Report presents selected topics from the The Library in the Life of the User meeting including: environmental factors that are driving libraries to reconsider their role; the range of users served by libraries; the range of choices that will be made when undertaking user research; and achieving a balance between serving the needs of user communities and fulfilling institutional goals. Additionally, the report encapsulates considerations and guidelines for planning and conducting a user study. Finally, the report records some core themes that flowed out of the meeting--he need to adapt, empower, partner and engage and concludes with some suggestions for future action.

Report presents selected topics from the The Library in the Life of the User meeting including: environmental factors that are driving libraries to reconsider their role; the range of users served by libraries; the range of choices that will be made when undertaking user research; and achieving a balance between serving the needs of user communities and fulfilling institutional goals. Additionally, the report encapsulates considerations and guidelines for planning and conducting a user study. Finally, the report records some core themes that flowed out of the meeting--he need to adapt, empower, partner and engage and concludes with some suggestions for future action.

This compilation provides a sequential overview of some of OCLC Research's user behavior research findings that articulate the need for the design of future library services to be all about the user.

Despite calls for electronic, virtual, digital libraries without walls, the walled variety are still being built, some of them massive. This book explores the reasons for this contradiction by examining several notable new library facilities around the world to see how modern expectations for libraries are being translated into concrete and steel. More and more libraries are looking at change not as a dreaded hazard but as an opportunity that can itself be seized to strengthen the library in the areas of mission, technologies, facilities, funding, and organizational structure. Thirteen libraries are discussed—by a librarian or administrator who worked on the project. Each author writes about the design and building concerns that were particularly relevant to that library: philosophy, political issues, or any other concerns that affected planning, building, and services in the new facility. Introductory and concluding chapters identify underlying values and themes, tying everything together. The unique combinations of issues, constraints, and opportunities show how libraries are planning to fit into the approaching era of virtual information delivery.

What is the role of a library when users can obtain information from any location? And what does this role change mean for the creation and design of library space? Six authors an architect, four librarians, and a professor of art history and classics explore these questions this report. The authors challenge the reader to think about new potential for the place we call the library and underscore the growing importance of the library as a place for teaching, learning, and research in the digital age.

In the face of rapid change and an ever-widening constellation of challenges, it’s crucial for library leaders to pull back to the question of “why?” Plotting a sustainable way forward depends upon recommitting ourselves to our underlying values, such as customer service and community-building, while fostering the improvements that change makes possible. With passion, patience, and fortitude, libraries can stride confidently into the future. In this book, noted speakers and consultants Bignoli and Stara speak directly to library directors, managers, administrators, and technology staff, offering concrete guidance on setting or resetting strategic priorities. Taking an interconnected and specific approach to planning for and strengthening the library environment as a whole, their book discusses why libraries should embrace change as a fundamental part of library life; explores how to harness rapid change to provide more responsive, user-centered library service; addresses the ways in which libraries straddle the physical and the digital, in areas such as service provision and collections, illuminating how they overlap and can be improved using similar philosophies; presents both a comprehensive overview of library technologies as well as related team and change management advice, all grounded in user experience principles; shows how the concepts of sustainability and flexibility apply to physical space planning and design, from furniture selection and arrangement to infrastructure; and provides sound guidance on project management, problem solving, preparing for future challenges, personal reflection and self-care, and other leadership topics.

Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.