The following is posted on behalf of Nancy Robertson, State Librarian, and Randy Dykhuis, MLC Executive Director. Update for Michigan libraries from Randy Dykhuis and Nancy Robertson about 1) MeLCat servers and 2) the status of NCIP: ———————————————————— 1. MeLCat servers MeLCat is run on several servers. There are two that the DCB libraries use …Read more »

Meredith Farkas is conducting a 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere. If you are a library-blogger, take the survey here. And please pass the word on to other library-bloggers.

Mark your calendars for April 15, 2008, for the MLC Technical Services Conference to be held in Lansing! Our keynote speakers will be Karen Calhoun of OCLC and Tim Spalding of Library Thing. Karen Calhoun is the author of the Library of Congress report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other …Read more »

MeL Databases will be getting some new databases this fall when the new contracts begin on October 1st. Gale has generously started access to their new databases early. To access the new Gale databases – Chiltons and Business & Company Resource Center – log into any Gale MeL Database through http://mel.org or via your library’s …Read more »

The Michigan Supreme Court issued a decision today (July 26, 2007) in Goldstone v. Bloomfield Township Public Library in favor of the Library. Click here for link to Supreme Court opinion (PDF – 51 pages). In a four-to-three split, the Supreme Court held that Article 8 section 9 of the Michigan Constitution does not require …Read more »

Nader Qaimari, InfoTrac Product Manager at Gale, has announced PowerSearch enhancements coming soon: During the week of August 13th, Gale will release a set of new features to Gale’s InfoTrac databases and the PowerSearch platform. These new features will automatically be turned on and be made available to all PowerSearch users. We are extremely excited …Read more »

Evette Atkin from MLC is attending the Gaming, Learning and Libraries Symposium in Chicago this week.  She’s blogging the symposium live at The unLibrarian blog.

With the impending release of the final Harry Potter book this weekend, yesterday the New York Times posted the questions “who was your Harry Potter? what were your favorite books when you were a kid?” on their blog, and they’ve already received more than 1000 responses from readers. See: http://news.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/who-was-your-harry-potter/ For those of you out …Read more »

Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a white paper on ILL written by Anne K. Beaubien, Director, Cooperative Access Services, University of Michigan Library. The paper analyzes trends in ILL activity in US academic and research libraries over the past two decades. One trend that Beaubien notes in the white paper is that ILL …Read more »

An interesting NY Times article about Public Libraries and the Dewey Decimal System. “Neighborhoods” vs Dewey for shelving and cataloging. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/us/14dewey.html