American Libraries articles from January 2012

American Libraries archives from January 2012

Treasure Hunt
January 1, 2012... All of you who've weeded a collection know the challenges I face. Former American Libraries Editor Leonard Kniffel left me a legacy: file drawers stuffed with materials from his 15 years at the helm of this magazine. As someone new to the...

Trends in E-content.(E-content)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Trends in E-content Recent weeks have been busy ones for A e-content, Christopher Harris writes. Librarians are taking a critical look at OverDrive's business practices in the wake of Penguin Group's discontinuation and subsequent restoration of...

American Libraries Direct.
January 1, 2012... American Libraries Direct Every Wednesday in your email, AL Direct delivers the top stories of the week. Sign up free.

Find us on Facebook.
January 1, 2012... Find us on Facebook Now you can "like" our Facebook page and have online content delivered to your Facebook wall Daily.

Recommended audiobooks.(Ask the ala librarian)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Q. I got to explain to an older patron today that audiobooks can be downloaded! I told her about the Odyssey Award. Does ALA have any lists of audiobooks for children? A. The annual Notable Children's Recordings list that comes out of ALA's...

The year in Focus.(AL focus)
January 1, 2012... The Year in Focus Watch our year-in-review video, which highlights the top news stones in Libraryland in 2011, on AL Focus.

International matters.(Global reach)(Mortenson Center for International Library Programs)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... International Matters Mortenson Center for International Library Programs Director Barbara J. Ford reported on the November, 28 meeting of the US National Commission for UNESCO, which is struggling after Palestine's membership triggered a...

No More Business as Usual: The Evolution of ALA's Midwinter Meeting
January 1, 2012... My first American Library Association Midwinter Meeting was in 1976. After stimulating learning experiences at two Annual Conferences, I really wanted to get involved. Colleagues advised me that Midwinter provided the best venue to do that with...

What oasis of quiet?(Comment Enabled)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2012... I just had a chance to sit down and read the recent On My Mind, "An Unplugged Space" (AL, Nov./Dec, p. 29), and was pleased to find the article. I am relatively new to the library profession and began managing my first library four years ago....

New vision urged.(Comment Enabled)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2012... In response to "Egypt's Cultural Center Seeks Its Path Amid Turmoil," AL Online, Nov. 7: I am among those peacefully protesting outside Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) against the leadership of its director, Ismail Serageldin. My colleagues and...

Citizens United distorted.(Comment Enabled)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2012... Jeffrey Beall distorts the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision by advocating that librarians fight any attempts to overturn the decision (On My Mind, "Librarians and the Threat to Free Political Speech" AL, Sept./Oct. 2011, p. 33). ...

Bibliocide in New York City.(Comment Enabled)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2012... In response to "A Library Occupies the Heart of the Occupy Movement" AL Online, last updated Nov. 16, 2011: Not long ago, nearly everyone went berserk when a deranged Florida minister publicly torched his own copy of the Quran five months...

Love for NOLA.(Comment Enabled)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2012... In response to the photo "Visual response to Katrina," AL Online, Nov. 30, 2011. See also p. 12, this issue: As a library supervisor at the University of California in San Diego who was a tourist stuck in the dank New Orleans Superdome during...

Virginia Mathews' roots.(Comment Enabled)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2012... The executive board of the American Indian Library Association (AILA) was pleased to see the tribute to Virginia Mathews (AL, May/June 2011, p. 21). While it highlights many of her accomplishments, it did not mention that she was a member of the...

An "unawesome" cover.(Comment Enabled)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2012... How do I say this gently? The cover of AL's November/December 2011 issue belongs on the Public Perception page. When my students saw this issue on my desk, they couldn't stop laughing about the outdated, "unawesome" image of "high-tenning"...

Children's acre.(Comic)(Cartoon)
January 1, 2012... "Would you like to interface with my new iPooh? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Laurie D. Borman named American Libraries editor.(ALA)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Laurie D. Borman, an editorial executive with more than 20 years' experience in print and online publishing, has become the new editor and publisher of American Libraries magazine. She assumed the role in December. "I look forward to meeting...

New Academic Library Trends, Statistics released.(ALA)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... A LA's Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has published its 2010 Academic Library Trends and Statistics, the latest in a series of annual publications that describe the collections, staffing, expenditures, and service...

Study says school library access rises.(ALA)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... According to trend data collected by ALA's American Association of School Librarians (AASL), technology acquisitions in school libraries across the nation appear to be leveling off, while remote access to school library databases is rapidly...

ALA-APA announces program partnership.(ALA)(American Library Association-Allied Professional Association)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... The American Library Association-Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) announced that the Library Support Staff Certification program is partnering with 11 Library Technical Assistant (LTA) training programs in a project that will allow...

