- A Blog Devoted to Bookshelves
Posted October 30, 2008
You'd think there'd be a finite number of ways to design a bookcase, but you'd be wrong.
Bibliophiles unhappy with the usual rectangular racks and rows - as well as librarians seeking inspirations for new ways to
configure books in their book displays - can find plenty of ideas (almost 250 of them so far) at Alex Johnson's
Bookshelf.
Some of the bookcases highlighted by Alex are either extremely high-tech, very expensive, or exceedingly ugly. Some, however,
are none of these things. The bookshelf shown here was made by sawing two identical coffeetables in half, stacking them on
top of each other, and bolting them to the wall. Voila!
Found via Bibliopolis, which we found via
PhiloBiblos, which we found via
Bibliophile Bullpen.
Click here to read all previously-posted Booklover Alerts
- Dept. of Lawbreaking Library Executives (Illinois Division)
Posted October 29, 2008
The head of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois has been fired after being arrested
a second time for shoplifting.
Details from the Chicago Tribune.
Before accepting the $250,000-a-year post in Illinois, historian Rick Beard, 61 years old, had been executive director for
ten years (1992-2002) at the Atlanta Historical Society.
Found via LISNews.
- New Job Website for Librarians
Posted October 29, 2008
Well, an improved job website, anyway: LISJobs.com.
Now, if AFPL's director would just decree that AFPL's Human Resource Office shall routinely post every vacant AFPL librarian job to the
site. ("Routinely" as in "an HR head will roll every single time the HR Office fails to promptly post an AFPL librarian vacancy to
LISJobs.com.")
And then if we could just get Fulton County to end its latest hiring freeze....
Found via the
Librarian in Black.
- Booklover Alert: British Library Releases Rare Audiotapes of 20th Century Writers
Posted October 28, 2008
National Public Radio broadcast the story this past weekend; the online
version includes a link to this delicious - and rather startling - audiotape (the only one in existence) of the voice
of Virginia Woolf.
Found via LISNews.
Click here to read all previously-posted Booklover Alerts
- Popular Writer Tony Hillerman Dies at 83
Posted October 28, 2008
Details via the
Associated Press.
Found via LISNews.
- Ten Allegedly "Cool" Library Buildings
Posted October 28, 2008
These are the libraries that will
no doubt be among the exemplars for a new Central Library in Atlanta, should the voters approve the Fulton county's library
bond referendum next Tuesday. (And should the $85 million in matching funds from philanthropists somehow be raised after that.)
No criteria are stipulated for having chosen these particular buildings for this MSN feature story, but at least they don't
all look like spaceships.
Found via LISNews.
- Selector Alert: Are Copies of These Frequently-Challenged Books in Your Library?
Posted October 25, 2008
The frequency of U.S. newspaper reports about individuals attempting to get the Local Powers That Be to permanently remove
from some library's collection (or, more often, permanently remove from the children's areas of some public library or school library)
is far too high - no to mention far too depressing - to report each and every one of them here at the WATCH.
The online version of a recent book-challenges
story in USA Today is unique in that it includes an American Library Association-supplied list of documented
book challenges over the past five years. Even better, the list is sortable: by title, by author, by state, by the reason
cited to justify the challenge, and by the upshot of the challenge (if known).
This sortable list is thus a particularly handy tool for library selectors who'd like to examine their collections to be
sure that challenged titles are currently available in their branch's collections.
Found via LISNews.
- Booklover Alert: The Particular Joy of Reading an Obscure Book
Posted October 25, 2008
The Guardian recently served up another feast for bibliophiles with a blogpost written by one Betty Mills entitled
"The Joy of Sharing Your Favourite Obscure Books".
As is often the case with the online versions of the Guardian's book-related stories, this intriguing blogpost is
accompanied by numerous equally-enlightening - and equally delightfully-expressed - readers' comments.
As we head into another winter, bibliophiles on both sides of The Pond are already squirreling away their little bits of
paper (and, for some of us, various computer printouts!) inscribed with the titles of books we intend to track down for
those days when the weather is far too nasty outside to do anything but stay indoors and hunker down with a good read.
The Guardian blogpost is chock-full of particularly obscure possibilities, so get ready to hit your PRINT key once
you've pulled up the link to this satisfying screed.
Found via LISNews.
