While everyone continues to wait for a PR honcho to finally be hired to
help with this important, never-ending task, those in the trenches who've
been doing what they can (on top of their other duties) to fill in the
breach could benefit from the numerous tips and warnings supplied by
Get to the Po!nt.
Found via LibTalk Blog, which often links to nifty
library-publicizing ideas.
Massive Cutbacks at Toronto Public Library
Posted July 31, 2007
Librarian Activist has posted links to several recent descriptions
of the latest financial crisis for TPL.
Remember "The Digital Divide"?
Posted July 31, 2007
Librarian/blogger Jessamyn West
explains why it hasn't disappeared yet, and what that means for public
libraries.
Librarians' Book of the Year?
Posted July 30, 2007
Perhaps it's a bit premature for the WATCH to opine about which book
published in 2007 we deem The Year's Most Important for Librarians to
Read. David Weinberger's
Everything is Miscellaneousis therefore the WATCH's first nomination
for the book worthy of this distinction.
We're not entusiastically nominating this book because its author is the same guy who
wrote the groundbreaking
Cluetrain Manifestoand
Small Pieces Loosely Joined, books whose compelling advice for libraries most library systems (including,
alas, AFPL), have yet to incorporate into the way they operate. Nor does
our nominated book's author happen to be a librarian himself - although
Weinberger does sweetly dedicate his latest book "to the librarians."
No, Everything is Miscellaneous is important because it explores -
in an unusually clear, unusually comprehensive, and unusually engaging
fashion - how the digitization of information has already revolutionized
and will continue to revolutionize the production, consumption, circulation,
and organization of knowledge by disrupting the habits, agendas,
and preferences of traditional (print-based) information gatekeepers.
Library people will profit from (and enjoy) reading Weinburger's book in
its entirety. But for those who'd like a glimpse of what the book covers,
blogger Mark Bowers has helpfully posted a
chapter-by-chapter summary, accompanied by pithy quotations from
the text (Everything is full of well-crafted, arresting sentences).
Readers impressed by the book will be pleased to learn that its author
maintains a blog
exploring Everything's arguments and posting the comments of the
book's ever-growing number of fans and critics. Meanwhile, there've been
plenty of reviews and lots of discussion about Weinberger's book
elsewhere in the biblioblogosphere.
Any librarian not inclined to make arrangements to get hold of a copy of
Weinberger's latest book this this very minute will perhaps be willing to
Do What You Can to make sure your library orders a copy for your library's
users. (As of this morning, only one AFPL library had a copy of
Everything in its collection.)
More Bloggers' Reactions to the Dispensing-with-Dewey Experiment
Posted July 30, 2007
As mentioned earlier this month,
a recently-opened Arizona public library is using a system other than
Melvil Dewey's to arrange its book collections by subject.
Library workers and library users interested in following the resulting
brouhaha can find links to a half-dozen discussions of this experiment
among library users (most of them not librarians) at Buzzfeed.
"From the Sublime to the Ridiculous" - The Internet as Mirror
Posted July 28, 2007
"Unlike all previous new technologies, [the World Wide Web] is not a
set of tools outside of ourselves. The web meshes machines and people more
completely than any previous technology and its contradictions are ours.
It is our unjust societies that maintain the digital divide as a new global
class system, our capacity for generosity that created the collectivist
not-for-profit ethic of the web, our greed that is making it increasingly
subject to corporate takeovers, our desire for connection that drives its
curiosity, our damaged minds that generate its dangers. It is, virtually,
the way we are."
--Finton O'Toole, quoted in the Irish Times
Treat yourself to reading
more of O'Toole's penetrating and/or sobering reflections about the
consequences of the 15-year-old Internet - including some unforeseen
psychological shifts and plenty of not-universally-welcomed rearrangements
of political power blocs and information-gatekeeping.
Dept. of Library Trustee Grandiosity (Illinois Division)
Posted July 27, 2007
We weren't aware that trustees needed fancy, expensive badges to do their
jobs.
Read how one of these badge-flashing Illinois trustees misused said badge
- although that incident obviously wasn't tacky enough to dissuade his
colleagues from voting to keep using the badges in the future.
Memo to Library Administrators & Committee Chairs:
A Biblioblogger's Tips for Non-Toxic Meetings
Posted July 27, 2007
"Do you stagger out of meetings moaning how you hate, hate, hate meetings?
Do you yearn for anything - earthquake, hurricane, building collapse - to
get out of the meeting you’re in? Do meetings have to be so awful?"
Like the rest of us, librarian Karen Schneider (aka the Free Range Librarian)
has clearly been taken hostage more than once by poor meeting-conductors.
