Colleges share many things on Twitter, but one topic can be risky to broach: the reading habits of library patrons. Patrons' privacy is precious to most librarians. Yet new Web services thrive on collecting and sharing the very information that has long been protected. This points to an emerging tension as libraries embrace digital services.…

Stanford University is going through the difficult and highly fraught process of figuring out a plan for the library of the future. Coming on the heels of the "bookless library," touted as the vision for a new engineering library, a preliminary proposal in 2007 to tear down the seismically unsafe Meyer Library and digitize and house off campus…

In putting up its new, Frank Gehry-designed Lewis Library, Princeton University endured its share of challenges. It constructed models of the building to give the subcontractors a chance to practice. It fired a contractor halfway through the job when the building was past due. It learned that some subcontractors were trying to bribe their way onto…

In this article, the author shares his experience as he traveled from island to island with a single objective--to reach the archives. He found out that not all archives are the same. In recent months, his daydreaming in various facilities has yielded a recurrent question on what would constitute the Ideal Archive. What follows, in no particular…

Nancy Fried Foster was an anthropologist hired by University of Rochester's library to study its undergraduates, to help shed light on how they do their research and write papers, and how they spend their days. The results of the study helped guide a library renovation, influenced a Web-site redesign, led to changes in the way the library markets…

This article reports on a library renovation at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona which incurs complaints from professors and librarians about a shift from print to online materials. The $60-million project at Cal Poly is providing a difficult lesson in the challenges of library renovation, and in the changing role of one of the…