Archive for the 'libcrisis' Category
Posted in libcrisis | Thursday, June 24th, 2004 | Comments Off
SaveOurLibraries.org used to be the domain for the Save America’s Libraries campaign that now has
this little page with a crap URL on the ALA site. Now there’s another site at
SaveOurLibraries.com that addresses some of the recent issues surrounding the San Francisco Public Library. I see the unlinked acronym RFID there, I’m interested to see where this goes.
Posted in libcrisis | Saturday, June 19th, 2004 | Comments Off
Providence Public Library
lays off workers, gives admins big raises.
uring the week of May 24th, the administration of the Providence Public Library announced to the staff that because of financial trouble they would be forced to lay off over 60 people. This would include the entire unionized custodial staff whose jobs would be outsourced to non-union labor. Forty more would be cut from Central and 10-15 from the branches.
Posted in libcrisis | Tuesday, April 27th, 2004 | Comments Off
How are UK libraries
failing users? A new study entitled “
Who’s in Charge?” by charity group
Libri proposes some questions, and some answers. Long document, but worth a read.
“Performance management is poor and planning is disconnected from the preparation of budgets. The extent and nature of the problems are such that the heads of library services do not have the authority to act and resolve them. Because costs in other areas are difficult to reduce,whenever savings are needed it is the book budget along with opening hours and buildings maintenance which bear the brunt of cuts. Alternatively, library closures are proposed, even though these measures inevitably result in a reduction in service to the public.Cost control is not directed so as to improve or maintain the service,but rather to avoid making difficult decisions with which public servants feel it unfair to task their staff.” [thanks all]
Posted in libcrisis | Tuesday, April 27th, 2004 | Comments Off
The headline
Heinz Museum cuts employees due to budget cuts deftly skips over the fact that most of those employees were library and archive staff.
Reducing library hours… makes sense because the number of authors, researchers, genealogists and students using the library is not growing. The number of people using the library’s collections and images online has increased, he said. [thanks barbara]
Posted in libcrisis | Tuesday, March 30th, 2004 | Comments Off
Posted in libcrisis | Tuesday, March 30th, 2004 | Comments Off
Due to what is being called a “critical staff shortage” the American Museum of Natural History Library’s Speciall Collections are
closed to the public.
[thanks carol]
Posted in libcrisis | Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004 | Comments Off
“Where did the magazines go? How can I help?” Athens-Clarke County library system is
sponsoring an adopt-a-magazine program to try to maintain its magazine collection after having to drop 150 subscriptions due to budget cuts.
[thanks katia]
Posted in libcrisis | Thursday, February 26th, 2004 | Comments Off
Placement stats from
ALAs report on Midwinter. Jobs down almost 40%, job seekers up almost 40%.
“Jobs: 196 (The highest number, 31, was for general reference positions.) This compared to 318 jobs last year in New Orleans. Job-seekers: 293 (The highest number, 203, interested in reference positions.) This compared to 214 job-seekers in New Orleans.” [thanks tj]
Posted in libcrisis | Thursday, February 26th, 2004 | Comments Off
Miss Eli shares
a Stanford University Libraries memo regarding strategies for trying to staunch the hemorrhaging serials budget.
“Libraries are encouraged to scrutinize the pricing of journals and to drop those where pricing decisions have made them disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value. Special attention should be paid to for-profit journals in general and to those published by Elsevier in particular.”
Posted in libcrisis | Tuesday, February 10th, 2004 | Comments Off
University of Hawai’i library suffers
horrible budget cuts to their serials budgets. Apparently the serials budget is inflating at faster than teh rate of the cost of living, substantially.
[thanks brandon]
