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The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not a dedicated business center within a public library acts as a key success factor in a public library’s services to the community entrepreneur.

A questionnaire survey was sent to 88 public libraries with dedicated business centers, and posted to BRASS-L and BUSLIB-L, for input from public libraries without business centers. Interviews with three survey respondents and one local city official followed.

Fifty-seven per cent of all respondents felt that a dedicated business center is very essential or essential to the services provided to the entrepreneurial community. The services most often offered were workshops/seminars/classes, counseling sessions by collaborative agencies and one-on-one research sessions with librarians. The majority of responding libraries collaborated with a community business agency (80 per cent). Fifty-one per cent spend between 6 and 20 hours/month on the collaboration.

Since 2007, many of the dedicated business centers in public libraries have closed or been consolidated with other sections and services of a public library. This should be further studied. Further research on librarian expertise in market and industry research is recommended.

This study updates the business services associated with public libraries business services since the push in the late 1990s for public libraries to be more active in community economic development.

The global proliferation of distance learning programs has become a major phenomenon of our times. So rapid is the growth rate of distance learning options, that statistics on them are rendered out-of-date at the moment of publication. As soon as innovations in media and automation technologies have appeared, their new capabilities have been adapted to distance learning applications, fueling the growth of distance learning programs, and providing marketing tools for the promotion of newly upgraded or newly created distance learning programs and institutions. Rapid growth in a highly competitive market has led to the duplication and overlapping of new distance learning options both within institutions and across institutional and geographical boundaries.

IT is well known that librarianship or library science and information work or information science as the common educational, professional and scientific discipline is everywhere undergoing great change and development. During its continual and relatively fast development, this discipline has at the same time to solve the increasing tasks connected with the problems of the so‐called information explosion.

This paper reports a study into the current status of, and future prospects for, community informatics (CI) services in libraries in Pakistan.

It is based on a questionnaire survey of academic and public libraries, and community centres, in the major cities of Pakistan, backed up by interviews with librarians and community leaders.

It is found that while most libraries provide community information services, these are of traditional kind, and there are very few examples of information and communication technologies‐based CI. There is enthusiasm for developing such services among librarians, and high regard for library services in the community. Essential factors are funding for provision of equipment and training, and awareness raising in the community.

The study was limited to a sample of libraries in large cities.

Proposals for development of a government‐sponsored CI initiative are presented.

This is the only study to date which investigates the role of libraries for CI provision in Pakistan, and one of very few which studies this topic in a developing country.

This survey covers civil, electrical and electronics, energy, environment, general, materials, mechanical, and traffic and transportation engineering. Areas such as biomedical and chemical engineering will be dealt with in future issues. Readers may find that the classifications included in this survey are not mutually exclusive but do occasionally overlap with one another. For instance, the section on environmental engineering includes a review of a book on the environmental impact of nuclear power plants, which might as easily have been part of the section on energy technology. Before we go into a discussion of data bases and indexes, I would like to note in this introductory section some recent bibliographic aids published during the period surveyed. Most engineering libraries will find them very valuable in their reference and acquisition functions. Since normal review sources will cover these books, I am merely listing them below: Malinowski, Harold Robert, Richard A. Gray and Dorothy A. Gray. Science and Engineering Literature. 2d ed., Littleton, Colorado, Libraries Unlimited, 1976. 368p. LC 76–17794 ISBN 0–87287–098–7. $13.30; Mildren, K. W., ed. Use of Engineering Literature. Woburn, Mass., Butterworths, 1976. 621p. ISBN 0–408–70714–3. $37.95. Mount, Ellis. Guide to Basic Information Sources in Engineering. New York, Wiley, Halsted Press, 1976. 196p. LC 75–43261 ISBN 0–47070–15013–0. $11.95 and Guide to European Sources of Technical Information. 4th ed., edited by Ann Pernet. Guernsey, Eng., F. Hodgson, 1976. 415p. ISBN 0–85280–161–0. $52.00.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Hurricane Katrina‐related narratives of Library and Information Science students at the University of Southern Mississippi's School of Library and Information Science, in order to gain insight into the role of public libraries post‐Hurricane Katrina.

Qualitative NVivo software was used to code the narratives for themes related to public libraries post‐Hurricane Katrina.

Post‐disaster problems include physical damage or destruction of the libraries and inundation of the libraries by refugees and evacuees seeking communication and information. Post‐disaster services provided by public librarians include providing communication and information, helping fill out aid forms, listening, offering comfort, volunteering, and donating.

This study can inform practitioners of the value of the public library as a quality of life issue since providing people with information and communication in public libraries played a crucial role in light of a catastrophic circumstance.

