LISNews: Librarian News

NORTHAMPTON MA- A late Smith College professor has bequeathed $1 million each to Look Memorial Park and Forbes Library, the biggest donation either has ever received.

Dilman Doland, who taught psychology at Smith for 30 years, died on Sept. 8 of last year at the age of 88, leaving an estate in excess of $10 million. Doland, who had no children of his own, willed much of that to his surviving brothers and their children, but set a generous amount aside for some of his favorite institutions, including Smith.

Kathleen Doland worked as a reference librarian at Forbes from 1956-1962 and her husband remembered the library in his will, bequeathing it $1 million as well. Director Janet Moulding said Doland had already established a reference room in her wife’s memory some years ago. By the terms of the will, the gift must be put into a trust and its interest used only for the reference department. Moulding said the library’s trustees have appointed a committee to perform a needs assessment and determine how much interest they can expect to realize on an annual basis.

Doland received the Trustees’ Award in 1999, Moulding said and was a frequent patron, often stopping by her office to say hello. Moulding said she was astounded by the gift.

Library Inc.
From industry-backed research to CEO-style executive salaries and perquisites, the influence of corporate America on universities has been the subject of much popular and scholarly scrutiny. University libraries have largely escaped that attention. Yet libraries, the intellectual heart of universities, have become perhaps the most commercialized academic area within universities, with troubling implications for the future of higher education.

A marvelous paper by Dr. Stephen Ramsay given at Emory University Libraris on encouraging academic librarians to be scholars, not slaves.

http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/?p=266

If your answer was "SCAN THEM ALL!" you're wrong:
What do you do with 8 million books? Build a shelf 153 miles long
Viewed from the outside, it could be any old warehouse in the country. Inside, though, it has the equivalent of 153 miles of storage space to store more than eight million books which form the bulk of the stock of arguably the country's most famous library.
Welcome to the new home for books owned by Oxford University's Bodleian Library, which has found that its historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK had led to it running out of storage space.