Field Notes

Games are moving into one of Swedens most literary rooms, and the borrowing data is hard to ignore.

Ban the phones, cancel the Chromebooks, and you have a quieter classroom, not a reader. What Sweden puts in the hole that New York leaves empty.

A high school counselor said the loan would outlive her career. The milk carton agreed. She became a librarian anyway.

How a handful of activists trying to get books to one jailed friend became thirty thousand books a year, and why that floor is now cracking.

A shy girl hiding fairy books behind the encyclopedias, a man with 23,600 stolen volumes, and the two metre gap where a book can vanish for thirty years.

Sweden still scores above average in reading, and that is exactly what the numbers are hiding.

Why the anger I expected at ALA never came, and why we’d refuse to sell Librar to anyone replacing a librarian.

First impressions from four days on the floor of the ALA conference in Chicago.