Demonstrating how librarianship has been and continues to be a practice of pushing beyond definitions and preconceptions, the inspiring and informative histories in this volume chronicle library workers and users who strived towards making libraries more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

What does it mean for a library to be without borders? This remarkable collection of essays, drawn from the Library History Seminar sponsored by the Library History Round Table (LHRT), explores the roles that libraries have played in the communities they serve, well beyond the stacks and circulation desk. The research contained in these pages shows how librarians and users can not only reach beyond the border separating professionals from patrons, but also across institutional boundaries separating different specializations within the profession, and outside traditional channels of knowledge acquisition and organization. Delving into a variety of goals, approaches, and practices, all with the intention of fostering community and providing information, this collection's fascinating topics include 

• a critique of library history as it is currently conducted, pointing out the borders of habit, familiarity, and bias that thwart diversity within library and information studies;
• stories of the community-based activism that has been key to battling the “epistemicide” that can undermine collective understandings about the world and the interests of African American library users;
• profiles of current Indigenous library practitioners who are both documenting and creating library history;
• a grassroots movement to create a comprehensive collection related to the theology and practice of the Society of Mary at the time of great ecclesiastical and liturgical changes; 
• histories of the innovations which led to the Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services and the Instruction Section of ACRL;
• using the “due date” as a lens for understanding how patrons and the general public feel about the role of libraries and their rules in the lives of average Americans;
• how the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act influenced the work of research libraries that collected materials from the Communist Bloc; and
• a primer on conducting research in library history that will allow readers to explore how libraries in their own communities have affected the lives of their users.

Protests against proposed immigration laws arose in cities across the United States during the spring of 2006. Many of the attendees were Latino, and waved flags. At first, flags of Mexico and other Latin American countries were displayed. Following negative reactions in the media, protest organizers asked rallygoers to fly the U.S. flag alongside or instead of the flags of Latin American countries. This article traces the history of flag-flying at these immigration protests, analyzes the motives of those displaying flags, and discusses the reaction to the display of Latin American flags. The disputed meanings imputed to the use of flags by the protesters and those who objected to the use of the flags is discussed in terms of symbolic conflict.

Thirteen Months in Dixie tells a rollicking tale of adventure, captivity, hardship, and heroism during the last year of the Civil War—in the protagonist’s own words. After being hidden away for decades as a family heirloom, the incredible manuscript is finally available, annotated and illustrated, for the first time.

Oscar Federhen was a new recruit to the 13th Independent Battery, Massachusetts Light Artillery, when he shipped out to Louisiana in the spring of1864 to participate in the Red River Campaign. Not long after his arrival at the front, a combination of ill-luck and bad timing led to his capture. Federhen was marched overland to Tyler, Texas, where he was held as a prisoner of war in Camp Ford, the largest POW camp west of the Mississippi River.

Thirteen Months in Dixie recounts Federhen’s always thrilling and occasionally horrifying ordeals as a starving prisoner. The captured artillerist tried his hand at escaping several times and faced sadistic guards and vicious hounds before finally succeeding. But his ordeal was just beginning. The young soldier faced a series of challenges as he made his way cross-country through northeast Texas to reach Union lines. Federhen had to dodge regular Confederates, brigands, and even Comanches in his effort to get home. He rode for a time with Rebel irregular cavalry, during which he witnessed robberies and even cold-blooded murder. When he was recaptured and thought to be a potential deserter, he escaped yet again and continued his bid for freedom.

Federhen wrote his recollections in lively engaging style not long after the war, but they sat unpublished until Jeaninne Surette Honstein and Steven Knowlton carefully transcribed and annotated his incredible manuscript. Numerous illustrations grace the pages, including two from Federhen’s own pen.

Thirteen Months in Dixie is not only a gripping true story that would have otherwise been lost to history, but a valuable primary source about the lives of Civil War prisoners and everyday Texans during the conflict.

The knowledge organization system prepared by the Library of Congress (LC) and widely used in academic libraries has some disadvantages for researchers in the fields of African American studies and LGBTQIA studies.  The interdisciplinary nature of those fields means that browsing in stacks or shelflists organized by LC Classification requires looking in numerous locations.  As well, persistent bias in the language used for subject headings, as well as the hierarchy of classification for books in these fields, continues to “other” the peoples and topics that populate these titles.  This paper offers tools to help researchers have a holistic view of applicable titles across library shelves and hopes to become part of a larger conversation regarding social responsibility and diversity in the library community.

