March/April 2011Volume 50, No. 2

Getting to What’s Working: A Conversation with Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, the psychological thriller Sharp Objects, was hailed as “an admirably nasty piece of work, elevated by sharp writing and sharper insights” by no less a critic than Stephen King. Her follow-up novel, Dark Places, details the efforts of a troubled woman to uncover the truth about the murder of her mother and sisters, a task made more challenging considering her testimony put the alleged killer, her brother, behind bars. A former writer for Entertainment Weekly, Gillian Flynn lives in Chicago where she is currently at work on her next novel, Gone Girl, due next year. She talked with Public Libraries on February 9, 2011.

E-Government: Service Roles for Public Libraries

Public librarians now assist many patrons with federal, state, and local government agencies’ services that have moved almost exclusively online––with increases in online services occurring since the passage of the E-Government Act of 2002.1 Persons with limited or no Internet access, or persons who need assistance using technology or understanding and reading forms, rely on […]

New Product News March/April 2011

Garden Minibeasts Up Close Did you know that ladybugs are brightly colored to warn birds and other predators that they taste awful? Did you know that crickets have long, powerful back legs and can jump about three feet into the air—more than thirty times the length of their bodies? That is like a human jumping […]

Historical Collections: Is adding One Right for Your Public Library?

Susan enters the library quickly through the employee door and hurries to the archives section. An author researching one of the library’s historical collections has an early appointment. The researcher viewed the collection’s online inventory and has pinpointed several boxes she would like to review. Susan heads first to the donor correspondence files. She recalls […]

From Project to Branch Integration and Sustainability: Community-Led Work at Halifax Public Libraries

“I have learned a totally different approach to librarianship and the library than I have ever heard of before. I went through how many years of schooling, and it never touched upon it once. My whole idea of librarianship is now community-development centered. All it took was a shift in thinking. It is not extra […]

It Takes a Community to Build a Library

The four-year, four-city Working Together Project sent community development librarians into diverse neighborhoods across the country. Supported through funding agreements with Human Resources and Social Development Canada, the Vancouver, Regina, Toronto, and Halifax Public Libraries (HPL), worked in diverse urban neighborhoods and with diverse communities — communities we traditionally consider socially excluded. Such communities included […]

A Global Experience

Last fall, I had the honor of being asked to give a speech to the attendees of the first Turning the Page: Global Libraries Advocacy Training, a specially adapted version of the PLA training hosted by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries program. The two-and-a-half-day event took place September 22 – 24, 2010, […]

The Story of Library Renewal and Similar Initiatives

For this column, we thought we would share what’s been going on with the development of a fledgling nonprofit we’re both involved in, Library Renewal. You might have heard about it, along with stories of the American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Task Force on Electronic Content Access, a certain publisher-that-will-not-be-named, and those dratted e-book format […]