- Georgia Center for the Book is Ten Years Old
Posted April 28, 2008
The Georgia Center for the Book, headquartered at the
DeKalb County Public Library's central library in Decatur, is celebrating its tenth birthday, and its
May lineup of author appearances will be of interest to many AFPLS patrons.
As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, AFPLS still hasn't posted a link on its webpage
to the Georgia Center. Until that happy (if belated) day arrives, perhaps at least a few AFPLWATCH readers will
pass along the link to their friends, and encourage them to either add it to their Favorites, or sign up for the Center’s
free email alerts.
- Back to the Future: Print Format Wikipedia in the Works
Posted April 28, 2008
A German publisher has announce plans to publish a 900-page, one-volume excerpt of the German-language
edition of the online Wikipedia.
Details from PC World.
Found via Library Link of the Day.
- Bridgeport, CT Library Faces Radical Budget Cuts
Posted April 28, 2008
The town’s mayor says that public libraries aren’t essential city services.
Details reported by Library Journal.
- Dept. of Tasks for Librarians With Too Much Time on Their Hands...
Posted April 28, 2008
Incredibly detailed (and illustrated) instructions from
WikiHow for how to make earrings that look like teeny little books:
Found via Jessamyn West's Librarian.net.
- Library Use and Rising Gasoline Prices...
Posted April 26, 2008
Few public library systems - even those "Green Library"-interested systems - would be brave enough to post a link
to this
car-trip-cost-calculator, but we think every public library should. For one thing, it would encourage more
computer-owning library patrons to minimize gas-consumption: the posting of the link could be used to explain
how many library services can be accessed "remotely."
For example, how many patrons have you encountered who remained unaware for years on end that they could
renew their materials online, and who have been dutifully traipsing off in person - via their cars, some of them
behemoths - to simply renew their borrowed materials?
Found via LISNews.
- Citizens' Outcry Kills Proposal to Charge Library Users $1 To Place a Hold in Los Angeles
Posted April 26, 2008
A website created by one of the outraged library users objecting to the plan
was instrumental in organizing others against the idea.
Details at Library Journal.
Found via LISNews.
We think charging library users a fee to place a Hold - or charging patrons anything for any public library
service - is a terrible idea, but we certainly agree with a suggestion made by one of the people who commented on
this news story: charge library patrons a fee whenever they fail to pick up a Hold they've placed.
The amount of staff time spent searching for, labeling, and otherwise handling Holds that library users actually
pick up is time well spent, but library employees waste precious hours of time every day removing, returning, and
reshelving Holds that were never claimed - and other hapless library users are forced to needlessly wait
seven days before an unclaimed Hold is released for another borrowers waiting for that item. Patrons who carelessly
consume the energies of library staff - and who are also interfering with other borrowers' access to library materials -
should be expected to pay for their thoughtlessness, just as we expect patrons to pay a fine for not returning
a borrowed item on time.
- Iowa Legislators Vote Down Proposal to Regulate
Which Videos Kids Can Borrow from Libraries
Posted April 26, 2008
Details.
Found via LISNews.
- Woman Kills Herself Inside Salt Lake City Public Library
Posted April 12, 2008
A few
details.
Found via LISNews.
- Wikipedia Landmark: Entry #10,000,000
Posted April 11, 2008
Wikipedia's ten millionth entry - about a 16th century
goldsmith (something that certainly would never have made its appearance in
Britannica) - was written by (drum roll, please) a former librarian.
Found via LISNews via
CNET blogger
Daniel Terdiman.
- How Many Americans Read Books, and How Often?
Posted April 10, 2008
Read the
results of a Harris poll conducted last month.
Found via LISNews.
- Selector Alert: Another "Best Books of All Time" List
Posted April 8, 2008
AFPL selectors might want to take a break from their guesswork about the
potential durability (or at least temporary popularity) of the various
titles currently on offer to see if their library owns at least one decent-condition
copy of these
110 Best Books as decreed by the UK's Telegraph. As usual with
these lists of classics, the Telegraph's readers chime in with their
own nominations, which AFPL selectors - and classic-broaching booklovers -
should pay equal attention to.
Found via LISNews.
Click here to read all Booklover Alerts
- Libraries and Politics in Memphis
Posted April 8, 2008
The mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, having already
replaced its library director with two non-librarians (one of them the
mayor’s former bodyguard), is now trying to
close five of the city’s 19 libraries.
Found via Library Journal.
- And This Year's Award for Oddest Use of the Term Library Goes To...
Posted April 8, 2008
...the Fort Collins (Colorado)
Bike Lending Library.
At first, we were afraid that some library somewhere had decided to
lend out bicycles along with their books. But no, this really is a
stand-alone bicycle-sharing outfit that's just grabbed the term library
to emphasize how it, like public libraries, operates under a non-capitalist
business model.
Found via LISNews.
- Another Critique of ALA's Celebrity-Obsessed READ Posters
Posted April 8, 2008
Convincing a bunch of movie stars to pose for a series of reading-endorsement
ALA posters is fraught with questionable assumptions, but it's not the
rationale for these posters that the Neighborhood Librarian objects to.
