Jennifer Howard

This is a week to be grateful. I’m grateful for many things, including libraries. I like to visit them. I like taking my kids to them. I like writing about them. It makes me sad whenever I hear that a library has to cut staff or services or that it can’t buy the materials it wants to share with its patrons. I’m sorry when I read that public libraries are caught in the middle between publishers and Amazon. These are not flush and easy times for many libraries. You’ll get no argument from me on that point. So here’s a… Read more...

On a wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, my 7-year-old daughter reminded me that our local library was having its book sale. So she, her younger brother, and I piled in the car and headed over. After about 20 minutes, the kids settled themselves in a corner with a stack of books more than a foot high. I kept browsing. By the time we were ready to settle up, we had picked out 14 books, which set us back a whopping $9. None of what we bought was rare: some Magic Treehouse adventures , a few Nancy Drew and… Read more...

Greetings from Seattle. Yes, it’s raining. (To be fair, it was sunny yesterday.) I’m here for the Chronicle, covering the 14th biannual conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries. What’s on the minds of 3,000 academic librarians? Quite a lot. Read my first report here. (You all do realize that reporters don’t usually get to write their own headlines, right?) Substance-related foonote: I’m still looking for a good cup of coffee, having vowed not to set foot in a Starbucks while I’m here. Coffee-shop recommendations from Seattle aficionados would be welcome. If you have ever been to a… Read more...

Is there anybody who isn’t covering the Democratic convention? Even the Library of Congress has a correspondent there. She’s photog Carol M. Highsmith, and she’s been filing images (copyright-free) from the Mile-High City. She’ll be filing from Minneapolis-St. Paul, too. Highsmith has already donated a large (also copyright-free) image archive to the LOC: The online presentation of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive features photographs of landmark buildings and architectural renovation projects in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. The first 23 groups of photographs contain more than 2,500 images and date from 1980 to 2005, with many views in… Read more...

Greetings from the Blue Hill Public Library, which luckily for me has free wifi. (The inn where we’re staying is a Net-free zone, and I had to file a book review that, in a moment of bad planning, I failed to turn in before we hit the road.) This may be the swankest public library I have ever been in. It even has a separate area for young adults, with signs posted asking grown-ups to make way for YAs. They have loaner laptops and so much polished wood everywhere I feel like I’m on board somebody’s yacht. Fittingly, there’s a… Read more...

I’m talking rodents, not computer peripherals. Does your local library have a cat? Also check this out. (Via LIS News.)… Read more...