website he created...

Librarian of Congress James Billington announced July 17 that Kay Ryan had been appointed as the library's 16th poet laureate, for 2008-09. Ryan is scheduled to open LC's annual literary series this month with a reading from her work. In making the...

If you are not one of the 11 million-plus who have seen Karl Fisch's "Did you know?" video (tinyurl.com/2rzrn9) or its 2006 predecessor, "Shift Happens," on YouTube, I recommend that you invest eight minutes and 19 seconds to watch it. Then ask yourself:...

Are commitments to your library, family, and professional or social activities colliding? Are you guilty of promising more than you can effectively deliver? I, too, have suffered the throes of having said "yes" too many times to worthy commitments...

It is hard to believe how much the profession has changed in the 17 years since I got my MLS degree. In the late 1980s, I pursued the degree in part because of an article in a popular magazine that listed corporate librarians as one of the fastest-growing...

When I was 14 years old, I saw the movie version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and concluded that being a writer in New York was the coolest thing a person could do in life, possibly even cooler than playing center field for the Giants....