Libraries

On a refreshingly cool morning, before the sun drenches every exposed grain of sand in this vast desert, Hemeid Sobhy sets out on foot from the Bedouin village where he lives with his parents and sisters. Neatly dressed in jeans, sport shirt and sturdy sandals, he walks 40 minutes to the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. He passes through a narrow door in the monastery's thick walls and makes his way past an ancient church and a warren of buildings, clustered along winding pathways.

Authorities are investigating the theft of a rare 18th century Italian manuscript from an exhibit case at a UCLA library, campus police said. A bound volume of documents from a collection about the politically powerful Orsini family of Rome was stolen sometime between the late afternoon of Feb. 9 and the morning of Feb. 12, according to police.

Library patrons can check out books, but they can't check out the models in Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue. A magazine spokesman confirmed Thursday that the Time Warner Inc. publication withheld shipment of the Feb. 14 issue to libraries and schools after years of taking heat from critics who said the issue had become too risque.

Stories of criminals, ghosts, shipwrecks and pirates swirled through the busy streets of 18th century London. Competing writers spun outlandish stories, and selling the tales was part of the street commerce, like hawking a criminal's last confession before execution. A new exhibit at the Boston Public Library gives a glimpse of that lively world, where the modern novel had its roots.

No peeking. The publisher of the new Harry Potter novel has strict rules for libraries handling the book this summer. Among them: Libraries must limit the number of employees who handle the books before the July 21 release and provide names and contact information for each branch manager, according to the contract from Scholastic Inc. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is the final book in J.K. Rowling's popular series about the boy wizard.

An explosive rise in Internet access at the nation's public libraries has also led to a solid increase in the number of visitors, according to a study released Monday by the American Library Assn. "Far from hurting American libraries, the Internet has actually helped to spur more people to use their local libraries because it has increased our hunger for knowledge and information," Loriene Roy, president-elect of the American Library Assn., said in a statement.

It's not often that a librarian is warned to stay away from the bookshelves because of high voltage, and that students aren't allowed to roam freely through the stacks -- but it's becoming more common. At Chicago State University, a South Side college that dates to the 1860s, only robots are allowed to browse most books and archives.

Is the public library no longer a haven for children? That's the message the director of a charter school in South Los Angeles sent the parents of her 340 students last week, warning them that Hyde Park--Miriam Matthews Public Library, a few yards from the school campus, was not safe for their children.

REVIVING a piece of Orange County history, the city of Irvine is replicating the original Irvine family mansion to serve as a new branch of the Orange County Public Library system. The Katie Wheeler Branch Library, named for the late philanthropist Kathryn Lillard Wheeler, granddaughter of Irvine Co. founder James Irvine II, is being built on the 2.4-acre site where the 19th century mansion was destroyed by fire in 1965.

FOR the German monk searching for signs of God in "Star Trek," the obscure storeroom on the fourth floor of UC Riverside's main library was worth the trans-Atlantic pilgrimage. Bernhard Janzen pored over television scripts and a video clip from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," and noticed how an African American space station captain had found a religious stone tablet and, much like Moses, smashed it on the ground as he shepherded an oppressed people toward freedom.