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From fears of anarchist terrorists in the early twentieth century through cold war conflict and contemporary fears of extremist religious terrorists, the American library community responded to the use of libraries as a site for surveillance and source of dangerous information in an increasingly proactive and organized manner. This paper traces the evolution of privacy norms and standards within the American library profession, focusing on the lack of regard for patron confidentiality in the early twentieth century, the development of privacy norms in the American Library Association (ALA) Code of Ethics in 1938, and the increased protection of privacy rights as the profession's conceptions of privacy formed around the ALA's codes. Using Nissenbaum's (2009) "contextual integrity" framework within a broad historical analysis of ALA publications, the paper examines the role of its codes regarding privacy in establishing a normative framework around which the continued application of privacy standards in libraries has taken place despite new technological challenges and continued pressure from governments and outside organizations to exploit patron information. The paper concludes that the ALA's unambiguous stance on, and consistent advocacy for, privacy standards across the profession has enabled reactions to violations of privacy norms that have shifted with technologies and new social pressures. The ALA's historic ability to maintain and protect these professional standards serves as a compelling model for new information professions that work to set professional standards in areas that range from data-analytics to social networking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical bibliography which examines U.S. library history literature from 1997 through 2015 to map the current research around race, ethnicity, and racism in such literature. Seventeen years ago Wayne Wiegand (2000) examined fifty years of published research literature (1947-1997) in American library history looking for varied theoretical perspectives. He argued for the use of more critical theories, and for library historians to join with social and cultural historians to help contextualize library history within broader cultural and social forces in the United States. The paper examines the progress of histories around race, racism, and people of color in libraries since Wiegand's call, and discovered that theoretical perspectives around library histories have broadened into the areas of race and ethnicity, but that there is still much research to be done. Many topics and time periods are still underresearched. For example, the paper found few or no articles that focus on race or ethnicity in the histories of U.S. private libraries, the predecessor to the public library, special libraries, or library education; it also found many articles in ethnic studies journals rather than LIS journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than thirty years the United States Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) has been a major player in the dissemination and preservation of agricultural information. Beginning as a network of institutions, USAIN early on restructured to an individual-based organization. As a community of practice, USAIN members conduct work through committees and interest groups and maintain close communication through a variety of outlets. Biennial conferences offer face-to-face networking opportunities, and conference scholarships have been successful in engaging potential new members directly in organizational activities. The results of a survey of scholarship winners provide insights into perceptions of the organization and the benefits of membership. Through the years, USAIN also has initiated and supported projects that have helped build a more efficient and effective agricultural information system to inform and educate a broad range of audiences involved in the areas of agriculture, food, and nutrition. These include a national preservation program, a national text-digitizing project, the AGRICOLA database, and the Agriculture Network Information Collaborative (AgNIC). This paper chronicles the history of the organization and the impact it has had on agricultural information professionals and national agricultural information initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes past preservation efforts with agricultural literature in the United States, as well as current projects, challenges, and trends. Starting in the early 1990s, preservation of U.S. historical agricultural publications experienced a period of coordinated scholarly evaluation and funding. In 1993 the combined efforts of the United States Agricultural Information Network and librarians at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library produced the National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature. It was an ambitious effort to save the nation's historical print-agricultural literature from deterioration. This effort ranged from nationally significant scholarly works, such as the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture, to significant state and local literature. A multiphase project on state and local literature was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Later, in the wake of the nation's financial crisis of 2008, NEH-sponsored funding ended and staffing levels in many libraries declined as the large-scale digitization of library collections was being undertaken by Microsoft and Google. With the advent of HathiTrust Digital Library and other collaborative efforts, the challenges and opportunities for preserving and accessing the nation's agricultural literature have evolved and changed dramatically. Today, new partnerships and initiatives around the country, such as the Center for Research Libraries-sponsored Project Ceres, are continuing and refocusing earlier efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dedication to service is often cited as a hallmark of a profession. Service is included as one of eleven Core Values in the American Library Association's "Core Values of Librarianship" (2004). For librarians, service includes helping people find information resources to meet their educational, recreational, and work needs. Reporting findings from a larger study into the professional identity of librarians, this paper explores the centrality of service, with specific attention to how librarians advocate for their services and, ultimately, for librarianship. Using a discourse analysis approach, this study examines the roles that Service as a Core Value and advocacy play in the construction of professional identity. Three different data sources were used: professional journals, e-mail discussion lists, and research interviews. The data were analyzed for the discourses librarians use when describing librarians, librarianship, and professionalism and their connection to advocacy. When librarians advocate for the services they offer, they are in fact advocating for the value of the profession. Discursively, speaking or writing about advocacy positioned librarians as active participants in their own identity formation. By making advocacy a central activity of the profession, librarians not only challenged others' perception of librarianship, they challenged their own understanding as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally libraries, including and perhaps especially Bulgarian ones, are very conservative institutions. Libraries indeed have many reasons to be conservative, but this does not mean that they have been inactive. They have to find the proper modus operandi in order to act appropriately, responsibly, and for the greater good of society. Through funds, grants, and projects, Bulgarian libraries have began recovering. This is not to say, however, that they do not have more work ahead of them. The National Academic Library and Information System (NALIS) and the American Bulgarian Library Exchange (ABLE) projects helped pull libraries in Bulgaria out of the ashes and brought them into the twenty-first century. The aim of this paper is to briefly trace the development of Bulgarian libraries over the course of the last twenty-five years. Throughout this period, there were two decisive factors influencing library development: the rapid expansion of information technologies, and, at the same time, the acute social and economic crisis besetting the country that impeded its modernization of library science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]