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 »

“Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update.” http://demo.openlibrary.org/

In February 2007, the OCLC Board of Trustees authorized a review of OCLC’s governance structure. The review, which will be facilitated by the Higher Education Consultancy Group in the United Kingdom, will evaluate current and alternative governance forms for OCLC as it becomes an increasingly global cooperative. To ensure wide consultation for the study, the Board, OCLC …Read more »

As part of its LJ Industry Leaders’ Library Advocacy web page, ProQuest has put together a Library Marketing Kit. The tools in the kit are designed to help libraries promote their online resources to their patrons. The kit includes a how-to guide on marketing online resources, a digital ad that can be downloaded to a …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

MLC’s party last night in Second Life was a big success, thanks to Evette Atkin who planned and hosted the event. Many people attended, including librarians from Marshall District Library, Library of Michigan, University of Michigan, and University of Detroit Mercy – very nice to see local librarians there, as well as others from around …Read more »