Save LAPL - did you know it needed saving?

Posted in libcrisis | Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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Some friends of mine are working on the Save LAPL website. Los Angeles Public Library is having budget problems and considering some odd (and to my mind bad) choices about how to curtail services including…

Unless citizens of L.A. can convince Mayor Villaraigosa and The Board of Library Commissioners to change their plans, starting on July 1st all branch libraries will begin charging a fee of $1 per book to request anything sent from another branch. This wouldn’t be so bad if local branches were well stocked with reading material, but they simply are not, and were never meant to be.

Please consider learning more and adding a testimonial or getting involved.

confessions of a bookplate junkie

Posted in libraries | Monday, November 6th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
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Hi. I’m in the Los Feliz branch of Los Angeles Public library where the air conditioning is brisk and the wifi is fast and free. Abby has an amusing wrap-up of her impressions of the WLA conference as well as some thoughts about Library Thing. It’s fun to hang out with other moderator/administrators of library-ish social-ish sites (LibraryThing for her and MetaFilter for me). A lot of the issues we deal with concerning identity, authority and content filtering as well as the sheer volume of the bits and bytes we move around mean that even though our sites are very different, some of the cat-herding aspects of being an overseer of a social software network are very similar.

Speaking of MetaFilter, here’s a fun link from there today: Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.