AASL joins literacy education alliance.(ALA)(American Association of School Librarians supports the National Center for Literacy Education)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... ALA's American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has joined 20 other stakeholder groups representing education, school, and community leaders in support of the new National Center for Literacy Education (NCLE), a project of the National...

New higher education standards released.(ALA)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... ALA's Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) board approved a comprehensive revision of the association's seminal "Standards for Libraries in Higher Education" (SLHE). Grounded in nine principles fleeting the core roles and...

Prepare for inaugural Digital Learning Day.(ALA)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Building on a growing movement, ALA's American Association of School Librarians, working together with the Alliance for Excellent Education and other national education associations and organizations, is calling on school librarians to...

PLA 2012 conference books major speakers.(ALA)(Public Library Association)(Conference news)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... ALA's Public Library Association (PLA) is counting down to its biennial conference, PLA 2012, slated for March 13-17 in Philadelphia. The conference kicks off when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes the stage at the opening session March 14. He has...

Meltzer named 2012 NLW honorary chair.(ALA)(National Library Week chairperson, Brad Meltzer)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Bestselling author, television host, and library advocate Brad Meltzer has been named the 2012 Honorary Chair of National Library Week (NLW), April 8-14. As the author of nine books and ' the host of the History Channel series Decoded,...

Visual response to Katrina.(ALA)(Susan Guevara's mural about Hurricane Katrina)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Artist Susan Guevara puts the finishing touches on a mural in November 2011 at New Orleans Public Library's Children's Resource Center. The mural was begun in 2006 during ALA's Annual Conference in New Orleans. Guevara, who said the artwork...

Neal-Schuman Joins ALA Publishing
January 1, 2012... ALA President Molly Raphael and Neal-Schuman President Patricia Glass Sehuman signed an agreement December 23 to make Neal-Schuman Publishers part of ALA Publishing. "We are very excited about Neal-Schuman joining the ALA family," said...

Calendar.(ALA)(American Library Association)(Brief article)(Calendar)
January 1, 2012... ALA EVENTS Jan. 20-24: ALA Midwinter Meeting, Dallas, alamidwinter.org. Feb. 1: Digital Learning Day, digitallearningday.org. Mar. 4-10: Teen Tech Week, ala.org/teentechweek. Mar. 13-17: Public Library Association Conference,...

Ebook escapades.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... HarperCollins imposed an arbitrary 26 loans per ebook license and Penguin refused to let libraries lend its new titles altogether. Even good e-news had a catch: Patrons who could now borrow Kindle-formatted ebooks had to disclose their...

Occupying libraries.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Peoples Library)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Guerrilla libraries sprang up in the numerous camps of the Occupy movement, most notably in Zuccotti Park in New York City, where Occupy Wall Street protesters set up the Peoples Library. By the time police cleared the park on November 15, it...

Rising above natural disasters.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Colleagues worldwide coped with sudden calamity. Japan lost lives and libraries in a tsunami. Libraries shifted into community-relief mode in New Zealand and Virginia after enduring earthquakes, as well as on the East Coast after Hurricane Irene...

Transforming libraries' image.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... As e-reader sales soared, "ebooks" and "digital" became mots du jour. When content creators changed the lending rules, librarians responded by seeking digital workarounds. Libraries embraced crowdsourcing as a way to enlist volunteers in...

Taking copyright to Court.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(copyright infringement case against HathiTrust)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... In September, the Authors Guild sued HathiTrust and several universities, claiming that book digitization infringed on copyright and calling into question the fate of millions of scans at research libraries. Authors are seeking a class-action...

Cutbacks: meet advocacy.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Across the country, advocates united to persuade politicians that libraries matter enough to fight for them. Zombies crawled in Oakland, California ("Zombies love brains"), cute kids and parents held read-ins from Chicago to California, and 200...

School librarians' hard times.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Cuts hit school libraries around the country, perhaps most severely in California, where the number of certified teacher-librarians dropped to 895 this year. Los Angeles Unified School District laid off dozens of library staff, interrogating...

Privatization pushback.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(library privatization)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Savings-conscious administrators in at least two states got an earful from constituents worried about outsourcing their libraries. A new California law mandates that proponents make their case with hard numbers as of January 1, 2012. Meanwhile,...

Privacy concerns mount.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Stop Online Piracy Act)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Librarians and technophiles are currently fighting the Stop Online Piracy Act. a sweeping bill that would require internet service providers to police users' activities for potential copyright infringement. Librarians cheered the September...

Digital destiny.(TOP STORIES OF 2011)(Digital Public Library of America)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... The ambitious Digital Public Library of America began a two-year endeavor in October to find a way to make the US cultural and scientific record available online, while the Europeana Foundation launched a plan to aggregate and distribute the...

