Artist’s sketchbooks may provide important insights into the genesis of the finished works and may also contain artworks that are at least as interesting and sometimes even more fascinating and fresh. However, sketchbooks are delicate and problematic exhibits; displaying them in a showcase leaves at most two pages visible, and allowing visitors to handle the books does not make sense. This pape...

INTRODUCTION Although it is clear that, in the late nineteenth century, public library service to “children” really referred to service to those we would now call “young adults,” over time, the emphasis altered and the focus shifted to young children.’ Consequently, young adults received less and less attention in public libraries. There were, however, women in libraries who consistently suppor...

LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 62, No. 3, 2014 (“Essays in Honor of W. Boyd Rayward: Part 2,” edited by Alistair Black and Charles van den Heuvel), pp. 519–529. © 2014 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Abstract The word “place” can mean both the physical brick-and-mortar and the concept of “appropriate space,” defined functionally. This article examines the language of children’s place in pub...

Citizen Coproduction and Efficient Public Good Provision: Theory and Evidence from Local Public Libraries Kristof De Witte and Benny Geys* In both public administration and economics, efficiency is brought forward as an important criterion for evaluating administrative actions. Clearly, its value as an assessment principle depends on our ability to adequately measure efficiency. This article ar...

This paper presents a case study about the implementation of the LIBERATOR project in the Portuguese region of Alentejo. Project LIBERATOR complies with the objectives of the Telematics for Libraries Programme of the EU in seeking to demonstrate the pivotal role for public libraries in the European Information Society through the establishment of Regional Information Services in the European co...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to describe a workflow of automated batch loading metadata from existing text to a database. Methodology/Approach – It introduces a case for the experience of metadata creation at Rutgers University Libraries in a collaborative digital project with the Hoboken Public Library in New Jersey. Findings – It is found that a well-designed workflow is crucial t...

From its Gate of the Sun to its Gate of the Moon, temples and palaces lined its spacious streets. Marbled columns and glittering statues dazzled visitors. Alexandria witnessed not only the romance of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra but also the genius of the greatest mathematicians and boasted the world‟s first and greatest public library, a library whose aim was to contain a copy of every book eve...

Introduction This paper applies the thought of Jacques Rancière to the concept of democracy as it is traditionally understood in library studies literature. Methods The paper reviews a cross-section of instances of the link between democracy and the public library in library studies literature. It offers a close textual analysis of Michael Gorman's Our Enduring Values as typifying the link betw...