The quasi-public library of Memphis, the Cossitt Library, was founded as a philanthropic institution in 1888. The first branch that served African Americans was established within the walls of the LeMoyne Institute. Later, service was extended through another branch in Howe Institute—which was later closed—and then a standalone branch that moved several times in the 1930s before settling on a plot on Vance Avenue.  The discrepancy between funding and services offered to African American and white Memphians both shaped and was shaped by the strictures of Jim Crow segregation in the South.

Many librarians evaluate local Interlibrary Loan (ILL) statistics in order to affect collection development decisions concerning new subscriptions. In this study, the authors examine whether the number of ILL article requests received in one academic year can predict the use of those same journal titles once added to library resources. There is little correlation between ILL requests for individual titles and their later use as subscribed titles. However, there is strong correlation between ILL requests within a subject category and later use of subscribed titles in that subject category. An additional study examining the sources from which patrons made ILL requests shows that database search results, not journal titles, dominate. These results call into question the need for libraries to subscribe to individual journal titles rather than providing access to a broad array of articles.

Memphis was a pioneer among southern cities in providing segregated library services to African Americans in 1903. However, those services were unequal to
services offered to white citizens, and subject to political forces aimed at perpetuating white supremacy. By the 1930s African Americans had become a crucial voting bloc that supported the political machine of “Boss” Crump, who dominated city government between 1927 and 1954. Improved library service was one of many civic amenities that were provided in African American ommunities as part of an unstated bargain between the Crump machine and African American voters of Memphis. The library became one of many community-building institutions that helped a generation of African American
leaders in Memphis prepare for the struggles of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many librarians find it difficult to compile information about perpetual access to
their e-journals because it may be scattered across numerous license agreements.
Rather than creating and maintaining a database for perpetual access information
that is separate from the order records and holdings information found in
integrated library systems (ILS), the University of Memphis is using Innovative
Interfaces’ Sierra ILS. By leveraging fixed and variable-length fields to record
perpetual access information, we can perform queries and generate reports that
are helpful in making collection development and preservation decisions.

Traditionally, usage figures for electronic serials have lumped all years of publication together. New tools give librarians information about usage according to the year of publication. They allow us to analyze the usage of current material separately from usage of content published in prior years. The relative value of current subscriptions and backfiles has important collection development implications. For example, many libraries subscribe directly to titles that are offered in aggregated databases, but with embargoes. The relative value of current content distinguished from prior years may be useful in reevaluating such subscription decisions. This paper discusses tools and techniques for analyzing usage by year of publication according to several measures—including COUNTER’s JR5 report, Google Analytics, ILL reports, and token reports, and discusses how librarians can use these tools to aid in decision‐making about serials collection development decisions.

The proportions of a flag are an integral part of a flag’s design, and often reflect the history of the country. However, when flags are grouped for display, a uniform set of proportions is used for all flags. The scientific and aesthetic basis for that decision is discussed.

Librarians often wish to know whether readers in a particular discipline favor e-books or print books. Because print circulation and e-book usage statistics are not directly comparable, it can be hard to determine the relative interest of readers in the two types of books. This study demonstrates a two-step method by which librarians can assess the appeal of books in various formats. First, a nominal assessment of use or nonuse is performed; this eliminates the difficulty of comparing print circulation to e-book usage statistics. Then, the comparison of actual use to Percentage of Expected Use (PEU) is made. By examining the distance between PEU of e-books to PEU of print books in a discipline, librarians can determine whether patrons have a strong preference for one format over another.

ou know how you feel after a really good meeting…ignited, excited, empowered…part of something larger than yourself?! Meetings can inspire community, spark ideas, and advance progress toward establishing and achieving goals. Meetings can also be enervating—a frustrating waste of time for everyone involved. This articles presents ideas for how to prepare for and facilitate good meetings—in-person and online.

Publishers attract readers to books and inform them about the books’ contents by adding information to the books’ covers. In many academic libraries, the dust jackets of cloth-bound books are discarded. This study was a physical inventory of 1,319 recently published books in an academic library, and comparison of circulation statistics between different cover types. By every measure, books with publisher-supplied information on the cover circulated at a higher rate than books with plain covers. The implications of our findings for collection management are discussed.

Academic libraries that cancel serials titles typically offer interlibrary loan (ILL) as an alternative means to access these titles.This study examines how serials cancellations affect ILL usage and how reliance on ILL affects patrons’ access to content. By analyzing the number of ILL requests from canceled titles, the authors found that cancellations have a very small effect upon overall ILL usage. With the help of Google Analytics, the authors counted patron requests for link resolver access that were converted to ILL requests. When the link resolver was unable to generate a link to full text, it displayed a message to that effect on a link resolver landing page and presented the patron with a choice to request the title through ILL. Google Analytics recorded traffic to and from the link resolver landing page and generated a data set for this study. Analysis of collected data, including ILLiad records, shows that after patrons identify desired articles that require ILL, they only submit ILL requests 31 percent of the time. This means that for every successful ILL request, there are at least two articles desired that are never requested. Implications for collection development are discussed.