Read Karen's
Eight Tips for Healthy Meetings - then go forth and Do Your Part in
making your meetings less dreaded by and/or more endurable for its attendees.
Booklover Alert: New York City's Library Hotel
Posted July 26, 2007
Next time you're visiting New York City, and you think it would be a lark
to book a mid-Manhattan hotel room that (kinda-sorta) resembles a library,
you can do that.
The LiB's readers make some equally compelling comments, including some
spot-on observations about how county-controlled public libraries are as
much hindered in their mission by county IT departments as they are
"supported" by them.
U.S. Judges to Library Decree-Makers:
Be Careful with Those Employee Dress Codes
Posted July 25, 2007
This
overview of some recent court rulings on lawsuits brought by
employees objecting to various employer-mandated dress codes cautions
library administrators about trying to institute and enforce dress codes
that run afoul of various constitutional rights and legal principles such
as gender equality in U.S. workplaces.
This overview is interesting not only for its content, but because it's
an example of the many educational uses of a library-based blog - in
this case, a blog maintained by an Illinois public library system.
As we mentioned recently, both the
New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have deemed newsworthy the experiment in an Arizona library of replacing
a Dewey-based organization of its collection with a BISAC-based one.
One of the biblioblogosphere's most articulate inhabitants, Karen Schneider
(for the past four years aka the Free Range Librarian)
reviews the Dispensing-with-Dewey experiment's facts and responds to
readers' comments and questions over at the
ALA TechSource blog.
In our humble opinion, the issue of how a (public) library organizes
its (non-digital) stock comes down to which (imperfect) classification
system simultaneously best serves two equally-legitimate but
radically different expectations of (most) (public) library users:
groupings that allow for users to quickly finding a particular
known item, and groupings that allow for semi-efficient (i.e., non-totally-random)
browsing (which is usually - though certainly not always - browsing by
subject). Another crucial feature of a desirable subject-based
classification system for non-digital library: non-ambiguous instructions
embedded in the chosen scheme for where a library employee should re-shelve
a borrowed (non-digital) item once it's returned.
Though hardly a first in this respect, New Jersey's Princeton Public
Library is one of many whose
website includes a prominent tab near the top of the site labeled
"Recommended." Website users who click on this tab are taken to a
lists of recommended titles grouped in a respectable number of various
categories, as well as to lists of new books in various categories. (Better,
each title in each list is accompanied by book jacket images, short
descriptions, and links to the relevant PPL catalog records.)
Although AFPL administrators have so far failed to enhance the usefulness of
AFPL's website, we hope the current
reluctance for radically improving the usefulness of the website by
identifying and allocating the staff resources necessary for doing so
will eventually be replaced by something more customer-supportive.
We also hope that, when and if such a staff investment-shift finally
occurs at AFPL, that such a "Recommended" feature, while displayed as
prominently as PPL displays theirs, will be slightly re-named to be a bit
more accurate (i.e., "New or Recommended Titles", rather than the ambiguous
"Recommended." In fact, we think there's a need for two separate tabs
(placed not only high on the page but side-by-side): one tab for "New
Titles" and another tab for "Recommended Titles." After all, those are
often very different animals.
Unfortunately, without a full-time webmaster on its own payroll, AFPL's
entrance to the ranks of Excellent Library Websites is going to be a long
time coming.
Your Tax Dollars at Work: If You Live in the USA,
Be Careful What You Read in Public Places...
Posted July 24, 2007
...or you may find yourself
questioned by FBI agents. This particular reader/citizen (who,
incidentally, lives in Atlanta) was reported to the feds by a fellow
Starbucks customer/citizen, but he could just as easily been reported by a
fellow public library patron/citizen.
And you thought this sort of perfectly legal government interest in
what people are choosing to read - including (as in this case) what
newspaper articles they choose to read - only happens in Third World
dictatorships? Welcome to Bush & Co.'s vision of the American republic and
the role of federal government employees in that republic.
Found at
LISNews, who found the story in Creative Loafing.
Library Litigation Alert: Employee Sues for Bookdrop-Emptying Injury
Posted July 24, 2007
Details on this federal case from Alabama's Huntsville Times.
Why should you care? Partly because lots o' libraries have tapped into the
resources (especially the reader-assigned subject tags) available at these
websites.
And lots o' other libraries (one of which shall remain unnamed) could
do the same....
The Only Patron Survey Question Worth Asking?