Read her
rants on (so far) the posters featuring Keira Knightly, Orlando Bloom,
Colin Ferrell, and somebody named Julia Stiles.
Found via
Librarian.net.
- California Town Considers Banning Shirtless Library Users
Posted April 4, 2008
Pretty soon, the lists of rules spelling out what is inappropriate for
would-be users of U.S. public libraries are going to end up constituting
book-length documents.
Miss Manners would weep (some more) over this latest development,
from the West Coast.
Found via LISNews.
- Service Desk Alert: Another Search Engine for Finding People
Posted April 4, 2008
The engine is called Pipl, and it might
be as (or more) useful as some of the other Internet-based tools library
staff routinely turn to for tracking down information on not-necessarily-famous
individuals.
Found via the
Librarian in Black, who cites a review of Pipl at Phil Bradley's
Search Engine Land.
- Sex Offender Accused of Molesting Six-Year-Old in Massachusetts Library
Posted April 4, 2008
While a homeless 26-year-old was molesting her kid, the kid's mom was using
a library computer less than 10 feet away.
Details.
Found via LISNews.
- Dept. of Damned-If-You-Do, Damned If-You-Don't:
Internet Privacy vs. Internet Porn at the Public Library
Posted April 4, 2008
Yet another newspaper reporter looks at the
dilemma faced by U.S. public library employees as they are repeatedly
damned for policing Internet porn-viewing in libraries...or for refusing to
do that.
Found via LISNews.
And the practical guidance provided by AFPL administrators to AFPL
employees on this issue? Virtually nil. No, AFPL administrators seem to
prefer to wait until a lawsuit has been filed before they force themselves
to address thorny issues chronically faced by frontline library employees.
- Privatized Public Libraries: Another View
Posted April 4, 2008
As the U.S. economy continues to spiral downward, more municipalities
are considering outsourcing the operation of their public libraries.
(LSSI, the biggest privately-owned library-operating company, already
manages 65 libraries formerly operated by 15 municipalities in California,
Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas.)
A story in a Massachusetts newspaper, from a financially-strapped town that
recently considered outsourcing its public library, provides some
interesting commentary about this "solution" to the problem of underfunded
library services.
Should this issue be of concern to AFPL employees and customers? Well,
if the Fulton County commissioners' notorious poor stewardship
of county funds continues, it could certainly result in the sort of
financial panic that makes outsourcing county libraries a tempting strategy
for allegedly saving taxpayer dollars.
Found via LISNews.
- Award Announcement: Oddest Book Title of the Year
Posted April 4, 2008
The UK's Guardian has the hilarious
details.
Found by a friend of an AFPLWATCH reader.
Click here to read all Booklover Alerts
- New Contract Ends Six-Weeks of Closed Canadian Public Libraries
Posted April 4, 2008
Details about the upshot of the recent closure of libraries in Victoria,
British Columbia, due to a labor/management dispute there.
Found via LISNews.
- What's Up in LibraryLand Elsewhere on Planet Earth?
Posted April 4, 2008
The Germany-based
LIBWORLD is an ambitious project: invited bloggers try to
summarize what's going on with libraries - and library-based blogging -
in the various countries where these bloggers live and work.
So far, the countries shown in red in the map above have been featured; only this week was a
USA profile added, written by the indefatigable Sarah Houghton-Jan,
aka the
Librarian in Black.
- Project Gutenberg's Top 100 Downloaded Books
Posted April 2, 2008
Most AFPLWATCH readers have surely heard about
Project Gutenberg, the mother of all online collections of copyright-free
book texts - going strong since Michael Hart started the project in 1971.
If you've ever wondered what sorts of PG books the computer owners of the
world have found the most useful, you might want to take a gander at PG's
listing of its Top 100 Downloaded Books. You'll probably
be surprised at the mix of fiction vs. nonfiction, and at the names of
the most-frequently-downloaded authors.
We hope these online book downloading frequencies have nothing to do
with any pattern of the absence of in public libraries of multiple print
copies of various literary classics.
Found via LISNews.
Click here to read all Booklover Alerts
- Coping Strategies for Email Overload
Posted April 2, 2008
Could one or more of these five approaches
recently suggested by ReadWriteWeb
work for you?
Found via the
Librarian in Black.
- Ways Libraries Could Be Using RSS
Posted April 2, 2008
Tampa, Florida-based Cheryl Wolfe, aka
The Moxie Librarian, can think of at least
10 ways.
And AFPL isn't using any of them. Why is that?
Found via the
Librarian in Black.
- Authors! Authors!
Posted April 1, 2008
Because (tacky! tacky!) AFPL doesn’t include on its website a
hyperlink to the Dekalb County-based Georgia Center for the Book, AFPL
patrons using AFPL’s website are not being conveniently alerted to the
Center’s impressive monthly lineups of author appearances, such as the one
for April.
Until AFPL’s phantom webmaster DOES bother to put up a link to the GCB,
we’ve added it to LibraryLand’s list of
frequently-used sources, so that at least AFPLWATCH readers can be
prompted to check it out from time to time.
Click here to read all Booklover Alerts
Continue reading previously-posted LibraryLand Bulletins
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