September/October 2011

Features

Talk to Teens—They’re Still Listening
By Elaine Meyers and Virginia A. Walter
About a decade ago, libraries were talking to teens about what would make the public library a cooler place. The...
Main Street Public Library
By Wayne Wiegand
One day in the mid-1990s Doug Zweizig and I were having lunch on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, where we...
Leading By Example: 2011 ALA Award Winners

The The individuals and libraries shown here have been singled out by their peers for their extraordinary achievements...
Leading By Example: Emerging Leaders

Newcomers to the profession are getting a boost toward leadership, thanks to ALA’s Emerging Leaders program....
Avoiding the Path to Obsolescence
By Steven Smith and Carmelita Pickett
Blockbuster was much in the news last fall, though not in the favorable light it once enjoyed. The cultural phenomenon...

Departments

Dispatches from the Field: Using Web Analytics Well
By Kate Marek
Are your website visitors doing what you expect them to do or what you want them to do? Are they following the path you...
Rousing Reads: The Problem with Sports Novels
Bill Ott
Most sports novels, especially the kind that follow a team or an individual through a season of play, face a built-in...
In Practice: Open Source, Open Mind
Meredith Farkas
I’ve been a big advocate of open source software since I learned about the model of software licensing and...
New from ALA Editions
By Karen Muller
With over 11 million articles and loans moving through the cooperative resource sharing processes of libraries each...
President's Message: The Big Easy Revisited
By Molly Raphael
Returning to New Orleans for the 2011 American Library Association Annual Conference this year was both rewarding and...
Librarian's Library: Manage Best with Best Practices
By Karen Muller
This month we’re examining the library literature for tips on how to manage our libraries better. Improvements...
Next Steps: Broadcast Collaboration
by Brian Mathews
“Remind me how to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull?” “What music should I play for a piece about polar...
Another Story: What’s Gone Is Gone
Joseph Janes
I wasn’t intending to write a “9/11” column, really. The 10th-anniversary rumblings have already...
Will's World: Networking without Pity
Will Manley
I’m working on a new house project. It’s one of the most complicated projects that I’ve ever taken on...

News Stories

Recognizing the Impact of Ezra Jack Keats
Rocco Staino
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Ezra Jack Keats’s groundbreaking picture book The Snowy Day (Penguin,...
A Library Home for Poetry

The new library of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago has a simple goal. “The mission of the library echoes that of...
A Librarian’s Primer on the Debt-Ceiling Deal
Rich Stombres
Now that the debate over raising the debt ceiling is over and the smoke is beginning to clear, the question remains:...
Credit-Card Hackers Target Library’s Online Donation Page

At the request of the FBI, Brighton (Mich.) District Library Director Nancy Johnson is spreading a cautionary word to...