The fourth annual statistical survey of the year's work in college and university library architecture. (Author)

The libraries featured in this article--all projects competed between July 1, 2009, and June 30, 2010--harmonize with and expand into their communities. Today's library is more than the mere sum of its parts. As evidenced by these 125 public library projects and 12 academic buildings, the thinking these days is for the library to harmonize with…

User experience (UX) is about arranging the elements of a product or service to optimize how people will interact with it. In this article, the author talks about the importance of user experience and discusses the design of user experiences in libraries. He first looks at what UX is. Then he describes three kinds of user experience design: (1)…

Though some libraries thrived in 2009, many more took a beating, and the fiscal crises that have struck many states and thousands of municipal governments in 2010 increase the odds that the effects of the new Great Recession will be felt over the long term. The decline in payroll and collections budgets have led to a loss of expertise and key…

The year in architecture offered grand facades, creative collaborations, and calamities overcome and viewed as opportunities. This article features 168 public building projects and 21 academic facilities completed between July 1, 2006, and June 30, 2007 that provide a glimpse of the future. Many libraries reported here achieved Leadership in…

With all the new advances in library technology--including metadata, social networking, and Web 2.0, along with the advent of nonlibrary and for-profit digital information companies like Wikisource and Google Print--librarians have barely had time to reflect on the nontechnical implications of these innovations. They need to take a step back and…

Few public buildings, and no libraries, have ever received the sort of acclaim that Seattle's central library garnered even before it opened in May 2004. "The Seattle building is thrilling from top to bottom," wrote Paul Goldberger in "The New Yorker." Herbert Muschamp, in the "New York Times," agreed: "In more…

This brief article reports on the 12th national Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) conference held April 7-10, 2004 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. William Mitchell, head of the media arts and sciences program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an architecture professor provided the conference attendees with the opening…

Discusses interoperability as a key challenge to digital libraries and describes efforts of the Open Archives initiative (formerly Universal Preprint Service initiative) to develop an open architecture that supports simultaneous searching and retrieval of papers from disparate archives. Highlights include scientific information and journal…

Lists over 100 association publications on topics of: aeronautics and space, aging, arts and architecture, computers, consumer guides, education, educational directories, government and politics, handicapped, health and medicine, housing and land use, libraries, management, recreation and hobbies, science and technology, social issues. A list of…

Although fall has always been "the" season of art books, spring catalogs--which for most art publishers stretch between January and June--are replete with intriguing and, in some cases, even groundbreaking new publications. The quality of the reproductions and scholarship continues to impress, but so does the growing diversity of subjects, as more…