Programs+

On September 5 the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a $50,000 grant to the New Mexico State Library (NMSL) for “Libraries Lead: A Creative Economy Initiative.” The funding will advance “Libraries as Launchpads,” a multi-partner program designed to enable small, rural, and tribal libraries across the state to serve as economic development centers and help entrepreneurs bring their business ideas to fruition.

As more and more libraries are finding, eliminating fees lowers barriers while still bringing books back into circulation.

Combining marketing savvy and hometown ties, Medina County’s Tina Sabol turned a library levy campaign into a communitywide advocacy win/

The Navajo Nation Library (NNL) is working to secure the funding necessary to digitize and catalog thousands of hours of stories, songs, and oral histories of the Navajo people, originally recorded in the 1960s by the Navajo Culture Center of the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity (ONEO).

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has issued a $1.2 million grant to remake the Harold F. Johnson Library at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, as a Knowledge Commons—an integrated, centralized hub of content, tools, and academic support services. While the library’s transformation over the next four years looks to a brand new service model, it also continues the tradition of innovation on which the library was established some 50 years ago.

Students and faculty of North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, are now diving into the first full school year with a new library at their disposal on the school’s Centennial Campus, and the rest of us get to watch as a new model hits its stride. The Hunt Library, which opened its doors in January after much anticipation and had the spring to work out any kinks, articulates the vision of the team at NCSU’s libraries. That team is led by Susan Nutter, vice provost and director of NCSU’s libraries and LJ’s 2005 Librarian of the Year. (We have a saying at LJ, “once a Librarian of the Year, always a Librarian of the Year,” and she keeps living up to it.)

Libraries need more vocal advocates than ever. It seems clear that trustees, as some of a library system’s more visible volunteers, need to make their voices heard with regard to advocacy as well.

It was a seismic move in the struggle to create a workable ebook access model for the users of America’s libraries. It was engineered by Joanne (Jo) Budler, the Kansas State Librarian, when she realized that an initial proposal in 2010 to renew the Kansas State Library (KSL) contract with OverDrive would increase administrative costs by some 700 percent over the next few years, as the state ebook deal was being restructured. Despite the risk of disrupting and even losing access to ebooks for the users of Kansas libraries, Budler rejected more than one proposal from OverDrive for a new contract until a year ago when she won the right to transfer titles from OverDrive to a new platform. The dispute set off a long (and public) national examination of library service agreements.

I was overjoyed when John Chrastka emailed to tell me about EveryLibrary, the new political action committee (PAC) he had just created. EveryLibrary will raise funds nationally and spend them on local library ballot initiatives like tax rates, bonds, and other referenda. It is difficult to understand why none of us in the profession nor our organizations did this decades ago.