Concerned Parents School Educators about Reading Choices
January 1, 2012... A flurry of challenges look place in the closing months of the year in school libraries from Maine to Georgia. * A committee assigned to review a graphic Story collection about the travails of life in middle school recommended December 12...

OCLC Launches New WorldShare Platform
January 1, 2012... OCLC has released a new platform that will let its member libraries create, configure, and share a growing number of new services and web-based library applications. The new OCLC WorldShare Platform, a shared technical infrastructure, will serve...

Fuzzy faces.(Perspectives)(librarian J. P. Baker and technician Mike Voss)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... Youth Services Librarian J. P. Baker (left) and Library Technician Mike Voss show off their fuzzy faces in honor of "No Shave November," a tradition among men in Australia and New Zealand, at San Diego County (Calif.) Library's Ramona branch....

LSSI Gets Its First Florida Contract, Eyes Simi Valley
January 1, 2012... Despite the opposition of library boosters in Osceola County, Florida, to the proposed outsourcing of county library operations there, the county commission approved a five-year contract with Library Systems & Services (LSSI), a private,...

I Love My Librarian Award Winners Honored in New York
January 1, 2012... Ten fierce advocates for their libraries, their patrons, and their communities were honored as winners of the 2011 I Love My Librarian Award at a ceremony in New York City December 9 "Libraries are the treasure house of civilization" said"...

Merritt Fund Aids a Colleague in Distress
January 1, 2012... As director of Hooper (Nebr.) Public Library, Karla Shafer worked to transform the institution into a vital place in the community for six and a half years. Those efforts ended abruptly in 2010, however, when controversy erupted over Shafer's...

Probes into ebook pricing revealed.(Perspectives)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... The US Department of Justice confirmed at a December 7 congressional hearing that it is investigating the pricing of ebooks, making DOJ the latest antitrust agency to probe whether improper collusion by Apple and several publishers took place to...

New synergy emerges with move of Keats Book Award to de Grummond.(Perspectives)(de Grummond Collection of Children's Literature)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... In a marriage of literary celebrity and scholarship, the de Grummond Collection of Children's Literature at the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries in Hattiesburg has become the host institution of the prestigious Ezra Jack Keats New...

Global Reach
January 1, 2012... UNITED KINGDOM (1) Advocates failed December 19 in a legal attempt to thwart the closure of several libraries in northwest London. Residents and celebrities wanted to prevent Brent Council from shutting six libraries and hoped the Court of...

Historic Egyptian Library Destroyed
January 1, 2012... The Egyptian Institute and its historic library caught fire early on December 17 during clashes in Cairo between Egyptian security forces and pro-democracy protesters. The institute, a research facility established by the scholars that...

Newsmaker: Joanne Budler
January 1, 2012... Kansas State Librarian Joanne Budler recently terminated the Kansas Digital Library Consortium's contract with ebook vendor OverDrive to become a beta tester of 3M's new Cloud Library ebook lending service. The change is the culmination of a...

How the World Sees Us
January 1, 2012... "You know how Occupy Chicago is talking about the 1% versus the 99%? Well, where the library is concerned, there's only the 100%. Everyone is impacted." CAROLYN ALES3IO, mother of a 9-year-old Girl Scout who joined a November 9 protest by her...

We Need Copyright 2.0: It's Time to Put the "Fair" Back in "Fair Use"
January 1, 2012... I applaud the hard work of everyone who has tackled the thorny issues confronting libraries in the increasingly hostile ebook environment in which we find ourselves. However, I believe we are missing an essential component in any solution:...

Bridging the Digital Gap: Mobile Services Can Help Libraries Reach out to All Populations
January 1, 2012... Google "smartphone user." Click on Images. What do you see? When I tried this, I saw some graphs, pictures of devices (many of them Black Berrys), and a bunch of while people, mostly men, using smartphones, often to do business. The problem:...

What's in a Name? You Are What Google and Facebook Say You Are
January 1, 2012... If you haven't googled the word "Santorum," now would be a good time, otherwise most of what follows won't make a lot of sense. Fair warning: What you find will be explicit, but it will also be instructive. Now that we're all on the same...

Providing the Tools: Bringing Digital Creation Technologies to Libraries
January 1, 2012... In the 1990s, libraries were pioneers in providing access to the internet in their communities. Even today, libraries are the only place some community members can get online. Over the past few years, libraries began positioning themselves as...

Preserving Black Academic Library History: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant Enables Library Alliance to Tout Successes
January 1, 2012... The success stories of more than 100 libraries participating in the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance--involving institutions in 20 states, the District of Columbia, and the US Virgin Islands--are being...

