American Libraries

Growing up, my athletic prowess was legendary. Strong, graceful, fleet of foot, gifted in multiple sporting endeavors, and a role model to friends and rivals alike. I was also, coincidentally, third in line for the throne of France. Seriously, I...

My experience is that the library profession is not just overwhelmingly liberal but vocally so in supporting various political issues. Despite our core value of intellectual freedom, librarians are not very tolerant of listening to points of view that...

CANADA [1] The director of University of Prince Edward Island library put his administrative foot down when an academic database proposed increasing the fee it charges the university by 120%. Mark Leggott responded by announcing in a campuswide...

What makes younger library users, past or present, so interesting to researchers? At the Library History Seminar XII, September 10-12, many scholarly papers focused on youth services. The ideas in circulation at the Madison conference suggested...

"Print is dead. Everybody says so. I checked it out and it's true. Print is dead. 1 saw that on the internet." "Native Son" columnist CARL NOLTE, on the irony of predictions about the death throes of print even as library circulation and brick-and-mortar...

I've spoken to library staff from libraries all over North America and have heard countless stories about innovative new services that failed. I always ask people why they think the initiative didn't work at their library and the answer has always...

The American Library Association got a brand-new president in June, when Roberta Stevens of the Library of Congress entered the ballroom at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C., dancing to the tune of "Celebration," along with the incoming presidents...

Nobody reads in the Emmy-winning TV series Mad Men. They drink prodigiously, and they smoke incessantly, but with the exception of Don Draper taking a glance at a volume of Frank O'Hara's poems in an episode a couple of seasons ago, there's rarely...

Serials Solutions announced September 13 that its web-scale discovery product Summon has reached the 100-customer mark. (The company has chosen not to name its 100th customer because "it's a three-way dead-on tie," according to media representative...

In Stevens County, Washington, public libraries are a fairly new concept. Residents voted to form a library district in 1996, transforming a hodgepodge of donation-based collections run by volunteers into a modern system. Over the past decade, library...