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Every librarian wants to go to the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Washington, DC, June 24-29. Despite that, more than half of those asked informally said they can't afford it. The good news is a cornucopia of programs aimed at nearly every need of librarians of all types and including every best practice in libraries. Many offer practical applications of the profession's core values. Even better, most sessions are free once a participant pays to register. There is advice for internal and external communications, as well as strategies and practical political tips for public budget battles and other advocacy. Programs on the benefit and need for green libraries and librarianship are side by side with programs on how to employ the latest hard- and software in staff development, publicity, reference and research work, and information literacy.

In the past three years, the Union County Carnegie Library (UCCL) in South Carolina has "been transformed." The library board, selected by the county supervisors, knew something had to be done. In October 2005, the board hired Nancy E. Rosenwald as UCCL director. Longing to get back to South Carolina from western Connecticut, Rosenwald was immediately attracted to the job posting by the photo of UCCL's gem of a beaux arts Carnegie building. "I saw the picture and decided I wanted to work there," she says. The resulting three-year transformation of UCCL was total. It changed what one observer called a kind of "selective club warehousing an out-of-date collection and occasionally functioning computers" into the "inclusive, modern, service-oriented, community center" the UCCL board sought. This article features the UCCL as the winner of LJ's 2009 Best Small Library in America Award, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The library is located in the city of Union (pop. 8,973) and serves a number of smaller communities in the surrounding rural area.

To librarians at the Delaware Division of Libraries, Governor Ruth Ann Minner, Secretary of State Harriet Smith Windsor, and Assistant Secretary of State Rick Geisenberger are "the Delaware Dream Team." The governor and her team supported funding for the 2004 statewide effort that resulted in the Delaware Master Plan for Library Services and Construction. Governor Minner has made efforts to weave libraries into the life of her state. As such, Delaware's librarians and libraries of all types have prospered from the team's leadership. This article describes the initiatives made by Minner, Windsor, and Geisenberger--the "Delaware Dream Team"--to support and improve Delaware's libraries.

Since the early 1990s, Carl Malamud has made it his business to return to the public what is rightfully theirs: free access to public information. Despite legislation that mandates such access to government information, some categories of information have been excluded, notable among them court opinions (with the exception of the U.S. Supreme Court) and state laws. Working most recently through his foundation, Public.Resource.org, Malamud is spearheading several initiatives to digitize or otherwise make government information available. Some of his most recent initiatives include digitizing government videos available from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and National Archives (NARA) and making them available through the Internet Archive and YouTube, freeing fee-based court decisions available from PACER (Paper Access to Court Electronic Records), and bringing Oregon State information into the public domain. In this interview, Malamud discusses some of these initiatives, as well as barriers to access, trends in copyright, potential legal fixes, and where libraries fit into the puzzle.

A traditional librarian argues that there is no "science of information" and that librarianship belongs to the humanities not the sciences. Traces the replacement of librarians with "machine people,""digital theorists," and other "off-the-wall types" from the 1960s to the present. Proposes a course of action. (PEN)

As a college student, Phil Davis intended to become a scientist. But as he studied population genetics of a family of mosses, monitoring his experiments daily, he wondered, "Is this really how I want to spend my life?" After taking time off to read philosophy and bike his way around France, his answer was, "No." Instead, he decided to advance the research of others as a librarian. He didn't stop researching, he simply applied his quantitative skills to the problems that academic libraries were confronting, like the apparent decline in students' use of libraries and their understanding of information quality once they discovered the Internet. In 1999, analyzing three years' of citations from students' term paper bibliographies, Davis published an important study documenting "The Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior." Convinced by this research that library-based instruction is "severely compromised if what students learn from librarians is not reflected in the class assignment," Davis teamed up with a professor teaching Introduction to Microeconomics to change students' citation behavior. When the professor provided guidelines for, and made grades contingent upon, the use of scholarly research resources, "book citations rose, journal citations increased dramatically, and web citations decreased?," he reported in an update of his original article. There were critical library management problems that needed Davis's data analysis skills as well, including the soaring prices of science journals. As chair of the library's Serial Evaluation Committee charged with a multiyear cancellation project (a group he christened "the Ginsu team"), he did citation analysis to determine what his university's core journal collection was and published an article on the methodology so other librarians could use it. Davis is a man of great intellectual seriousness, but seriousness is not the first thing his friends mention when they talk about him. Bob Molyneux of NCLIS enthusiasms," who can explain complex research findings to a variety of audiences in ways that are amusing and readily understandable.

