From Global Times:

Ebooks might be convenient, but they come at a cost. The spread of ebooks has driven circulation down in China’s university libraries, and even caused some librarians to lose their jobs.

. . . .

Hankou’s library is now lending 68,000 less books a year compared to 2010. But ebook access at a nearby school has increased from 356 to 44,556 since 2009.

Link to the rest at Global Times

From Good EReader:

Overdrive has gained the support of over 3,000 libraries for a new pilot project to take ebook accessibility to an entirely new level. The intention behind this new initiative is to create a global “library book club.”

Library partners in the OverDrive network will be invited to participate in the pilot program beginning May 15 – June 1, 2013. Participating libraries will be provided no-cost access to the librarian-selected ebook Four Corners of the Sky by Michael Malone via Sourcebooks. This title will be prominently displayed on the OverDrive-powered library websites, and discoverable through the libraries’ catalogs. For the pilot, the ebook will be simultaneously available for any and all readers with a library card to browse, sample, and borrow. At the end of the pilot period, the title will be removed from the collection, but libraries can still buy it.

“We want to demonstrate once and for all the enormous influence of the library demographic, and that when libraries put an ebook in their catalog it serves a valuable role in increasing exposure and engagement with an author’s work,” said Steve Potash, OverDrive’s CEO.

Link to the rest at Good EReader

From The Deseret News:

Parents value libraries as a safe place for children, a source of education and entertainment, a tech hub. They feel great affection for a library’s ability to instill a love of reading in young minds, too, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life project.

In fact, 94 percent of parents say libraries are important for their children and 79 percent say “very important,” according to the survey of 2,252 Americans 16 and older conducted last fall, including 584 interviews with parents of minor children. “Parents” in the results refers only to those children younger than 18.

The survey found that among all adults, parents are more likely to have library cards, visit the library, use the library website and participate in programs there, said Lee Rainie, who directs the Internet and American Life Project for Pew.

“There’s a whole host of family-based reasons why families are attracted to libraries,” he said. Parents, they found, “do more things in libraries, are more passionate about things in libraries, and are much more enthusiastic about almost everything at the library than non-parents. Mothers especially are the biggest library enthusiasts of them all.”

Link to the rest at The Deseret News

From Kansas University. For those outside the United States, the KU mascot is the Jayhawk.

and The Lord of the Libraries

From Publishing Perspectives:

The virtual doors to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the first public online-only library in the United States, have opened. And, according to author Doron Weber, it’s “as if the Ancient Library of Alexandria had met the Modern World Wide Web and digitalized America for the benefit of all.”

. . . .

It is a free, open-source resource making a variety of digital collections and archives from across the country available in one place. Launched in conjunction with the Smithsonian, the National Archives, New York Public Library, the University of Virginia, Harvard University, Digital Library of Georgia, Minnesota Digital Library, Mountain West Digital Library and others, all of the library’s text, photos, videos, and audio can be searched or browsed on the DPLA website.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Ebook Friendly:

Marcus Tullius Cicero’s “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need” is probably one of the best known quotes about libraries.

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Libraries are an essential element in a process of giving users access to digital knowledge. For many people they are the only place with an access to free internet. Most importantly, however, libraries are the places where you can expect smart and clear answers to even most difficult questions.

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Link to the rest at Ebook Friendly

How to respond to your critics in exactly the wrong way.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Edwin Mellen Press is continuing to threaten its online critics.

A second librarian is facing legal threats from Mellen, a scholarly publishing house in Lewiston, N.Y. Mellen is threatening legal action against Rick Anderson, the interim library dean at the University of Utah, after Anderson criticized Mellen, in part for legal action the press has already taken against another librarian.

Strong reaction late last week by academic librarians suggests Mellen could face a backlash among the academics who make up the target audience for the books Mellen sells.

In the first case, Mellen recently sued Dale Askey, associate librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, over a blog post he wrote in August 2010 that was highly critical of Mellen. The company dropped that suit, but another in which Mellen’s founder is the plaintiff in a libel action against Askey remains.

Now, Mellen is threatening Anderson for two blog posts he wrote about the Askey case that were also critical of Mellen. The publisher is also threatening a freelance copyeditor who left a comment on one of Anderson’s posts.