The unique context of local rural and small‐town public libraries faced with devastating catastrophic circumstances can add to the body of literature related to the value of public library services post‐disaster and form the basis for further, more comprehensive studies.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the landscape of data curation services among public and academic libraries in the USA, with a focus on library capacity for providing data curation services.

The authors conducted an online survey by employing stratified sampling from the American Library Directory. A total of 198 responses were analyzed.

The authors’ findings provide insight into the current landscape of libraries’ data curation services. The survey participants evaluated six capacity dimensions for both public and academic libraries – value, financial, administrative, technical infrastructure, human resources and network. The ratings the participants gave to these capacity dimensions were significantly different between academic and public libraries.

This study suggests several areas in which libraries will benefit from further developing their capacity to successfully run data curation services.

This is among the first research study to address the concept of capacity in the context of libraries’ data curation services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore issues related to the development of long‐term planning for the municipal/public libraries in Greece. In Greece, municipal libraries constitute the largest category of public libraries. Although over the last decade efforts have been made to enhance their services, municipal/public libraries appear to be still in search of a purpose and are at a crossroad.

An empirical qualitative research study was conducted in order to examine the efforts made so far to develop long‐term plans and to study the attitudes and views of Greek municipal libraries' heads concerning the development of long term plans. The empirical research was carried out early in the second half of 2007, utilizing a specifically developed questionnaire distributed to 194 municipal library representatives, 100 of which agreed to participate in the study.

A number of current issues facing Greek municipal libraries are studied along with an overview of the strategic plans already developed. The perceptions of 100 municipal library directors in regard to developing strategic plans are recorded and the results overall suggest the need for formal long‐term planning in the municipal/public libraries in Greece.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the development of long‐term planning aimed at municipal libraries in Greece. It is one of the very few studies providing empirical evidence based on the views of municipal/public library directors in Greece.

THE centenary celebration is that of the apparently prosaic public library acts ; it is not the centenary of libraries which are as old as civilization. That is a circumstance which some may have overlooked in their pride and enthusiasm for the public library. But no real librarian of any type will fail to rejoice in the progress to which the celebration is witness. For that has been immense. We are to have a centenary history of the Public Library Movement—that is not its title—from the Library Association. We do not know if it will be available in London this month; we fear it will not. We do know its author, Mr. W. A. Munford, has spent many months in research for it and that he is a writer with a lucid and individual Style. We contemplate his task with a certain nervousness. Could anyone less than a Carlyle impart into the dry bones of municipal library history that Strew these hundred years, the bones by the wayside that mark out the way, the breath of the spirit that will make them live ? For even Edward Edwards, whose name should be much in the minds and perhaps on the lips of library lovers this month, could scarcely have foreseen the contemporary position ; nor perhaps could Carlyle who asked before our genesis why there should not be in every county town a county library as well as a county gaol. How remote the days when such a question was cogent seem to be now! It behoves us, indeed it honours us, to recall the work of Edwards, of Ewart, Brotherton, Thomas Greenwood, Nicholson, Peter Cowell, Crestadoro, Francis Barrett, Thomas Lyster, J. Y. M. MacAlister, James Duff Brown and, in a later day without mentioning the living, John Ballinger, Ernest A. Baker, L. Stanley Jast, and Potter Briscoe—the list is long. All served the movement we celebrate and all faced a community which had to be convinced. It still has, of course, but our people do now allow libraries a place, more or less respected, in the life of the people. Librarians no longer face the corpse‐cold incredulity of the so‐called educated classes, the indifference of the masses and the actively vicious hostility of local legislators. Except the illuminated few that existed. These were the men who had the faith that an informed people was a happier, more efficient one and that books in widest commonalty spread were the best means of producing such a people. These, with a succession of believing, enduring librarians, persisted in their Struggle with cynic and opponent and brought about the system and the technique we use, modified of course and extended to meet a changing world, but essentially the same. Three names we may especially honour this September, Edward Edwards, who was the sower of the seed; MacAlister, who gained us our Royal Charter ; and John Ballinger, who was the person who most influenced the introduction of the liberating Libraries Act of 1919.

The purpose of this paper is to look back on the last 30 years of technology development for libraries.

The paper presents an interview that took place at the American Library Association Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.

The paper reveals that many of the developments are slow. There are very few really sudden revolutions in social‐scale technologies. They do not switch on quickly and cannot be sudden because the installed base is too thin.

The paper reveals that there should be some renewed conversation about how libraries can help the public. In the early days of the internet libraries played an enormous uncredited role in teaching the adult population about the internet. There are some opportunities like that now, and one place where we are starting to see signs of it is digital preservation, not as libraries doing it for the cultural record, but helping individuals to do it for their own content.