Big Changes on the Drawing Board for Omaha Public Library

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Link to September 17 Omaha World Herald article, "Omaha libraries at a crossroads".

Excerpt:   If Omaha Public Library officials have their way, some major changes are coming to the city's library system.

Among the ideas proposed in a library planning report:

• Omaha's flagship library would leave its downtown location and move closer to the middle of the city, into a new building at or near Crossroads Mall at 72nd and Dodge Streets.\
• The Swanson Library at 90th Street and West Dodge Road would be closed, replaced by the new Crossroads-area main library.
• The current downtown site could be sold to a developer for a high-rise building.
• A smaller branch would be built elsewhere in downtown Omaha, probably near Joslyn Art Museum.
• Two new suburban libraries would be added: one near the Village Pointe shopping center near 168th Street and West Dodge Road, the other near 180th and Q Streets.

Don't grab your library cards and look for those new facilities quite yet, however.

None of those projects has been approved, the library's executive director, Gary Wasdin, said in an interview Thursday. In fact, the city is still waiting for a consultant to finish cost estimates later this month.

L.A. Weekly Takes Mayor Villaraigosa to Task

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Link to September 16 L. A. Weekly article, "City of Airheads: Villaraigosa Dismantles L.A.'s Vaunted Library System".

Excerpt: Today, students in Los Angeles are still venturing to public libraries — and in huge numbers. A recent survey by the Los Angeles Public Library system shows that 90,000 young people, or 15,000 students a day, visit one of the city's 73 libraries every week. With most LAUSD schools starting up this week, libraries soon will be packed.

Many public library systems — the five biggies are Boston, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles — have faced an ugly two years of recession-spawned budget cuts and trimmed hours. Yet political leaders who control the purse strings for the biggest cities fought and saved their libraries from severe harm.

The city that has not done that is Los Angeles.

Here, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa executed an unprecedented, and punishing, raid on the libraries. Last spring he convinced the City Council to close the city's central and eight regional libraries on Sundays, then slashed $22 million from the 2010-11 budget and closed all 73 libraries on Mondays beginning July 19.

Related articles:
Hours Reduced at library for 3rd time in 7 months. (7/20/2010)
Don't let the library get washed away.  (7/19/2010)
The Middleton Public Library is open more hours than the Los Angeles Central Library.  (7/16/2010)
Los Angeles Board of Library Commissioners does Mayor's bidding.  (6/12/2010)
Another elective body thinks libraries are dispensable.  (5/5/2010)
Cutting library hours:  Charlotte Mecklenburg this week, LA next week, who's next?  (4/6/2010)
More news under the same headline.  (3/24/2010)

Save America's Libraries (The Los Angeles Story).  (3/23/2010)

Putting Together David Markson's Personal Library Again

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Link to September 19 Boston Globe article by Craig Fehrman, "Lost libraries. The strange afterlife of authors’ book collections".

Excerpt: The news of Liddell’s discovery quickly spread through Facebook and Twitter’s literary districts, and [David] Markson’s fans realized that his personal library, about 2,500 books in all, had been sold off and was now anonymously scattered throughout The Strand, the vast Manhattan bookstore where Liddell had bought her book. And that’s when something remarkable happened: Markson’s fans began trying to reassemble his books. They used the Internet to coordinate trips to The Strand, to compile a list of their purchases, to swap scanned images of his notes, and to share tips. (The easiest way to spot a Markson book, they found, was to look for the high-quality hardcovers.) Markson’s fans told stories about watching strangers buy his books without understanding their origin, even after Strand clerks pointed out Markson’s signature. They also started asking questions, each one a variation on this: How could the books of one of this generation’s most interesting novelists end up on a bookstore’s dollar clearance carts?

Related articles:
The surprising fate of David Markson's library (which wasn't all that surprising).  A 9/17/2010 post from reporter Craig Fehrman blog.
Oh I get it, it's a sci-fi novel!  (LRB blog,7/26/2010)
David Markson's library for sale, and it's going fast.  (Los Angeles Times, 7/29/2010)

The Strand, 18 miles of books.