At a time when government funding cuts mean that public libraries face an uncertain future and need to make sure they stay relevant to young users and their families, this paper explores what counts as literacy for young children in a public library in a town in the East Midlands, UK. It is based on a study which adopted an ethnographic approach,…

Five of the world's largest libraries have joined Google in a herculean effort to digitize millions of books and make every sentence searchable. The project involves libraries at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, in England, as well as the New York Public Library. It could…

A possibility for improving library output measures would be to incorporate in catalog entries and charging codes a symbol indicating the type or level of difficulty of each adult non-fiction title. Experiments were conducted by the Public Library Research Group to define such categories. (Author/LS)

This report describes a study to investigate the improved efficiency and effectiveness of prison library provision in England and Wales, through the development and validation of relevant performance indicators to be used as part of quality assurance programs. Prison libraries perform important educational, rehabilitative, and recreational…