About once a week, lately, I get letters (and sometimes phone calls and visits) from library headhunters.

More commonly called "corporate search firms," these are companies employed by fairly large libraries to fill the top job. Some headhunters work a variety of professions. Some just do libraries.

At first, I freely admit that I was flattered by the attention. Who wouldn't be? Headhunters tend to be very complimentary. They've heard good things about you, they say, or were impressed by a talk or an article you did.

Videos came into library collections about 15 years ago. Right off the bat, they were very popular. They were so popular, in fact, that we applied some internal controls to ensure that people would get them back quickly so other people could check them out.

Most library materials go out these days for two weeks. But when we first offered videos, they went out for just 3 days.

When I was in library school, I took a class called "Genre Fiction." Through the semester, we read and analyzed representative works of popular reading genres. At the end of the semester, we had to write a final paper.

Mine was ambitious. I wrote a novelette, and I believe it may be the only one of its kind. It was a nurse-romance-gothic-science-fiction-western-mystery. Its title: "Nurse Unbridled."

Our new Highlands Ranch Library is intended to be the first public building in the new downtown of a city. But what does it mean to be a "public building?"

The most obvious definition is that it was funded by, and opens it doors to, everybody. In the case of a library, that means it also provides access to a collection of materials, purchased cooperatively, and accessible to all.