When the Libraries Got Desegregated
While Brown vs. Board of education immortalized schools as the site where the historic shift to desegregation happened, few would remember the other locales of everyday life that were also once…
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libraries
175 posts
Resident Cat Evicted from Library
Wouldn’t it be great if your local library had an animal friend to liven things up? A small town in Texas certainly thought so, prizing their tabby Browser as a member…
Keep Kids Learning, All Summer Long
Chicago libraries have an ambitious plan to give away more than a million children’s books this summer in an effort to combat intellectual regression that occurs in summer months when…
A Young Nation’s Game
The Annual Library Budget Survey, published last week, found that libraries around the world have varying growth expectations for the coming year, with North American libraries tending toward negative. On the…
Gimme Gimme JSTOR
The question of access continues to plague the academic community—if academia is truly about knowledge and discovery, why are there still so many barriers to the unfettered sharing of information?…
A Library of Things
A Florida library is looking beyond books and media to draw in more patrons. The Temple Terrace library has started a “Beyond Books Lending Program,” offering everything from power tools to…
The Psychic Sasquatch
Most libraries have limited physical shelf space, so if they want to purchase new books for their collections, often they have to remove some old ones. Two librarians, Mary Kelly and…
Better Funding Boosts Library Usage
Library use has been declining, but that decline probably isn’t due to a decreasing interest in reading. Plenty of pundits blame the rise of digital technology, but even libraries that offer digital services…
A Library on a Horse
Ridwan Sururi had a horse. Indonesia’s small mountain towns needed a library. Now, several days a week he loads up his horse with books and travels from town to town,…
House Of Cards
At the Atlantic, Sara Polsky traces the evolution of library cards from the 18th century to today. Even though library cards have nostalgic value for many patrons, Polsky argues that libraries…
Why We Need Libraries
For VICE, Amelia Dimoldenberg asks people in London why they visit their local libraries. Since 2010, UK has lost nearly 350 libraries because of cuts in local spending. But the answers Dimoldenberg…
Wherefore Art Thou
To honor the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sending the First Folio around the country. Looks like the book tour really is dead.