libraries
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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 segregated spaces. For Lit Hub, Cynthia R. Greenlee writes on the…
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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 of their community. Unfortunately, the popular library cat is getting evicted,…
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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 children aren’t in school. Every branch of the Chicago library…
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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 plus side, libraries in developing countries (with developing markets) are…
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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? The architects of digital “pirate libraries” around the world are…
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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 sewing machines. The program requires only a library card to…
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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 Holly Hibner, know this can be a tough pill for…
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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 like ebook lending have seen declines. The real culprit is…
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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, earning him the name “the Don Quixote of literacy.”
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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 may expand their readership with a system that uses more…
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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 receives show how necessary libraries still are: “The library is a…
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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.