During a number of slave risings, the slaves fighting for freedom displayed flags.  This article discusses known instances of such flag use and analyzes them within the anthropological construct of "contested symbolism."

Despite their professional training and study in the development of research collections in academic settings, librarians often consult with or even defer to faculty in selecting materials. Faculty often use various methods of evaluation that tend to emphasize qualitative data or even anecdotal evidence. Bibliometric analysis offers emerging tools to quantify these decisions, reflecting fundamental principles of library science. This study compares faculty choices of serials subscription cancellations to the choices that would have been predicted using a bibliometric tool, the California Digital Library Weighted Value Algorithm (CDL-WVA). Faculty choices differed significantly from the decisions predicted by CDL-WVA. However, as the bibliometric score increased, so did the rate of match between faculty choice and decisions predicted by CDL-WVA. Implications of these findings for collection development are discussed.

The U.S. cataloging community is an interorganizational network with the Library of Congress (LC) as the lead organization, which reserves to itself the power to shape cataloging rules. Peripheral members of the network who are interested in modifying changes to the rules or to the network can use various strategies for organizational change that incorporate building ties to the decision-makers located at the hub of the network. The story of William E. Studwell’s campaign for a subject heading code illustrates how some traditional scholarly methods of urging change—papers and presentations—are insufficient to achieve reform in an interorganizational network, absent strategies to build alliances with the decision makers.

The choice of formats for monograph acquisitions is an important decision, not easily made. This program will survey how several different libraries make the decision about which format should be chosen for which books. To see the reasoning behind other libraries’ choices may be helpful in determining your own collection development policies.

In 1974, Harold Ford became the first black Congressman from Tennessee. His narrow victory over the incumbent was due to a favorable redistricting, dissatisfaction with the Republican party, and his own political savvy and shrewd messaging. The story of Ford's rise and ultimate victory is covered.

The Tennessee flag and its constituent parts are widely used in the state by private organizations as well as the government. This paper addresses the reasons for its popularity, noting that its design, by virtue of an effect called pragmatic unity, evokes the Confederate Battle Flag. The paper also notes that the use of a three-star symbol outside of the context of the flag still calls to mind the flag, due to an effect called visual synecdoche.

Historiographic review of books on the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis by Laurie B. Green, G. Wayne Dowdy, Michael K. Honey, Sherry L. Hoppe and Bruce W. Speck, and Bobby L. Lovett.

Thomas A. Sebeok developed a scheme within semiotics for distinguishing among types of signs. This article discusses Sebeok's six types of signs and how various flags can be identified as one or another type of sign.

The cataloging of microforms and other reproductions has been difficult throughout the history of cataloging codes, particularly due to the "multiple versions problem," The proposed new cataloging code, Resource Description. and Access (RDA), seeks to clarify the relationship between reproductions and originals by applying the principles of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) to cataloging. While the use of FRBR principles does help to identify the relationships between works in the catalog, RDA as currently designed is challenging for the cataloger and includes many data that may prove to be difficult for catalog users to understand.

The history of cataloging rules is often written as a story of continuous improvement toward a more rational and efficient code. Not all catalogers, however, have been in agreement that reform of the cataloging code has been improvement. The debate of the 1950s and 1960s over cataloging code reform, hosted in part by LRTS, is an example of conflicting values in the cataloging community. Seymour Lubetzky's proposal for a cataloging code based on logical principles eventually became the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, but many catalogers of the period felt that other values, such as tradition and the convenience of the user, also deserved consideration in the cataloging code.

This article describes methods that libraries use to make content in microform more visible to patrons through libraries' discovery tools.

To assess the question of whether online availability affects the distribution of published medical literature, this study examined the impact factors of a number of medical journals before and after they went online.  No effect of online availability on impact factor was observed.

The current cataloging code, Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition (AACR2), was originally published in 1978 and implemented by American libraries in 1981, and various revisions have been published occasionally since then. Despite the revisions, the fundamental approach of AACR2 remains unchanged from its original edition. In light of the many changes that libraries have encountered in their collections, access services, and patron behavior, the library community is preparing to adopt a new set of rules in 2008.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings have been criticized for containing biased subject headings. One leading critic has been Sanford Berman, whose 1971 monograph Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People (P&A), listed a number of objectionable headings and proposed remedies. In the decades since P&A was first published, many of Berman’s suggestions have been implemented, while other headings remain unchanged. This paper compiles all of Berman’s suggestions and tracks the changes that have occurred; a brief analysis of the remaining areas of bias is included.