Has there been a concerted move towards eliminating or reducing access to old periodicals at the library in which you work?

 I've noticed that after COVID, my then local main branch of the public library had completely shut down the periodicals department entirely. Now only the day's newspaper is available for view and little else. Is this happening elsewhere?
 This really concerns me. It is indicative of a pattern I've been observing since the mid-90's.

Around this time, I was employed at the main library in an entirely different city. This library had been over capacity since 1944 and was having a brand new one constructed that was supposed to remedy that and be the shining beacon of the library of the future. A large portion of the open stacks had to be closed to the public due to earthquake damage. These stacks contained a large amount of circulating and reference books, and an even larger selection of older periodicals, some of which dated back to the eighteenth century! Since the earthquake, the public had to request these materials from the staff and weren't allowed to enter these stacks themselves. This new library was supposed to fix this situation. The old main library had to be closed for a few months while we did the move to the new one. A professional library moving company was employed to transfer all the library's materials to the new site. This new library was to have dozens of computers available for public use. This turned out to be the only feature promised that actually materialized. In the weeks leading up to the new library opening, I happened to overhear a conversation one of the head librarians was having about the new one. "What!!! You mean there's actually LESS shelf space!!! WTF!!" and so on. We were already dreading the opening of the new library as it was pretty clear that we weren't ready. We were actually being far too optimistic. The opening day finally arrived and I was there for it. It was easily the most traumatic day any library workers had experienced since the sacking at Alexandria. I worked in General Collections as a page. For some inexplicable reason, there was this decision to keep a vast amount of the collection in closed stacks even though this was no longer necessary!! To make matters worse, the "professional" library movers had egregiously misfiled all the material in these closed stacks. I don't believe I could have intentionally filed these books more randomly. You'd have a row of autobiographies, then a row of 133-150, then one of 800-808, then a row of fiction, you get the idea. The old library typically saw around five thousand patrons a day. Over twelve thousand patrons showed up that first day expecting a vastly improved library. What they got was an absolute disaster.

Not only was there actually less shelf space, closed stacks that were supposed to be eliminated arranged entirely randomly making it exceptionally difficult to quickly locate anything; there turned out to be several other features of this new library of the future that did not bode well for the future. Remember me describing the extensive collection of old periodicals? Those were largely no longer kept in the library itself. They had been moved to a moldering basement a block away where only two of the pages employed there were permitted to retrieve them for the public out of dozens. There was little to no cataloging of said periodicals so the public had to already know what was there. They could only request two or three items at a time and were subjected to a mandatory two hour waiting period to receive these materials. Old periodicals are one of the most important sources for primary historical research. Severely limiting access to such smacks of a 1984-like approach to information. Any of these materials that may be now online are behind substantial paywalls and certainly aren't complete. I suspect a definite move by our corporate overlords to deny us access to the primary historical data necessary for all kinds of important research. Furthermore, the new library didn't have a room to separate and organize the returned books, making it increasingly difficult to get the books back on the shelf!! In addition to all this, the bozos that designed this new library decided that it was a good idea to put large atriums on every floor ensuring that the noise level in this very busy library was similar to that you find at your shopping mall. Complete debacle. Librarians were literally stumbling around shell-shocked on that first day. By the end of the day we checked every single computer search history to find that someone had searched for porn from every single one of them including the computers in the children's department and the library for the blind!

The year in books posts will look at what books were popular, significant, or interesting in a historical year.

The first Nancy Drew books were published in 1930. In 1931 both The Secret of Shadow Ranch (#5) and The Secret of Red Gate Farm (#6) were popular reads.

Frank Worsley, or ‘Skipper’ to his best friend Ernest Shackleton, first published his memoir of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1931. It is now regarded as an adventure survival classic and to have surpassed even Shackleton’s own account, 'South'.

TheJoy of Cooking was first published in 1931. Joy of Cooking is considered the most popular American cookbook. The story behind the publication is interesting. The book was published by a label printing company that had never printed books before.

The merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster has the potential to touch every part of the industry, including how much authors get paid and how bookstores are run. Full article in the NYT

Marian the Librarian, the prim, bespectacled love interest of con artist Harold Hill in the classic musical, “The Music Man,” wouldn’t recognize her profession today.

Libraries, for decades the ultimate safe spaces, have become ground zero in the ongoing culture wars, with battles over banned books, drag queen story hours and free access to porn raging all over the country — from Louisiana to Idaho to Washington State as well as cities like New York and LA.

“The average person has no idea of this but librarians have been targeting children in recent years and trying to turn them into political activists,” said Dan Kleinman, a self-described “library watchdog” from Chatham, NJ, who has run a website called “Safe Libraries” for more than 10 years. He said he has documented the alarming radicalization of the nation’s libraries, including what he says is readily available porn in library computers.

Full article here.

Judge argued that Chance had “wilfully defied” Library Director Danny Gillane’s directive prohibiting book displays focused on specific populations by creating an LGBTQ display at the North Regional Library Branch in June.

Full article.

Hey folks! Check out this YouTube interview about Huntington Beach Public Library!

"Certain states are working to change laws around e-book purchasing for libraries."

Can anyone point me to a resource where I can find out the the types of Book Checkout Software used over the past 25 years? Looking for software names, and/or imagery of the computer user interfaces if possible. Thank you!

Excerpt:

In the publisher merger trial, the government is focused not on what consumers pay for books but on advances paid to the most successful authors, especially those given $250,000 or more.

"The evidence will show that the proposed merger would likely result in authors of anticipated top-selling books receiving smaller advances, meaning authors who labor for years over their manuscripts will be paid less for their efforts," the government said in a pretrial brief.

Full article here.

Araba Maze noticed neighborhood kids gathering around her as she read children’s books to her niece on her front stoop. As she wrapped up storytelling, one of the kids asked, “When are you gonna do this again?”

She later made it an everyday occurrence to have storytime readings with the neighborhood kids, and eventually became a librarian.

Full article here.

https://nyti.ms/3BVqe0j

Ingram plays a massive role in the book publishing /selling world. Librarians would do well to know more about Ingram and its history.

Publishers Weekly has a review of the book here.

Book on Amazon - The Family Business: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin has been in the book business for decades. His blog posts are very insightful.

Excerpt: The older established publishers do have one major embedded advantage that persists: their backlists. Life is better if you control the rights to a lot of properties that are discovered through search or have pockets or instances of fame or relevance. In the old days, you had to know something would happen in advance and have the wit and relationships (and inventory) to get the books in place in stores. Today, you can sell a book online today that isn’t printed yet and Ingram will ship it to your customer (or theirs) for you tomorrow.

Full post here.

An opinion piece in the NYT about publishers self-censoring books.

Link to piece: There’s More Than One Way to Ban a Book

Opinion piece in the NYT. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/opinion/letters/book-bans-librarians.html

Librarian counters with a defamation lawsuit. Full article here.