Overview

Quintessentially American institutions, symbols of community spirit and the American faith in education, public libraries are ubiquitous in the United States. Close to a billion library visits are made each year, and more children join summer readings programmes than little league baseball. Public libraries are local institutions, as different as the communities they serve. Yet their basic services, techniques and professional credo are essentially similar. In this text, Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain assess the current condition and direction of the American public library. They consider the challenges and opportunities presented by electronic technologies, changing public policy, fiscal realities and cultural trends. They draw on site visits and interviews conducted across the country; extensive reading of reports, surveys, and other documents; and their long-standing interest in the library's place in the social and civic structure. The book combines a scholarly, humanistic and historical approach to public libraries with a look at their problems and prospects, including their role in the emerging national information infrastructure.

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9780262632225

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Reviews

Civic Space/Cyberspace provides a seminal work that places libraries in the emergent cyberculture of our time....Professors Molz and Dain have written an important, lively, entertaining, provocative book. It deserves to be read widely across the information professions and used in the education of future information scientists and professionals. - Richard J. Cox, Journal of the American Society for Information Science; Concise, coherent, and readable....Molz and Dain have succeeded in providing an excellent primer on the social, political, and economic forces shaping the public library. - Alan R. Earls, Connection

Author Information

Redmond Kathleen Molz is Professor of Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. Phyllis Dain is Professor Emerita of Library Service at Columbia University.

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