It's not all bad

• A new survey reports that library usage is highest with patrons aged 18-30.

Mostly they're coming to use the computers, but still:

Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said.

"These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down," said Leigh Estabrook, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results.

"Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries," she said.

Words on wheels

• Anna Badkhen reports on the declining usage of bookmobiles in The Boston Globe.

I adore the idea of bookmobiles -- always have -- and yet, like most hardcore readers I've never actually used one. Growing up I used to see a bookmobile in my rural neck of the woods all the time, but I can only recall setting foot in it once; it was just easier for me to walk to the library after being freed from the Gulag Schoolpelago for the day. It would be sad to see them go.

Bookmobiles became popular in the 1950s, when they carried books to city neighborhoods and remote villages, said Thomas Moroney of Worcester, who owns one of the four companies that make bookmobiles in the United States. Back then, Moroney Monolite Bookmobiles built a new bookmobile every eight weeks.

"Way back in the glory days they were ordering four at a time," recalled Moroney, whose company built the Beverly bookmobile 20 years ago.

But by the 1980s, the popularity of bookmobiles began to fade. Specialists who study bookmobiles differ in their explanations. Some blame skyrocketing gas prices. Others say bookmobiles became irrelevant in communities where residents can get easy access to other resources, such as the Internet.

"I sold bookmobiles for 15 years, and I would come across people who said 'bookmobiles are dinosaurs' and 'bookmobiles are fading,' " said Tina Wilson, a branch manager at Cleveland Public Library.

So much for rehabilitation

• Books are disappearing from prison libraries.

It's mostly books about Islam -- surprise, surprise -- but still. I don't think that every person behind bars that picks up a book automatically sprouts a countdown-towards-rehabilitation timer on their foreheads, but at the same time, flipping a few pages is a lot better than parking a shiv between someone's ribs.

Feldman said inmates are permitted to order books on their own and bypass the chapel libraries. "So fundamentally this is not a case about what books the inmates have the ability to read," he said.

However, inmates say the rules have had a chilling effect.

Inmate Moshe Milstein told the judge by telephone that the chaplain at Otisville removed about 600 books from the chapel library on Memorial Day, including Harold S. Kushner's best-seller "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," a book that Norman Vincent Peale said was "a book that all humanity needs."

"There is definitely irreparable harm done to us already, and we would like the court to issue the injunction to get the books back as soon as possible," he said.

Inmate Douglas Kelly, who described himself as a representative of the prison's Muslim community, complained of "a denial of our First Amendment rights."

He said books on Islam already were the least represented in the library's collections and were reduced by half in the Memorial Day removal.

"A lot of what we are missing were definitely prayer books or prayer guides and religious laws on the part of the Muslim faith," he said.

Two sides to every library

Two articles caught my eye this week regarding libraries -- I subscribe to a daily RSS feed called "Library Link of the Day" which often yields interesting reads. (Gotta love the URL: tk421.net. Librarians are such dorks.)

• Chip Ward details the struggles librarians encounter with the homeless at AlterNet.

I practically grew up in libraries and bookstores, and there's always a nut or ten wandering around, stinking to high heaven and rambling about who knows what. You get used to it after a while but I must admit it would be nice to sit and read without being bothered by space cadets.

In bad weather -- hot, cold, or wet -- most of the homeless have nowhere to go but public places. The local shelters push them out onto the streets at six in the morning and, even when the weather is good, they are already lining up by nine, when the library opens, because they want to sit down and recover from the chilly dawn or use the restrooms. Fast-food restaurants, hotel lobbies, office foyers, shopping malls, and other privately owned businesses and properties do not tolerate their presence for long. Public libraries, on the other hand, are open and accessible, tolerant, even inviting and entertaining places for them to seek refuge from a world that will not abide their often disheveled and odorous presentation, their odd and sometimes obnoxious behaviors, and the awkward challenges they present to those who encounter them.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America's public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

• On a more positive note, a library cat is getting remembered thanks to a $1.2 million book deal.

Mike Wilson's article for the Associated Press talks about how a fondly-remembered library cat named -- wait for it -- Dewey Readmore Books will be immortalized by librarian Vicki Myron in a book for Warner -- er, Grand Central Publishing:

Myron found Dewey in the library's book drop on a cold January morning in 1988. After that, Dewey became famous worldwide, she said. TV crews came to the small northwest Iowa town from as far away as Japan to do stories on Dewey, and Myron said she has found more than 200 "hits" for Dewey on the Internet search engine Google.

Never could she have imagined the attention Dewey would get when she found him that cold winter morning.

"It just floored me," Myron said. "This is the way Dewey's whole life went. He drew people in his whole life from around the world. We had nothing to do with it. It's serendipitous.

"It's pretty amazing, but that's how Dewey's life went," she said.

Cats + books = happiness.

More librarian idiocy

• Susan Patron's Newberry Award-winning children's book The Higher Power of Lucky is being banned from school libraries.

Patron's crime against decency and humanity is using the word "scrotum":

[The book] has incurred the wrath of teachers and librarians over a passage on the opening page in which a character describes where a rattlesnake has stung his dog. Schools in several states are refusing to stock the book, which is intended for readers of nine to 12 years, and the controversy has unleashed a flurry of debate on scholastic and literary websites.

Writing in the industry magazine Publisher's Weekly on February 15, Patron said she was "shocked and horrified" by the attacks on her book.

Library police (the good kind)

• Joseph Huff-Hannon details the recent uphill battles waged by librarians in The Nation.

The day-to-day challenges librarians face are inherent in the job description: defending access to controversial or banned books, staving off budget cuts, and creating and expanding programs to draw more citizens into one of the few remaining genuinely public commons in American life. While the ethic of secrecy often prevails in the gathering and dissemination of corporate and governmental information, the work of a librarian is imbued with just the opposite. Be it in the capacity of archivist, reference librarian or information technology professional, a common thread is the profession's dogged commitment to safeguarding books, research and information to make knowledge more widespread, not less.

In the past few years this dedication has become more important than ever. With the federal government ever more intent on spying on its own citizens, and on classifying, concealing and manipulating larger swaths of information and intelligence, librarians and library custodians are on the front lines protecting freedom of inquiry and our right to privacy. And where right-wing groups, both local and national, have campaigned for censorship, librarians have also stepped up to the plate to defend minority points of view in their collections.

Digging for gold

• The AP profiles a guy with the best job ever: “Literary prospector.”

Having spent a large part of my youth whiling away hours upon hours in libraries and bookstores, this sounds like a great way to get paid for it, too. But it’s kind of a double-edged sword; I’m repeating myself, but with free access to online archives now many times larger than the Library of Alexandria, the market for this kind of thing is just going to get slimmer. Public domain laws only offer the artist limited protection, and it’s at least worth asking if the laws serve the artist, or those who think they’re entitled to a slice of the pie. Ah... I love the smell of capitalism in the morning.