Just after that one significant law passed on Friday night, Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn met up downtown to make another important announcement: A balanced, on-time budget for Fiscal Year 2012. Details of that budget are still emerging, but the official press release boasts, “We saved … libraries.” But “saved” is relative. While no sources are sure of actual numbers yet, the agreement should prevent branch closures and lay-offs, though service is still likely to drop from six to five days.

Make no mistake, this was a much better outcome than many library supporters were expecting. But this year's wrangling also represents [...]

In yet another horrible illustration of what happens when the slavering corpocrats get behind the wheel of anything whatsoever, Gary E. Strong, the UCLA University Librarian, passed around a letter yesterday outlining the need for a possible UC-wide boycott of Nature Publishing Group. The letter, signed by Laine Farley, Richard A. Schneider and Brian E.C. Schottlaender, three of the top UC library honchos, is harsh.

“Closing libraries is child abuse.” —Author Alan Bennett is strongly against plans to shut a library near his home in North Yorkshire. [Via]

Popped monocle alert: Nobody is silent in libraries anymore!

In the 1908 booklet Books for the People, the Midwestern librarian Henry E. Legler wrote: "Following in the wake of the great public library movement, which in less than two decades has dotted the cities of the United States with buildings that house millions of books for the people, came systems of traveling libraries."

Legler was speaking of what we call bookmobiles, which began to connect the rural cities of America during the early twentieth century.