librarian.net

For some wacky reason I’ve been asked to guest blog over at Boing Boing so I’ll be scarcer than usual here. I’m working on a post about the Gale/EBSCO thing but trying to find the hook that makes it … explicable to a plain old library user. If you have suggestions, or other things that you think would fascinate a Boing Boing audience, feel free to drop them in the comments. And if you happen to live in the Florida Panhandle, I’ll be in Niceville on Friday talking about CMSes.

…there’s an appeal to this bag and this bag’s story

“Did you know the [Boston Public Library] is America’s only public library that is also a presidential library?” Bernie [Margolis] asked me on one of my first visits. “It’s John Adams’s Presidential Library. David McCullough researched his John Adams here, and later became a trustee. And let me show you the Abbey Room, which is truly amazing…”

It was on my first tour with Bernie that we came upon a pile of canvas bags down in the basement. I picked one up by its handles and saw that it was unusually deep, stenciled with “Boston Public Library,” and considerably worn.

“We’ve been using these bags for the past hundred years or so,” Bernie said. “The reason they’re so deep is so the delivery man can carry the most number of books relatively comfortably as he shuttles them between our branch libraries—from the truck, up and down stairs, that sort of thing.” Bernie picked up one bag in each hand. “It’s best if you carry two at a time to balance yourself,” he advised.

For sale, via BPL, via Levenger. [10engines]

“In December of 1957 a comic book was published that really did threaten the future–at least the future of American segregationists. Carefully preserved in the special collections of several academic libraries, such as The Smithsonian Institution, Morehouse College, and Stanford University, The Montgomery Story, a 14-page comic book is, credited with being one of the most influential teaching tools ever produced for the Civil Rights Movement.“

David Weinberger points to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and the idea of “advice as process.” I’m going to keep this idea close to me as I move through another year of moderating Ask MetaFilter: “giving advice is a social activity, not merely a transfer of purported knowledge.” How much of what we do as librarians is reference and how much is advice?

How about a library christmas tree made of those nice green books? Would show you a photo here, but they’re “all rights reserved” unlike this nice shot. Worth the click through. You might also want to check out the Librarian in Black’s Gift Guide for Librarians and Book Lovers[thanks pk]

1. new.nypl.org
2. americanlibrariesmagazine.org

Both in beta. Both delicious improvements, in my opinion. Enjoy. Happy holidays!

Having the library snack machine two feet away from [and in the same room as] the toilet is full of fail.

One of the funny things about librarianship, to me, is how much of our collective “hive mind” type of knowledge is wrapped up in mailing lists and their online archives. I still subscribe to at least four library-oriented mailing lists though in many cases I have a web-based option for following along as well. I’ve recently become aware of the “Best of PUBLIB” website which has a nice categorized interface to some of the best “strings of comments” that have shown up on PUBLIB. The other lists I read are Web4Lib which I read via the web and VTLIBRARIES and VLABOARD which, to be best of my knowledge, don’t even have public web archives.

As per usual I’ve returned from holiday travelling with a lot of cool links to share and the admission that I’m behind on my blog reading — and this is me who is never behind, this is all deeply distressing to me — and I bet you are too. Anyhow, some things I’ve enjoyed reading over the past few days. I’m putting a Computers in Libraries column to bed today and it’s talking about widgets. I like talking about widgets.

• Phone box becomes mini-library – small community in Somerset turns old phone box into a lending library/free box for books.
• Portsmouth (NH) public library is having a documentary showing of DIY Nation + artist get together this weekend which looks like fun and a nifty type of program to boot. Plus I sort of stupidly like that they can link right to the book in their catalog. It’s 2009, how many of us can do that yet?
• One line update/coda to the Des Moines photography situation from the DMPL marketing manager “At this month’s meeting, our board voted to remove the requirement that permission be granted for photos to be taken in our library.” Woo!
• Curious to know what’s going to happen at the Hayward (CA) libraries when they go to a Netflix model for lending [pay up front, then no overdue fees]. Looking forward to seeing the crunched numbers at the end of this.
• In another neat model, ArchivesNext reports on the Amsterdam City Archives’ “you ask we scan” approach to digitization. There are some linked slideshows and further data. Interesting model.

I have some odds and ends here that I wasn’t too sure where to put. I try to do linkdumps infrequently. Here are some things I’ve come across in the past week or so that seem to be a few people deciding to improve something and what came out of that decision.

• ALA diverted 65% of their waste from landfills at their last conference. I’m aware that there’s a case to be made that recycling isn’t a cure-all, but I appreciate that ALA is making the effort to not print a ton of stuff on brand new paper only to send it straight to the dump.
• The Firefox Metrics team figured out one reason why people stopped partway through the Firefox installation process. They decided to make some changes to help more people install Firefox on OSX.
• MIT Libraries now has a mobile version of their site. Note that if you look at it from a conventional desktop you wind up having to look at it via a mobile emulator of sorts. Still, pretty nifty though.