LISNews: Librarian News

Wednesday, for the first time in more than 25 years, they came to the Anchorage AK Public Library, where amnesty was granted to people with unreturned books. All day, a steady trickle of people arrived to unburden themselves; the sheepish, the guilty and the shamed, into the sun-dappled lobby of the Z.J. Loussac Public Library to make their confessions.

"Once upon a time, in the year of Our Lord 1996, I believe, my wife's sister checked these out," Kirk Dungan told me. He slid a copy of "Traditional Buildings of Britain," "At Home in Scotland," and a curious tome with medieval-looking illustrations titled "Love and Marriage," across the counter Wednesday morning.

You could almost smell the satisfaction. His wife's sister used his wife's card, he said.

The books were from a time when his wife's sister was thinking of moving to Scotland. She wound up in Long Island. And all these years, the books nagged his wife. What if she applied for a job and there was some kind of electronic search and the books popped up? What then? What did it say about a person to have unreturned books in their past? The debt, money-wise, might be small, but karma-wise, it wasn't pretty.

"I'm just happy to be doing it," he said.

The New York Public Library is engaged in a public-relations blitz to address criticism from scholars and writers who object to the library’s plan to reimagine its Fifth Avenue flagship building at an estimated cost of $300 million says a report from The New York Times.

In the past few weeks the library’s president, Anthony W. Marx, has written articles for The Huffington Post and Inside Higher Ed, appeared on radio and television and assembled an advisory panel that includes people skeptical of the plan.

Here's what Mr. Marx wrote on the NYPL website about 'reimagining the library.'

The library’s efforts are the sort of salesmanship that traditionally accompanies any new ambitious undertaking. But they are also an acknowledgment that the plan, which includes the sale of two prominent Manhattan branches, is a dramatic reshaping that has, at the very least, upset library traditionalists.

New York Public Library's plan to take books off shelves worries scholars
But now, 101 years after the library was first dedicated, up to 3m of those precious books are to be removed from the central library and shipped to two off-site storage facilities, prompting a chorus of complaints from authors and scholars who say that the institution is threatening its own claim to be "one of the world's pre-eminent public resources for the study of human thought".

D.C. library official quits, is rehired as consultant
The D.C. Public Library system’s chief business officer quietly resigned from his $164,500-a-year job last summer, but quickly won a no-bid contract that pays him the same amount of money for many of the same responsibilities — including helping to manage the library contracts office.