Posted July 19, 2007
Rochelle, the librarian who maintains the blog "Tinfoil + Racoon,"
recently recounted an interaction with someone who didn't know about
her library's licensed databases, and, once alerted to them, didn't know
how to efficiently use them. Her entire blogpost is worth reading, but
here is an excerpt that captures her analysis of that interaction with
the library patron:
Something is really wrong if library services make people feel stupid.
...Patrons could give a crap about the image [portrayed in the media] of
the folks behind the big desks or in the stacks. I've read recently that
the only survey question you need to ask a patron/user/customer is "After
using the library today, would you come back?" (I mean all points of
service--phone, web, in-person.) Who wants to come back to a place where
they feel stupid and helpless? It doesn't matter if you do your job in a
jacket and tie, stockings and heels, tats and vintage, rumpled Dockers and
Birks. It matters even less what you look like, drink, or wear once you're
out the door. What matters is that our users find librarians who are kind,
patient, and helpful, a physical space that they can navigate without a
map and where they feel welcomed, materials that are useful and accessible,
and resources that don't require hours of instruction. What matters is that
when you ask them, "Would you come back," they answer, without hesitation,
"yes."
The Disappearance of Book Reviews from Print Newspapers
Posted July 18, 2007
The latest media giant to report on the trend among local newspapers - including
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution - to abolish their longstanding
book review sections - is National Public Radio, which broadcast its story
yesterday in a “Morning Edition” segment.
Listen to the story.
Taking a Pass on Apple's iPhone
Posted July 18, 2007
Bob Rankin (of Internet
Tourbus fame), has posted to his blog
ten reasons for not rushing out to buy this year's most media-hyped
gadget.
Dept. of “Oh Gawd, I’ve-Lived-Too-Long…”
Posted July 18, 2007
Speaking of gadgets, Internet Tourbus driver Bob Rankin also recently
posted a rather mortifying
list of kewl doodads that can be plugged into the USB ports of desktop
computers - including the USB ports of hundreds of computers located in
AFPL’s libraries.
Chances are that AFPL library workers, on their periodic strolls through
branch computer areas, may begin noticing some weird stuff plugged into
one or more of their processors. (We’re talking lava lamps here, folks!)
You have been warned.
Vatican Library Closed for Repairs Until 2010
Posted July 18, 2007
Librarians, scholars, and library-loving tourists traveling to Rome anytime
during the next few years will be disappointed if they'd been planning on
visiting the amazing library at the Vatican.
Details.
Here's an idea from an academic
library in Virginia that public libraries everywhere should be
experimenting with: posting on the library's website comments
(via email inquiries, phone calls, service desk interactions, and
suggestion boxes) made by library users, with each posted
inquiry/suggestion/complaint followed by an appropriate staff member's response.
What a great way to (a) demonstrate that the library staff welcomes
its users' comments, suggestions, and complaints (b) simultaneously and
conveniently explain to lots of people which user suggestions have
been/will be implemented, and which ones won't be, and why.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the folks at AFPL who handle the monthly
deluge of "customer comment" postcards, emails, and phone calls from AFPL
users would be willing to funnel those efforts into such a communication/educational
tool? Even if only selected comments were replied to publicly on AFPL's
website, this would be an advance over the current way AFPL administrators
now handle complaints and suggestions.
July 24, 2007 Update: The Wall Street
Journal has also
taken notice of the experiment.
Booklover Alert: Yet Another Web-Based Title-Recommending Resource
Posted July 17, 2007
Librarian Sarah Houghton-Jan (aka the Librarian in Black)
notes that the great maw of
AllConsuming.com covers book titles as well as certain other consumables
(so far, music and food). AllConsuming.com
thus qualifies as yet another part of the Internet where readers can find
(and, if they wish, post comments about and/or post lists of) titles on
various subjects that they or others are reading, want to read, or have
read already.
"In Love with a Machine" - A Librarian's Confession
Posted July 17, 2007
We've often wondered - with some anxiety, it must be admitted - about
what sets of circumstances might propel a computer user into switching from
a PC to a Mac. Even more often - and even more anxiously - we've wondered
about how someone might decide that the time has finally come to swap her
desktop for a laptop.
Although the chronicling of either of these leaps o' faith doesn't quite
fit the WATCH's normal criteria of a LibraryLand Bulletin (not exactly being
"news" from elsewhere about what is or is not happening at AFPL),
this librarian's well-told tale
is so entertaining that we've decided to post it to the WATCH anyway. Enjoy!
Flikr Bursting with Photos of Libraries and Librarians!
Posted July 17, 2007
Michael Porter (aka
Libraryman) notes that the Internet's most well-known (but certainly not the
only) photo-posting site now has over 10,000 images of libraries and/or
librarians, submitted by over 1,500 different amateur photographers?
