A few years ago libraries were flying high. I wrote a book about the so-called "third wave" library-building boom of the '90s and early aughts, a boom made possible in part by the dot.com bubble. Today, nearly a decade later, our cities and their libraries find themselves in a very different situation. While libraries are welcoming record numbers of visitors and breaking circulation records, library budgets are facing drastic cuts, some of those flashy new buildings are often shuttered, and cities are resorting to the privatization or outsourcing of library services. Meanwhile, many services that patrons once relied on libraries to provide — specifically the provision and preservation of information in multiple formats — are now accessible elsewhere, including in our living rooms, and even in the palms of our hands.

Libraries are about much more, of course; they exist not simply to store and provide access to information. Advocates argue that libraries continue to serve crucial civic and social functions, and their tenacious faith is reinforced by a flurry of recent street-level library activity. The last few years have seen the emergence of myriad mini, pop-up, guerilla and ad-hoc libraries, which are part of the phenomenon that Mimi Zeiger, in her Interventionist’s Toolkit series for this journal, calls “provisional, opportunistic, ubiquitous, and odd tactics in guerilla and DIY practice and urbanism” — to which I might add, librarianship. Nowadays we have libraries in phone booths and mailboxes, in public parks and train stations, in vacant storefronts and parking lots. Often these are spaces of experimentation, where new models of library service and public engagement can be test-piloted, or where core values can be reassessed and reinvigorated. They are also often an effort to reclaim — for the commons, for the sake of enlightenment (or does this term now carry too much baggage to be used without scare quotes?) — a small corner of public space in cities that have lately become hyper-commercialized, cities that might no longer reflect the civic aspirations of a diverse public. As DePauw University librarian Mandy Henk puts it, “They ... show the power of self-organization and what people can build working together, outside of traditional institutions. Building and using them is a form community empowerment.” [1]

What will happen to the books at 42nd Street? Marx said that there are now about 3 million books in the stacks, 1.2 million in the Bryant Park Stack Extension (BPSE), and 300,000 to 400,000 stored elsewhere in the building. He said that 4 million volumes are now stored offiste. After the CLP, at least 2 million books would remain onsite, mostly in BPSE.

Charles Petersen: Petersen doubted that the CLP would serve all users well, and was skeptical of Marx's claim that 90 percent of the books requested would remain onsite. Petersen asked where the statistic had come from, and wondered whether consultants hired by the library had undertaken market segmentation analysis—that is, whether they had tried to find out how different subgroups of library users would fare under the CLP. Did the 90 percent figure apply only to the average visitor, who asks for a book or two?

Joan Scott: The real threat to the library's democratic mission, Scott charged, came from the reduction of the library's expert curatorial staff, who alone can make its treasures accessible to anyone who walks in the door. Scott quoted a recent essay in The American Conservative that urged the library's leaders not to confuse popularity with democracy. Democratic access to research, she concluded, is a "public good, not honored by a glitzy and overpriced reconstruction."

David Nasaw: Nasaw noted that he teaches at CUNY, which depends on the NYPL as a research library—a dependence that the state legislature recognizes by giving the library $1.1 million a year. "Now we're being told," Nasaw said, "that the only way to save the library is to rip out its innards." To supporters of the CLP who pointed out that offsite storage had been going on for a decade already, he answered, "That's what frightens us." He didn't think the administrators could plausibly claim that service would improve. Was traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike suddenly going to decrease? He wouldn't believe the library's claims unless he was given many specifics, down to the details of the van schedules. "If it's going to work tomorrow, why doesn't it work today?"

Mark Hewitt: When the 42nd Street building was completed in 1911, Hewitt said, it was considered a marvel, centered around a new piece of technology: the elevator. The librarian John Shaw Billings, after a tour of the world's best libraries, came up with the idea of putting the reading room on top of the stacks, and as a preservationist, Hewitt felt that the stacks ought to be first on the list of what to landmark in the building. He considered them as important to the library, architecturally, as the steel train sheds were to the old Penn Station. Because of the sturdiness of their construction, Hewitt thought it would take an "engineering marvel" to dismantle them. For their day, they were considered fire-resistant, because closely packed books were expected to burn slowly, like timber, allowing fire rescue teams to put fires out before they could spread.

Stallion is a Python Package Manager interface created to provide an "easy-to-use" visual interface for Python newcomers. Today we have many nice distribution utilities like pip, distribute, etc, but we don't have a nice visual approach with these same goals.

Artifacts, challenges, etc. Jane McGonigal at NYPL.

backplane authority control, linked data. Do /names after the person's name in the URL to get a list of names. /identifiers.

identifiers can link back to the person's main url

bibliotheque nationale de france

One of the primary challenges in this work is getting data describing
books and periodicals (catalog records) to relate to data from
non-library sources, such as data about book talks on YouTube or to NPR broadcasts of author interviews or to archival collections. It’s all about connections in the data. The barer the data, the less described it is, the more it falls flat.

On the bibliographic side, every new Library of Congress subject heading a cataloger adds to a record creates a rich set of connective
possibilities downstream for people like me. Likewise, every uniform
title entry inserted into a record allows us to show users of our
software another edition of a given work in the context of all its
editions — a crucial feature for any discovery service in the library
materials space.

No software can create these connections if the underlying data hasn’t
been carefully composed into richly structured records, based on solid
analysis and comprehensive description....

But also: the expertise which catalogers bring to the task of
comprehensive bibliographic description has proven crucial to me as a
reference resource in my work of designing software to harvest and
process bibliographic information.

This study gives a snapshot ofthe trends in strategic plans of ARL members. It shows that many ARL members do not produce an annual report, and that it istherefore difficult to assess if their strategic plans are implemented successfully.

Google Search Education - information literacy tutorials from the Big G