Meredith Schwartz and Matt Enis

At LJ’s 2022 Design Institute in New York City, held at the New York Public Library's Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on June 9, five libraries in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Illinois, Connecticut, and New Jersey enlisted architects and attendees to brainstorm on upcoming library design challenges.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Broward County Library, FL, to close its branches to the public, it immediately surveyed patron needs and created a targeted, data-driven marketing campaign to inform customers about electronic resources, online programs, and other content the library was offering. Los Angeles Public Library created new cardholders with its Art Card, designed by Gajin Fujita, an established graffiti artist. These very different campaigns, aimed directly at patron needs and preferences, earned the two libraries Honorable Mention for LJ's 2020 Marketer of the Year Award.

The 2017 conferences held by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L), in March and April respectively, covered trends ranging from diversity to emerging technology.

Every American Library Association (ALA) conference produces a bumper crop of news from the companies that serve libraryland, as each tends to time its biggest debuts to the event, and this year was no exception. Here’s an assortment of what we learned on the exhibit floor. Did we miss your news? Please add it in the comments!

The 2014 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition, held June 26 – July 1 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, saw some 13,019 attendees. Though this is a pretty substantial drop-off compared with the 20,237 attendees who came to Chicago in 2013, it is higher than the 12,000+ attendees who visited Annual in Anaheim, CA in 2012. Critiques of the location, which has not hosted an ALA annual conference since 1973, included the vast distances between event sites and the expensive transportation—and, of course, the heat, which topped out at 111 degrees. However, those who did attend seemed excited about the exhibit hall’s 800 company offerings, and heavy crowds surging toward the galley giveaways greeted the exhibit openings on both Friday evening and Saturday morning.

On June 6, the City University of New York (CUNY) held its first library assessment conference. Called Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment, the event grew from its initial target of 100 attendees to almost twice that many, and positive feedback from many attendees included calls for the conference to be repeated, or even turn into an annual event. Several recurring themes became leit motifs running throughout the day: turning from an emphasis on exclusively quantitative to qualitative assessment, libraries partnering with faculty on instruction, and the intersection of outcomes measurement and predictive analytics in a new granular portrait of individual students’ library use.

“Penguin will resume doing business with OverDrive as of this morning,” Penguin spokesperson Erica Glass told LJ on September 25. According to a blog post by Karen Estrovich, collection development manager for OverDrive, 17,000 Penguin ebooks are already “live and available for purchase in OverDrive Marketplace.” Although Estrovich refers to the transaction as a purchase, the books are being offered for a one year term on a one copy/one user lending model.

At ALA annual, record crowds shared enthusiasm for new technology, tools, and team-ups to promote core library values such as privacy and diversity