See for yourself!
And the Winner of the Culture Consumption Sweepstakes? Books!
Posted July 17, 2007
Now comes Globe and Mail op-ed writer Rick Groen with this
announcement:
I've done the math and here's the bottom line. If you want consistent
artistic bang for your buck, skip the movies, forget the theatre and turn
off your TV set. Instead, read a book. More specifically, read a novel.
More specifically still, read the kind of novel that publishers call
“trade fiction.”
And although Groen doesn't mention libraries, most book (and thus library)
lovers will want to read Groen's excellent screed
in all its glorious entirety.
Warnings for Bloggers: Two Sets of Commandments
Posted July 16, 2007
Everyone in LibraryLand who reads lots o' biblioblogs - and certainly anyone
in LibraryLand (or elsewhere) with A Blog of Her Own - could benefit from
reading these separate (if somewhat overlapping) lists of recently-posted
Dire Warnings and Reassuring Encouragements for Bloggers:
July 18th Update: Would-be bloggers
who'd like to delve into some how-to-properly-blog information beyond
brief lists like theones mentioned above might start with
"55 Essential Articles Every Blogger Should Read," compiled by Matt Hudgins.
[Found via
Stephen Abrams.
So Stop Knocking the Potter-Lovers, Already!
Posted July 16, 2007
One librarian's rant against the subtle and not-so-subtle ways some
librarians and critics are undermining the basic truism that there's
no accounting for taste in what people choose to read - and certainly
nothing wrong with some people enjoying books that others, for whatever
reasons, don't.
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist Doug Marlette Killed in Car Crash
Posted July 16, 2007
Tips for Requesting Technical Support
Posted July 10, 2007
AFPL workers coping daily with malfunctioning library computers know very
well the drill for asking the county's Information Technology Department for
help. The
Librarian in Black, a library techie herself, offers five tips for how
library employees should properly ask for technical assistance.
The LiB's advice is fine as far as it goes, but most library employees
would like to see posted, by somebody, somewhere, of "Five Tips for Quickly and Effectively
Rendering Technical Assistance."
Amusement Alert: Web-Based Comic Strips for Library Workers
Posted July 9, 2007
Minneapolis-based school librarian Emily Lloyd (aka "PoesyGalore") has
begun posting a series of comic strips set in a library. It's called
Shelf Check, and you can see a sample of the twenty-or-so strips already
available here.
Booklover Alert: Serious Tools for Serious Readers
Posted July 9, 2007
For a wide array of ingenious (if somewhat expensive) solutions to the
booklover's perennial dilemma of How-to-Read-at-Night-in-Bed-Without-Disturbing-One's-Bedmate,
check out BookLamps.com.
And for people (including librarians!) who find often themselves transcribing
text onto a computer screen from often-unwieldy-sized books, there's now
on the market a handy device that securely elevates those books so you can
scan back and forth between the book and the screen without cramping up
your neck muscles.
We worry that behind these plausible-sounding justifications lurks
the misguided notion that public libraries should try to become All Things
to All People. What next: inviting the public to haul their yard debris
to the nearest public library for recycling? Perhaps recycling old batteries (or old tires)
@ Your Library would be worth pursuing? As if fooling with distributing
voter registration forms and tax forms - and providing "free" Internet
[i.e., email and game-playing] access - weren't annoying enough already!
How One Public Library Copes with Homeless Library Users
Posted July 8, 2007
Interesting
newspaper story about a small Cape Cod library, located near a homeless
shelter, that selectively uses a two-hours-of-library-use-per-day time
limit (enforced by a $30,000-a-year security guard), as well as the
more conventional behavior-based rules, to prevent homeless citizens from
crowding out non-homeless citizens.
Another Internet-Based Competitor for Library Users' Patronage
Posted July 8, 2007
Using the NetFlix videos-by-mail model, Bookfree and Bookswim have formed
membership organizations that, for a fee, rent books to people through the
U.S. mail.
Details from Publishers Weekly.
We predict that public libraries - especially urban public libraries
like AFPL - will be forced to get into the books-by-mail service themselves.
And part of pressure to do so will be the growing perception that (as one
reader of this story states) public libraries are increasingly becoming
"places where only homeless people go."
.com
Perhaps it's a bit premature for the WATCH to opine about which book
published in 2007 we deem The Year's Most Important for Librarians to
Read. David Weinberger's 
Today, the laptop-owning citizens of (and tourists milling around in) Paris
began taking advantage of the wireless Internet access now available in
almost 300 of the city's public spaces, including parks, gardens,
government buildings, museums, and (of course) libraries.