This Library Gets Everyone's Vote: Special Collection Preserves a "Primary" Tradition
January 1, 2012... Reference librarians frequently get scholarly questions that challenge their library's resources. Take, for instance, "Who finished second to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Democratic New Hampshire primary?" Google can help, but the definitive...

O Sister Library, Where Art Thou? Libraries near and Far Can Thrive by Forming "The Strongest Relationship"
January 1, 2012... "Sisters function as safety nets in a chaotic world simply by being there for each other." --Carol Saline and Sharon J. Wohlmuth coauthors of Sisters (Running Press, 2004) What if libraries, like sisters, could be there for one another?...

Building Displays That Move the Merchandise: Observe, Eavesdrop, Ask-And the Book Will Fly off the Shelves
January 1, 2012... Displays are hit or miss. So often we throw together a bunch of books on a theme. In our flurry to pull just the right items and create beautiful signage to market the display, we get lost in the process and fail to ask ourselves important...

Reflecting Our Communities: Brooklyn College Library's Internship Program Open Doors and Minds
January 1, 2012... Few would disagree that a diverse work force makes us better stewards of the communities we serve. It enhances our ability to respond to an increasingly changing world of patrons, strengthens relations with our communities, and expands the...

The Conversation Starts in Dallas: ... on the Transformation of the Profession, the Best Books for Children, Top Authors, and Exhibits
January 1, 2012... Join the more than 10,000 library leaders publishers, authors, and guests in discussions about the transformation of libraries, learn firsthand from frontline Occupy movement librarians, and engage in the excitement of Youth Media Award...

Dining in Dallas: Midwinter Attendees Won't Want for a Good Meal
January 1, 2012... The informal parts of Midwinter--those personal meetings that take place outside of the official sessions, often over a good meal--can be among the most rewarding. Fortunately, Dallas offers plenty of options for tasty meals. Here, several...

Currents
January 1, 2012... * November 30 Doug Abbott retired as librarian at Welland (Ont.) Public Library. * Lupita Barron-Rios has become deputy director for public services at Phoenix Public Library. * Elizabeth Bird became youth materials specialist and...

Cited.(Announcements)(librarian awardees Jessica Nadine Hernandez and Hwa-Wei Lee)(Brief article)
January 1, 2012... * Jessica Nadine Hernandez, librarian at the Food and Drug Administration's Biosciences Library, was the only librarian among 25 winners of the 2011 Rising Star in Government Information Technology awards given by Federal Computer Week....

Obituaries
January 1, 2012... * Dorothy Broderick, 82, died December 17. Broderick was the cofounder of VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) magazine and led the publication for 19 years. She began her career in the mid-1950s as a children's librarian before entering academia;...

Making Progress by Fives: How to Hone Your Skill Set in No Time
January 1, 2012... At the Australian School Library Association conference in October 2011, Executive Director Karen Bonanno offered several excellent insights in her keynote that are useful to all librarians in this era of tightened budgets and job opportunities....

Add to Your (Library) Cart: How to Get the Most out of Your Status Updates, Tweets, and Website
January 1, 2012... Welcome to Outside/In, our new column for American Libraries. Some readers may remember us from Public Libraries magazine, where we wrote about web topics relevant to librarians and the public library sector. Our goal with this column is to...

Librarian's Library: Great Lists of Great Reads
January 1, 2012... Each January, librarians, publishers, parents... and. well, anyone who has an interest in books and reading... await the announcement of the Youth Media Awards at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. While awards help us define the criteria for "good"...

Rousing Reads: It's That Time of Year
January 1, 2012... For compiling best lists, that is. I either make or participate in the making of at least three different kinds of best-book lists every year. First, there's the Booklist Editors' Choice list, published in our January double issue, but I'm only...

Solutions and Services
January 1, 2012... PROJECT MUSE[R] Today's Research. Tomorrow's Inspiration muse.jhu.edu Project MUSE's redesigned platform launched January 1 on its beta site. The new platform will provide digital access to more than 14,000 books from 66 university...

Case Study: Leveraging Geographic Data
January 1, 2012... Suffolk County, New York, has 54 public libraries serving all of eastern Long Island. But each library defines its service area by school district and township boundaries, making it sometimes challenging for people to determine which is their...

Taking Care of Business: Entrepreneurship P Is a Two-Way Street
January 1, 2012... Public librarians have come up with all kinds of reasons why their communities should support them. Some of these reasons are even realistic: * Many people enjoy reading or listening to a good book; * Free Wi-Fi and electricity are...

So, why are you doing my performance evaluation?(Comic)(Cartoon)
January 1, 2012... "So, why are you doing my performance evaluation? You don't even work here." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]