LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Yes, it's home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but also the home of the New York State Historical Association.

The Daily Star reports on the 40th anniversary of the opening of the present New York State Historical Association Research Library, on Lake Road north of the village of Oneonta.

The facilities and offerings at the library are a far cry from what began in 1910. At that time NYSHA was located in Ticonderoga. James Austin Holden, a founder of NYSHA and its first librarian, declared that year the library was "practically a collection of junk." Today the NYSHA Research Library serves as a resource for students, scholars, genealogists and researchers, and the Research Library’s collections have grown to include more than 88,000 volumes specializing in Colonial American and New York State history and culture, 19th-century American art history, and Native American culture.

It's getting to the point where Katie Kennell, the librarian at the compact Lostant Community Library, has to wonder whether it's worth her time to continue to apply for the Illinois State Library's per capita grant.
This year the library will receive $1,093.

She told The Times the money is useful -- it funds the summer reading program for Lostant kids. But it is coming with an increasing number of strings.

Today, May 3, is free ! Make sure you go pick yours up as nothing beats free stuff!

Adil Najam Says There are, in fact, many nice libraries in Pakistan, but not too many functional ones. "Lahore, an ancient city of culture, now has more polo grounds than libraries. Lahore even has more offices for the chief minister (four in all) than libraries. Of course, the Chief Minister needs office space more than our children need libraries."

Tens of thousands of New Yorkers celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1994 discovered to their happy surprise that there was an enormous archive of gay and lesbian social history in an elegant building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

It was called the New York Public Library (and will soon be known as the Stephen A. Schwartzman Library as well).

The library’s exhibition on lesbian and gay life, “Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall” drew a record-breaking 17,258 visitors in its first week at the beginning of this month. One man, who cried as he walked through the Gottesman Exhibition Hall, said that such a show in such a setting made him feel he had “a place, a legitimate place, in the fabric of this country.” NYT Blogs.

Julia Eccleshare Wonders Whatever happened to book borrowers? She says people seem to have forgotten how to take things out from the library and return them...

However nimbly they have adapted, modernised, lost books and gained technology, become determinedly "functional" as invaluable resource centres rather than bookstores, the libraries are always needing to boost their profile. They need more borrowers and yet, one of their biggest problems, in my experience, is that "borrowing" is not a readily understood modern concept, however well-embedded it was in Carnegie's day.

Sounds like a romance novel, but it's not...BBC reports from Wales:

"Jack was browsing the shelves of the Dylan Thomas section when he spotted her thumbing through Iris Gower's latest romantic offering.

"Captivated, he approached, slowly and slightly awkwardly. "A quick glance at her lapel and his heart skipped a beat as he saw what he was hoping for.

"A pink badge! The mysterious stranger was also there, in Swansea Central Library that Friday evening, for singles' night."

Greg's been thinking and reading about online identity, reputation management and personal branding. His interest is NOT in marketing libraries. He says there are plenty of other people worrying about that. He's talking about marketing librarians and hopes to find ways to demonstrate the importance of that distinction to others in our profession.

I suspect few of you would disagree that librarians are, for the most part, poor self-promoters and marketers. I plan on doing my part to change that and the first step is paying attention to the people who know what they’re talking about.

Barbara Pasqua was 4 years old when she started preparing for a music career. For the next 14 years, she studied voice at the Pittsburgh Playhouse with the goal of studying music at Carnegie Mellon University.
"I wanted to be an opera singer," said Pasqua, 57, assistant law librarian at the Fayette County Law Library.

A standing-room-only crowd listening to her sing the national anthem in a recent courthouse ceremony heard evidence that she could have been a contender.

In its old, mustily glorious quarters in the British Museum, the British Library’s main reading room was as exclusive as it was glamorous, a club rich with tradition whose distinguished alumni included Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw.

A line outside the British Library last week. Under a new admission policy, 127,000 people have passes to its reading rooms.

But in 1998 the library moved to a modern red-brick building on Euston Road, and four years ago it liberalized its admission policy. It opened its new reading rooms not only to writers and academics who depend on material from its singular collection, but also to “anyone who has a relevant research need,” a spokeswoman said.

What has happened since that time? Flirting, giggling and other such outlandish behaviors says this NYT article .