Over the last 15 years, the book review landscape has changed seismically. Reviewing is no longer centralized, with a few big voices leading the way, but fractured among numerous multifarious voices found mostly on the web. In turn, readers aren't playing the captive audience any more. Undone by economics, many traditional print sources have been shuttered or, like the formerly stand-alone "Los Angeles Times" and "Washington Post Book World" review sections, either collapsed into the rest of the paper or moved entirely online. The "New York Times Book Review" is still standing but is half the size it was a few decades back. Meanwhile, book talk thrives on the web, with eager readers thronging LibraryThing and Goodreads, trading recommendations on Facebook and Twitter, and pushing their own reviews on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. From the most casual forums to rich and rigorous sites like the Millions, reviews are energetically spun out, then tweeted, rated, challenged, and otherwise subject to endless feedback. Pointedly, a chunk of this conversation comes not from critics picked expressly for their expertise but enthusiasts who may or may not be the best adviser one could find on a particular book. In print or online, traditional reviews still offer something unimpeachable while consumer commentaries have the verve and single-mindedness to do something that traditional reviews cannot. The author asserts that today's raging stream of voices has radically altered the idea of reviewing, with huge consequences for book culture itself.

This article presents an excerpt of Library Journal's (LJ's) Movers & Shakers ideas on how to ensure a vital library for the future. Several identify a disconnect between what librarians and libraries do and what users think they do. Mending this gap, they say, would transform library recruitment and library support. While specific insights on technology abound, the Movers agree that a vital library isn't about a single technology but how it all gets deployed (very well), when (quickly), and with how much freedom to innovate and take risks (lots). Similarly, when hiring, no single skill will stand out; instead, more flexible and creative people with both a great attitude and a hunger to serve are needed. The Movers' responses point to the need to create, above all, a relevant, thriving library that will serve users well into the future.

In this article, the author presents an interview with Brewster Kahle, leader of the Open Content Alliance (OCA). OCA book scan program is an alternative to Google's library project that aims to make books accessible online. In this interview, Kahle discusses his views on the challenges of getting books on the Web, on Google's library partnerships, and the progress of OCA. Kahle also discusses the intertwined future of books and libraries.

This article, based on the Periodicals Prices Survey of 2006, evaluates the changing trends of electronic periodical marketplace in 2006 and indicates what to expect in 2007. The 2005-2006 academic year was one of competing realities: the buying and selling of electronic journals continued apace, while the posting and crawling of every kind of free content on the web captured the imagination of the scholarly world. The former was overshadowed by the latter, and no wonder. Rival projects to digitize entire libraries full of books dominated headlines and spun off copyright arguments worldwide. Robust growth of open access repositories and the drift toward author self-archiving combined to populate the web with a surprising amount of free content that was initially available only through subscription. With Google Scholar and Google Library underway, Google strengthened its claim as the ubiquitous front door to the web and all of its content. The Open Access (OA) movement again occupied center stage in the journals marketplace in 2005, eclipsing issues of price, publisher mergers, and big deals. Journal publishers responded to mounting interest in open access in a variety of ways--some friendly, some not. This year's periodicals price survey looks at these and other factors that are shaping the periodicals marketplace. Three Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) databases--Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Science Citation Index--provide the bulk of titles used in the study. In addition, the survey includes data on titles in EBSCO Publishing's Academic Search Premier. The data are limited to prepriced titles (as opposed to standing-order or bill-later titles) that can be ordered through a vendor and are current as of February 14, 2006. This article highlights some of the trends revealed in the findings of the periodicals price survey. Some of these trends included: librarians, vendors, and publishers continuing to trade within a market dominated by all things electronic; books upstaging journals in digitization; the largest publishers bundling their content; concern over archiving digital content returning to the spotlight; Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) impacting the market; scholars getting smarter; funders getting wiser; and publishers getting bolder. (Contains 9 tables.)

Librarians, university press publishers, and scholars, find themselves at an unusually stimulating and challenging time in the history of these respective professions. The forces of technology, and privatization are changing the nature of their work environment, even as their fundamental mission remains, for now, the same. Committed as they both are to the world of ideas and the life of the mind, it is imperative that they come together in these uncertain times, that they each draw on distinct expertise to craft a new model or models, however haltingly at first, rather than allowing the winds of change, and unbridled commercialism, to drive them apart.

Discusses the growing trend in aggregated article databases and includes individual views from a panel discussion. Highlights include publisher's embargoes of current content; views of academic libraries and of vendors; full-text issues; the Tasini v. New York Times Supreme Court case; consortial buying; and future possibilities. (LRW)

Reports on interviews with six librarians and one faculty member about their views on what the future holds for the undergraduate library and what it needs to do in order to remain a vital and relevant part of the campus community. Topics include digitization, expanded hours of service, and bibliographic instruction. (LRW)

Interviews with three CEOs--UMI (University Microfilms International), OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), and Gale Research--focus on outlooks for information and libraries. Discusses expanded educational Web services/courseware, library role in delivery, electronic dissertation publishing, digital data conversion, thesauri/indexing, union catalog, extending membership benefits, costs/fees, global networks; home access, library market, K-through-life strategy, and profitability. (AEF)

Reports on Bill and Melinda Gates's tour of Alabama, the first state to be wired to the Internet by the nonprofit Gates Library Foundation, and the model for connecting 1000 more libraries this year. Mutual appreciation between Alabama librarians and the Gateses resulted. An interview with Bill Gates focuses on challenges libraries face in obtaining Internet access. (AEF)