Click here to read all previously-posted Booklover Alerts
- Tomorrow, in Bainbridge: 10th Annual Georgia Literary Festival
Posted October 24, 2008
Like so much else of interest to Atlanta's bookloving community, you won't find anything about this year's Georgia Literary
Festival on AFPL's website. Fortunately, you can read about the festival - and about numerous closer-to-home author appearances - at the website of the
Georgia Center for the Book - a link to which you also won't
find on AFPL's website.
When, O Lord, will the AFPL Powers That Be invest a little staff energy into routinely posting to its website information
of likely interest to one of the public library's primary constituencies - the city's (computer-owning) bibliophiles? Don't
the aforementioned Powers understand that its website would garner more users if the site were more useful than currently
is? Adn just think of the additional legion of bond referendum cheerleaders the library system might have created had it
been more methodical over the past few years in its routine biblioinformation-broadcasting efforts!
- Library Quote of the Day
Posted October 24, 2008
From an interview with the author of (among other things) The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel:
Q. "...What do you think about the future of libraries? Are you optimistic?"
A. "I don’t think libraries or books are, in themselves, threatened. I think our intelligence is threatened. I think that
we are in the midst of a worldwide intent to render us stupid so that we will be better consumers of economic and
intellectual trash, whether it be fast food, pop literature or religious claptrap. I’m optimistic in the morning,
pessimistic in the afternoon."
Found via Fade Theory.
- Dept. of Religion and/in Libraries: Halloween Division
Posted October 23, 2008
Every Halloween brings another opportunity for library administrators and funders to wade into arguments and power struggles
over the proper role of public libraries in marking this particular (and widely-celebrated) holiday. (Similar things happen
with each advent of Christmas.)
One Halloween-related wrinkle in this tiresome annual enactment that we'd not heard about before is unfolding in a small
town in
Connecticut.
Found via LISNews.
- The Public Library: Information Depot or [and?] Community Recreation/Health/Legal Aid/Entertainment Center?
Posted October 23, 2008
Rarely do two consecutive comments on a blog represent so perfectly the two ends of a polarized debate as do the first two
readers' comments following LISNews' recent Get Your
Flu Shots @ the Library blogpost.
- Notes from One Blogger's Experience of 2008's Internet Librarian Conference
Posted October 23, 2008
One of the WATCH's favorite bibliobloggers, Sarah Houghton-Jan, aka the Librarian in Black, has been blogging this
year's Internet Librarian Conference. A few snippets from her series of reading-worthy daily reports:
- "OPACS do not allow for enough personalization or customization because of the way the vendors have locked down the
product. As a patron you can't go in and make it feel like it is yours. And most importantly, while the rest of the world
seems to understand the idea that you create a web presence and unify all of your services into one place with a single
log-in that doesn't involve a 14-digit barcode log-in, that is what we do. That is what we have chosen to do, our vendosr
have chosen for us."
- "Most next-gen OPACs are overlays that still require the underlying system to remain in place. Keep that in mind – it
won’t fix underlying data errors. It may expose them more, but won’t fix them."
- "How do you draw people into the library? Have something good to offer in the first place - people love the library
but they love their precious time more....Our users are the center of our universe, but we are not the center of theirs."
As we mentioned, the entirety of Sarah's various postings
from the conference are worth reading (especially by library administrators).
- 200,000 Reader-Written Book Reviews at LibraryThing Can Now Be Easily Embedded in Library Catalogs
Posted October 22, 2008
Quick, could the AFPL Technical Services Manager please look into
this post-haste?
Oh, wait. AFPL doesn't have a Technical Services Manager on its payroll.
Which is probably why AFPL's website lacks so many other useful features that are a part of so many other public
library websites these days.
- Dept. of Nifty Logos for Public Libraries
Posted October 22, 2008
A few years back, the latest in a series of expensively-acquired AFPL logos was unveiled to the hapless public:
Said logo was greeted with near-universal disappointment, not to mention confusion-triggered head-scratching. Perhaps there
are a few people who like the thing, but we find it interesting that the library doesn't even use the logo on its own
website. Coincidence?
At any rate, we've been interested to see how much better other public libraries have fared in obtaining for themselves
well-designed logos to use on their stationery, press releases, signage, T-shirts, websites (!), etc.
For example, take these two logos, the top one belonging to the Sacramento, California PL, and the bottom one adopted by the
Fayetteville, Arkansas PL:
Nice, yes?