. . . .

Faced with legal action, Anderson said Friday he thinks Mellen’s behavior now speaks for itself.

“It’s an important part of a professional librarian’s work to evaluate the offerings of publishers and I think the letter from Edwin Mellen Press’s attorney speaks eloquently for itself,” Anderson said.

. . . .

Mellen is no stranger to criticism or litigating its critics. The company sued the now-defunct Lingua Franca over a 1993 article that called Mellen a “quasi-vanity press cunningly disguised as an academic publishing house.”

The article said Mellen had capitalized on a pre-approval system universities use to automatically buy some publishers’ books. Mellen lost the suit.

Now, librarians are suggesting Mellen’s legal maneuvers may hurt the company because university librarians will be on the lookout for Mellen books and give them closer scrutiny.

Link to the rest at Inside Higher Ed

From The Guardian:

Libraries can be scary places in Stephen King novels – such as the terrifying appearance of Pennywise the clown in Derry’s library in his novel It – but they appear to hold a special spot in the horror writer’s heart, after he and his wife Tabitha pledged to donate $3m (£1.9m) to their local branch in Bangor, Maine.

Barbara McDade, director of Bangor Public Library, told the Bangor Daily News that Stephen and Tabitha King had offered to pay one third of the $9m (£5.9m) the library is looking to raise for refurbishment, as long as the remaining $6m (£3.9m) is raised. “They have just been wonderful supporters of the library,” said McDade.

The Kings previously donated $2.5m (£1.6m) towards a new wing for the library in the 90s, said McDade, and “also replaced our front marble steps [six or seven years ago], which were worn to the point where they were dangerous”.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Brendan for the tip.

From Flavorwire:

Face it: most librarians are probably cooler than you. After all, their job is to wrangle books, attract readers, and then get the two together — one of our own favorite activities. Though for many years, the librarian stereotype was a severe old lady who couldn’t stand excessive noise, the mold has changed (to the extent that even the New York Times has noticed). Now, many librarians are punk-rock agents of social change, complete with tattoos, tech savvy, and new ideas to get books to the people. After the jump, meet just a few of the very coolest librarians alive.

. . . .

Who could be cooler than an official riot grrrl librarian? Lisa Darms, a onetime zinester herself, is a senior archivist at the Fales Collection at NYU’s Bobst Library, which houses the famed Riot Grrrl Collection.

. . . .

Now here’s a librarian with personality to burn. “I would like to see a librarian on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine,” Porcaro says. “I want to see a librarian on Jersey Shore, in Kanye West’s entourage, and on the coaching staff of the New York Jets. I want to see the first librarian elected President of the United States. Don’t forget, Casanova was a librarian.”

Link to the rest at Flavorwire

From The Economist:

Plastered on the wall of San Francisco’s main public library are 50,000 index cards, formerly entries in the library’s catalogue. The tomes they refer to may be becoming decorative, too. Not only can library patrons now search the collection online, they may also check out electronic books without visiting the library. For librarians, “e-lending” is a natural offer in the digital age. Publishers and booksellers fear it could unbind their business.

. . . .

A printed book can be borrowed only during opening hours and at the library, so many readers save themselves the hassle and buy their own copy. But e-lending is frictionless: any user with the right privileges can download a digital file instantly.

. . . .

In publishers’ eyes librarians are “sitting close to Satan”, declared Phil Bradley, president of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. He was addressing indignant librarians who recently gathered in London to swap tales of e-lending woe. Some publishers have refused to sell their e-books to public libraries, made them prohibitively costly or put severe restrictions on their use. Although 71% of British public libraries lend out e-books, 85% of e-book titles are not available in public libraries, according to Mr Bradley. In America the average public library makes available only 4,350 e-books (Amazon, an online retail giant, stocks more than 1.7m).

. . . .

Some even wonder if e-lending is in the libraries’ interests, since it encourages people to stay at home, rather than use them as a public space (one reason why they enjoy taxpayers’ backing). One critic privately calls e-lending the “Librarian Unemployment Act of 2013”.

Link to the rest at The Economist