Libraries

The whole idea for the hunt was motivated by the desire to have more of the public involved in Banned Books Week, which runs this year from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1, says Linnea Hegarty, executive director of the D.C. Public Library Foundation. When books are banned, their supporters disguise them and circulate them surreptitiously, she says, and the idea was to capture that spirit.

On Monday morning, a Dallas City Council committee signed off on a proposal that would limit the size and location of community book exchanges that have taken root in some two dozen Dallas residents' front yards.  As far as city officials can tell, if the full council gives its blessing, Dallas will become one of the only cities in the country to specifically regulate the take-a-book, leave-a-book boxes, which, in the past, have been subject to building laws and zoning codes.

Trends in visiting public libraries have steadied, and many Americans have high expectations for what their local libraries should offer

Conclusions from the International Summer School on the Digital Library Fundamental changes are occurring in society, education, technology and publishing. If academic/research libraries want to survive, they must also change. Libraries should, of course: Provide electronic access to scholarly material; Customize and personalize information services. But, more importantly, they should: Experiment on distribution and business models together with publishers (preferably via library consortia, which should be more than just buying groups); Support universities and research communities to develop document servers and open archives for their own scientific output; Stimulate universities to change their cost allocation models in such a way that the library budget is centralized, and decisions about scientific information are no longer made by individual faculties.