Academic institutions have long supported stand-alone branch libraries devoted to fine arts, architecture, and other allied fields. As subject specific collecting on campuses has been decentralized by collaborative collection development, consortial borrowing, and the quick availability of materials in both digital and print formats, the need for…

Eleanor (Edwards) Ledbetter, who served immigrant populations in Cleveland throughout most of the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, was one of the first librarians to advocate for multiculturalism (then called cultural pluralism) as opposed to Americanism. In providing multicultural and multilingual library services for immigrants,…

For-profit schools constitute the fastest-growing sector of higher education institutions in the United States. Yet accompanying the phenomenal growth of these proprietary colleges and universities has been considerable controversy over the role that the profit motive should play in higher education. The literature of higher education contains…

In 2009, after a year of planning and preparation, the second generation of Ohio Memory was launched. A collaborative effort of the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) and the State Library of Ohio, Ohio Memory is a repository for more than 75,000 digital items, including photographs, journals, and other manuscript materials, as well as print documents…

As campus renovation projects go, the Ohio State University's plan to turn its main library into "a library for the 21st century" is ambitious. The author describes the decade-long, $109 million transformation of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library. The overhaul calls for a complete replacement of all mechanical and electrical…

Over the years, the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML) has experimented with various continuous improvement initiatives. Some projects fizzled owing to the universal killers of grand ideas such as inertia, inconsistent implementation, lack of buy-in, "flavor of the month" attitude, and the all-time favorite: if they ignore this idea it…

When Leslie Polott arrived at the Hudson Library and Historical Society in 1996. She headed out into the community to find out what people wanted from their library. After rounds of surveys, focus groups, and town meetings, she knew: a library that was the center of their educational and cultural lives, that provided more opportunities for…

This document chronicles the evolution of the Norwalk (Ohio) Public Library (established in 1866) from a small collection in an upper room in the Old Mansion Block building to a Carnegie facility which has been renovated to meet today's needs, including accessibility to the handicapped. Funding for the first reading room was provided by the Alert…

The Kent Free Library (Ohio) evolved from the Great Atlantic and Western Railroad Reading Room of 1875, into a municipal Carnegie library, and then grew to be a medium-sized public school district library, in the city of Kent, Ohio. Its original building has been enlarged through three separate expansion campaigns, in order to have space to house…

The purpose of this study is to look at how the academic library systems office (i.e., an entity or group of entities within a library whose purpose is to oversee the hardware and software systems functions within its electronic automated processes and services for the use of the staff and public) in Ohio has evolved to become a library-wide…

At Kent State University, Libraries and Media Services (LMS) and the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) have been working closely in the area of collection management. The article explores the multi-faceted way in which the LMS-SLIS collaboration manifests itself and shows how this collaboration goes beyond what might be expected as…

Explores the cases of two states, Louisiana and Ohio, which found budget problems to be the occasion for concerted statewide efforts to improve academic library services. Both states ultimately established statewide multipurpose resource-sharing academic library consortia, supported by electronic library networks, as the solutions to their very…

This paper traces the history of the toy library, a facility or program created to loan toys to children, parents, child care providers, teachers, and play therapists. Types of toy lending libraries are the community toy library, the supplemental toy library, the cooperative neighborhood toy library, and the mobile toy library. The first toy…

This paper covers the history of the Canton Public/Stark County District Library (CPL), focusing on the years 1929-1997. The paper focuses on the broadening of the library's services, including the development of reference services, service to young adults, and a variety of outreach activities. A literature review discusses the history of the…