If you happen to stumble across other better-than-mediocre public library logos, please
let us know about them so we can eventually assemble a little collage for those who believe AFPL can't do any better.
The bottom two logos shown above were recently highlighted by LISNews.
- Dept. of Library Heroes: One Man, Two Donkeys, and 4,800 Books
Posted October 21, 2008
A school teacher in an isolated part of Columbia, determined to get books into the
hands of war-tramatized children in an even more isolated area of his country, has for ten years now been a one-man,
two-burro bookmobile.
Two depressing reflections upon reading about this inspiring, resourceful bibliophile:
- What can we conclude from the fact that it took the
New York Times an entire decade to publish this
remarkable story?
- What can we conclude from the fact that this guy in the hinterlands of South America has singlehandedly gotten more
books into the hands of more children than AFPL's still-garaged, mega-expensive bookmobile has gotten into the hands
of Atlanta's children during the past ten years?
Found via LISNews.
Wasilla Public Library Back in the News
Posted October 21, 2008
First reported by the
Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, an Alaska newspaper, the story was picked up yesterday by the
Christian Science Monitor.
Found via LISNews.
Dept. of Satirical Takes on Music Videos Filmed in Libraries
Posted October 21, 2008
If you replace the original lyrics of this Tears and Fears music video with a literal description of the irrelevant behavior
depicted in the video, what you get is...weirdly fascinating.
Found via LISNews.
Dept. of Computer-Powered Gizmos
Posted October 16, 2008
 Libraries across the globe are finding they need to designate an entire
drawer somewhere to store all the floppy disks and jump drives left behind in library workstations. (We estimate that approximately
half the floppies and jump drives libraries have inadvertently inherited, sometimes temporarily, sometimes forever - were
abandoned by those apparently-easily-distracted users who've rushed out of the library to answer one of those
oh-so-important calls from their cell-phones.) (On second thought, this theory might not cover the facts, as libraries have
become the temporary or permanent owners to so many abandoned cellphones.)
At any rate, people keep inventing more and more things one can plug into computer USB ports...and can therefore end up
inadvertently leaving behind on their rush out the library door. Here's a photo our current fave. (With the zillions of users library workstations atttact, those keyboards do get mighty dirty - not to mention germ-infested -
but we wonder how much noise this puppy makes. Although it's probably not any louder than your typical cellphone ringtone going off, right?)
Found via
Librarians Matter.
Fellow Employee Kills Colleague at College Library in Texas
Posted October 14, 2008
A few details from
the San Antonio Express-News.
Found via LISNews.
Local GLBTQ Literary Festival Starts Tomorrow
Posted October 13, 2008
AFPL is one of the co-sponsors of Atlanta's week-long 2nd Annual Queer Literary Festival. Nationally-known writers Mark
Doty and Kate Bornstein will join dozens of local GLBTQ writers and performers at events around the city. This year's
festival also includes the staging of an award-winning play, as well as poetry readings, lectures, workshops, and more.
Although so far there's been zero information about the festival posted to the library system's
website, articles describing the festival have been published by the local GBLTQ newspaper
Southern Voice and the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A sidebar
of the AJC article describes various ways AFPL is systematically collecting GLBTQ materials at three of its
facilities: Central's Special Collections Department, the Auburn Avenue Research Library, and the Ponce de Leon Branch.
Except for the $10 tickets to performances of the play, the festival free and all events are open to the public; the complete
schedule is posted at the festival's blog.
October 14th Update: A link to the festival schedule
was posted to the library system's website the morning of October 14th.
October 17th Update: One of the festival's out-of-town guests, poet and memoirist Mark
Doty, is among the just-announced finalists for a
National Book Award. Award winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on November 19th.
(Long) List of Computer Shortcuts You Thought Everyone Knew
Posted October 7, 2008
David Pogue, computer columnist for the New York Times, recently posted a few often-overlooked computer tips; his
blog's readers have responded with over 1,000 more. Scroll through even a few dozen of these
short-cuts and and you'll probably learn something that might save you some time, steps, or grief.
A highly-selective excerpt of this list would be mighty useful for the legions of library employees across the globe whose
duties include teaching the public how to use computers.
Found via LISNews.
Dept. of Libraryland Truisms: "Banning" a Book
is a Good Way To Get More People to Read It
Posted October 7, 2008
Consider this:
Now read the amusing comments this "graph"
produced by Jessica Hagy provoked.
Found via LISNews.
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