As of now, there are three locations open: the Main Library, Nix (way Uptown where it didn't flood), and Algiers Point (on the other side of the river, i.e. out of the soup bowl). Each is open 4 hours a day, providing reference assistance and computer access, as well as limited circulation. They are still working with a staff of 19 -- mostly administration -- and desperately trying to get more people reinstated.

Bad news: I went by my old branch a few weeks ago. They had to gut the entire thing. All the materials were in dumpsters outside...and that's pretty much the condition of at least 6 or 7 other branches. It's sad, disheartening, a low down dirty moldy shame....

Good news: They're planning on opening 2 more branches (Latter and the Children's Resource Center, the other two Uptown branches) in January, and *hopefully* I will have better employment news then. All signs point to yes, but I'm not going to jinx it by saying it's fact.

More info and pictures: http://nutrias.org/

As for New Orleans itself... it's a terrible thing, and almost impossible to describe. Some parts of it (Uptown and the Quarter) are doing surprisingly well: restaurants and bars and other businesses are staying busy, and large percentages of the population have returned. Other parts are completely devestated: many neighborhoods still have no electricity or inhabitants and more than half the homes in the city have to be gutted. It's a terrible and awe-inspiring sight. The flood lines are everywhere, and you find it's all you can look at. When my dad was here a few weeks back, I was trying to point them out to him, and he couldn't see them. Finally, he said, soberly, "Oh, there they are. I wasn't looking high enough." Yeah, New Orleans will come back, but it's going to take a very, very long time.

"…With wireless Internet access creeping into every niche of life - it's even coming to airplanes and taxis - we'll have to carve out retreats from the information age. "If you fill every waking minute with more media, you never do any independent thinking," [web design expert Jakob] Nielsen said. "You may have all the specific pieces of information, but the higher level is knowledge and understanding. You don't have time for that reflection if it's being thrown at you at never-ending streams. "All you can do is duck."

"It's the basic problem of an entrenched monopoly suddenly facing competition. When we were the only game in town, it didn't matter if users had to exert a lot of energy and learn lots of new tasks to use our collections -- now that there are easier alternatives, and the users/consumers, for better or worse, are satisfied with what they are getting there, the onus may well be on us to become more user-friendly and competitive."

"I cannot imagine a director or administrator that would not want to devote some staff time to an Emerging Technology Committee. It’s a perfect way to start looking at things, aggregating all of the info coming out, and making recommendations. How forward thinking is that? Wouldn’t the board or other governing body be happy that the library was looking toward the future instead of the way things have always been done?...I’d think any board would be thrilled the library was trying to increase its user base and, therefore, the number of happy and satisfied taxpayers! Anytime we can draw in more users, through either our physical or virtual doors, we’re going to increase our political capital....Most of our battles are not with the user but with our own people. Users are often far more likely to embrace new ideas and new offerings than our own administrators!"

"You not only can’t take [your fabulous collection of favorite books] with you, but your relations will likely offer the whole to some imbecile who will like as not deposit the books in a landfill when they can’t be sold profitably. That, or they’ll end up in the hands of the folks who buy hard-bound volumes by the shelf, as raw material for chic wall coverings. Interior decorators cut the spines off the books, gluing them to wallboard to create a sort of library effect."