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The definitive biography Amelia Gayle Gorgas, one of the most influential people in the history of the University of Alabama

Amelia Gayle Gorgas: A Biography is a richly documented and deeply compelling portrait of one of Alabama’s most influential nineteenth‑century women. Drawing on the unparalleled depth of the Gayle‑Gorgas Collection—letters, journals, family papers, and contemporary accounts—this biography argues that Amelia’s life offers enduring insight into the resilience, intellect, and quiet leadership that shaped Southern society before, during, and after the Civil War. 

Far more than the daughter of a governor, wife of Confederate ordnance chief Josiah Gorgas, or mother of famed physician William Crawford Gorgas, Amelia emerges here as a figure of remarkable adaptability and personal strength. The book traces her journey from a lively Greensboro childhood through the upheavals of war‑torn Richmond, the hardships of Reconstruction‑era Alabama, and her transformative service as librarian at The University of Alabama. Its chapters illuminate the themes that define her legacy: intellectual curiosity without formal schooling, deft management of family and community crises, a gift for nurturing students and soldiers alike, and an ability to thrive in environments as varied as Maine, Charleston, Sewanee, and Tuscaloosa. 

Vivid storytelling blends seamlessly with meticulous scholarship, giving readers both an intimate family narrative and a sweeping social history of the nineteenth‑century South. This biography will appeal especially to readers of Southern history, women’s history, university and library heritage, Civil War studies, and anyone drawn to strong, quietly trailblazing figures whose lives illuminate broader cultural change. Amelia’s story endures because it speaks to the universal work of holding families, institutions, and communities together in times of profound upheaval.

Richard E. Rubin’s book has served as the authoritative introductory text for generations of library and information science practitioners, with each new edition taking in its stride the myriad societal, technological, political, and economic changes affecting our users and institutions and transforming our discipline. Rubin teams up with his daughter, Rachel G. Rubin, a rising star in the library field in her own right, for the fifth edition. Spanning all types of libraries, from public to academic, school, and special, it illuminates the major facets of LIS for students as well as current professionals. Continuing its tradition of excellence, this text addresses

• the history and mission of libraries from past to present, including the history of service to African Americans;
• critical contemporary social issues such as services to marginalized communities, tribal libraries, and immigrants;  
• the rise of e-government and the crucial role of political advocacy;  
• digital devices, social networking, digital publishing, e-books, virtual reality, and other technology;
• forces shaping the future of libraries, including Future Ready libraries, and sustainability as a core value of librarianship;
• the values and ethics of the profession, with new coverage of civic engagement, combatting fake news, the importance of social justice, and the role of critical librarianship;
• knowledge infrastructure and organization, including Resource Description and Access (RDA), linked data, and the Library Research Model;
• the significance of the digital divide and policy issues related to broadband access and net neutrality;
• intellectual freedom, legal issues, and copyright-related topics;
• contemporary issues in LIS education such as the ongoing tensions between information science and library science; and
• the changing character of collections and services including the role of digital libraries, preservation, and the digital humanities.

In its newest edition, Foundations of Library and Information Science remains the field’s essential resource.

A tour of an ancient library transports us to Mesopotamia, introducing us to its people, their ideas, and their humanity.
 
The library of Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last great king, held an astonishing collection at the forefront of knowledge in its day, from ancient traditions in religion and literature to the latest developments in magic and medicine. When the Assyrian empire fell, the library burned to the ground, and its contents, clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, lay buried for thousands of years until a team of Victorian archaeologists discovered the remnants in modern-day Iraq. The clay had baked and hardened; the very fire that consumed the library had helped its texts to survive for millennia.
 
In The Library of Ancient Wisdom, scholar Selena Wisnom, one of only a few hundred experts able to read cuneiform script today, guides us inside this important collection and, through its contents, brings ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Introducing us to Ashurbanipal and his family, scribes, astrologers, physicians, and more, Wisnom explores the library’s tablets and the details they divulge about how these ancient people thought about the world. Like us, they had concerns about job security, jealous rivalries, and profound friendships, and questions about the meaning of life. Wisnom ushers us into a world where magic was commonplace, where the gods spoke to you in dreams, and where the secrets of the universe were revealed through puns—taking us to the heart of what it means to be human.
 
Offering a close look at a major historical landmark as well as a readable account of the world’s earliest civilizations, The Library of Ancient Wisdom lays bare the ideas, hopes, fears, and desires that survive on humble clay.

Examining the personal library and the making of self

When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.

Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner’s literary celebrity.

What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making.  

Information science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury.

Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet’s library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.