• Library Journal's recent reminder about the lawsuit is here.
• American Libraries' coverage last November is here.
• Last November's local newspaper coverage is (among other places) here.
• Wikipedia's excellent article on filtering software is here.

• Low risk
• Low cost
• Low effort
• Sure to provide added benefit to a good number of users
• Pretty much just common sense service enhancements
• Not likely to ruffle [needlessly] many technophobe feathers

"...A good library makes you feel a bit more alive, a bit more connected to people and ideas across time, a bit more aware of how much there is to know....[Also refreshing is] the fact that there is nothing to buy there, and no one trying to sell us anything. It’s one place [where] it is actually difficult to spend money. In the summer, we can always go outside, but in the winter, the library is practically the only free activity available to us outside the house."

"To me a library is a lot like a good recipe for spaghetti sauce. If you only mash tomatoes (which BTW I do agree is the most important main ingredient ) together in your mix, you may have sauce but it’s definitely not going to be very appetizing. To spice a Library up and make it an award winning recipe, you need to pepper your professional talent with many other degreed professionals - marketing specialists, project managers, early childhood educators, programmers, historians, etc… etc … etc. and stop thinking that only MLS degreed professionals offer the skills that today’s libraries need. Businesses and other non-profits don’t seem to think or operate this way -- so why do we?

...The need for a different perspective is a very valid one....We need to do more than merely open our ears to our users. We need to also make sure that the "ears" we are are using to listen with come from a variety of different skill sets and backgrounds as well… otherwise we run the risk of interpreting what we hear from only tomato point of view."

"...If the essence of our role [as librarians working in libraries] is bringing people and information resources together for the whole broad range of reasons that people need to, and want to, dip (or plunge) into the accumulated knowledge that is increasingly available to them, then tending to the building can only be one part of what we do....For [some users]...our building is completely and utterly beside the point. They don't need our library, they need our librarians."

“Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure. It is a way to learn how to knit or build a house or solve an equation, a way to be moved to laughter and wonder and to learn how to live….Everywhere, every day, someone is changed, perhaps even saved, by words and stories.”

I recently had a conversation with a GenX librarian from another library who was leaving his current position to go another library system. He cited several reasons for leaving his job, but all of them centered around one theme: he no could no longer tolerate the climate of stagnation and the lack of progressive thinking that permeated the culture where he worked. After expressing my congratulations, I half-joked that his library wouldn't get any better if everybody who is forward-thinking jumps ship. "Who's going to stay," I said, "and help make it better?" His response was hard-hitting: "It's like a cancer," he told me. "It will kill you before you kill it."

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading “Paradise Lost” and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

If poetry is what is called “a sealed book” to you, begin by reading Hazlitt’s famous essay on the nature of “poetry in general.” It is the best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and kill at forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental state of the man who, after reading Hazlitt’s essay, is not urgently desirous of reading some poetry before his next meal....

1. Radical decentralization
2. Small pieces loosely joined
3. Perpetual beta
4. Remixable content
5. User as contributor
6. Rich user experience

Instead of strolling in the library stacks to find a book, people want to stay put in their homes and offices and retrieve full texts with a click of a button. Asked about the reliability, accuracy, and objectivity of the information they retrieve on the web, people express concern, but there is little evidence that they act on their concern.... As such, searching the web specifically, and searching for information generally, conforms to the principle of least effort, "The design of any ... information system should be the system's ease of use ... If an organization desires to have a high quality of information used, it must make ease of use of primary importance" (Rosenberg, 1966, 19).

For a decade and a half beginning in the early 1980s, the online library catalog was the jewel in the crown when people eagerly queued at its terminals to find information written by the world's experts.... Long ago, we could have added more value to the online library catalog but the only thing we changed was the catalog's medium. Our failure to act back then cost the online catalog the crown. Now that the era of mass digitization has begun, we have a second chance at redesigning the online library catalog, getting it right, coaxing back old users, and attracting new ones.

Peter Drucker says something to the effect of that we only know our organization if we look at it from the outside. I suspect, as has been suggested, that the catalog is not a priority for many library patrons. I find it ironic that many surveys of public library patrons suggest that their top priority are hours that the library are open. When you ask people what they associate with public libraries they usually say books, old gray haired ladies, overdue fines, and hindering rules about using the library. Rather than put these issues at the top of our priority list, we instead focus on catalogs.

BookSwim.com, an online library that allows members to rent unlimited books on a monthly-membership basis, is about to launch in February 2007. We will offer books with no due dates, no late fees, and no shipping charges. BookSwim is a sort of “Netflix for books."

"Out of sight, out of mind" was never more true. Hide Harper Lee in the back of the library with the other fiction, and yeah, it might very well not get checked out for two years. Put it up front on the "Staff Recommendations" table and it will be gone in an hour.