librarian.net

photo from Contra Costa Library, thanks!

I got an email that ALA’s @yourlibrary site had redesigned and I went over there but found it’s the same old clutter of information. It is possible I’m getting curmudgeonly. I also got an email from former co-Councilor Heidi Dolamore who is working on an advocacy project that I like much more: the Pinole Library valentine campaign. The Pinole Library’s website is here. You can see that the library is open 24 hours a week over four days. They’re starting a campaign to show how much people support the library by having people write notes on these valentines.

Hi — I hope you had a nice holidaytime. I’m back in Vermont. I went to two public libraries when I was home for the holidays, one in Boxboro where I grew up and one in Cambridge which is newly renovated. I made a list in 2009 of all my library visits and I’m sure I’ll bore you with it shortly. For now I’m catching up at home. There is a push on MetaFilter [in case you're someone I know from both places] to help the daughter of a MeFite fund some libraries in China. I just donated in memory of Evan Farber and Judith Krug, two librarians who we lost in 2009 who I miss frequently. I also got a link from my friend Casey to this set of photos on Core77 of a small public library in Surathani, in the south of Thailand. Pretty stories, lovely photos. You can also contact them if you’d like to donate books.

Shorpy is a great source for old photographs. They often get them from sources like the Library of Congress which is where this photo of the New Cannan public library in 1953 came from. You can also see the original set of photos over at the Library of Congress [did not see this one over at their Flickr photostream]. The big add that Shorpy’s has, however, is the community. It’s not just a photo of a library, it’s also people commenting about their memories of the library including where else they’ve seen that certain floor tile [fun fact: it's also the tile that's in my bathroom as near as I can tell] [thanks mike]

Things with the Des Moines Public Library worked themselves out more or less amicably. I was also pleased to see Carolyn Wright who does the Photo Attorney blog, mention what the legal issues are surrounding photography in public libraries generally. Thanks Carolyn!

note: new update from Des Moines PL and the architect’s office below the fold. Short form: “it would be appropriate to change the policy”

I had a great time at the Iowa Library Association conference. I gave two talks and actually scheduled my time such that I could actually attend a few presentations as well as give some. My notes for two talks — Tiny Tech and On-the-Fly Tech Support — are online here. I saw a presentation by the new ALA OIF director about privacy in the age of social software as well as a gadgets talk where I learned more about ebooks.

I also had some time to go to the local public library. I’m often surprised that the local libraries don’t do much to acknowledge that there is a huge library conference in town. Most of the time when I go to the local public library when I’m visiting a new city, there isn’t even a “welcome librarians!” sign out. Karen Schneider [who gave a great keynote in the morning and a talk about open source later in the day] and I actually had a sort of weird experience there. We went in to the library, snapping photos as we do, and were met as we walked in by a library worker who basically asked “Are you taking pictures?” When we said that we were, she said that we weren’t allowed to take photos in the library and if we wanted to get permission to take photos we’d have to go talk to the marketing people up on the third floor.

We were just on a fly-by so we (mostly) put our cameras away. However, I was curious about the policy. I had an email exchange with the marketing director that I am reprinting here with permission. I’m not sure what to think about the whole situation. You’ll note I took a photograph or two anyhow, and I appreciated the very nice email, but it was in stark contrast to both a weird-seeming policy and a weird-seeming policy enforcement mechanism. (more…)

Some signage amusement from the Howe library in Hanover New Hampshire.

I was following the Louisville Free Public Library disaster/flooding yesterday via Greg Schwartz’s tweeting and twitpics but I was travelling home. Today, there’s been time for more recapping and reflection from the online community including this very good and succinct post from Rachel Walden: How You Can Help the Louisville Free Public Library Recover from Disaster. Upshot: don’t send books, consider contributing to the LSW fundraising drive. Send Greg and the other employees your best wishes

I read this CNN article about a group in Wisconsin who has been fighting with the West Bend Community Memorial Library over the group’s desire to have a long list of YA books moved to the adult section of the library. Their challenge failed, but there’s a lawsuit pending.

The news article has the predictable all-over-the-place approach to the issue but it seems that this is one of those fights that has everything including outraged parents, a beleaguered library board whose members don’t have their terms renewed, assertion of First Amendment rights, threats of book burning, and a lot of homophobic-sounding nastiness. The article, though on the web, also doesn’t seem to understand the usefulness of hyperlinks to telling a story that is playing out on the web so I have added them here

• the library’s materials selection policy (pdf) which appears to have been updated just a few weeks ago
• West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries
• blog post “there’s no such thing as a ’safe library’” from the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog
• Wissup blog with lots of commentary about the library
• West Bend Parents for Free Speech blog (interview with Maria Hanrahan, the blog’s founder)
• City of West Bend’s website
• Information from American Libraries about the lawsuit against the city of West Bend for the books in the library being, among other things “explicitly vulgar, racial, and anti-Christian” The plaintiffs want the book Baby Be-Bop to be burned or similarly destroyed.

I really wish the library or the city had more accessible public statements about this whole ongoing mess.

I’m visiting family before I head back up to Vermont. Yesterday I convinced my dad to go get a library card in the town he’s lived in for ten years. My dad is one of those “Hey, why borrow it when you can buy it?” people but we trundled over to his library anyhow because I wanted to see it and while we were there, I suggested he get a card.

Let me first mention that even though the experience at the library wasn’t great, I totally understand why that was the case, and I’m not trying to do any public shaming thing here (hence no link). I just think that there’s a sense in which we’re always saying “Hey libraries are more popular than ever!” but there are also people who just plain old never use the library — one of the big challenges of outreach is to identify these people and see if there are ways to make the library appeal to them — and I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad is one of them.

So, we went to the library. The library is being renovated so it’s a bit of a challenge to get inside, lots of uneven sidewalks and unclear signage. My dad is seventy and doesn’t really like being outside of his comfort zone so we were already a little confused when we got there. We went to the circ desk which was being staffed by one obvious volunteer and one person who may have been circ staff or may have been a librarian or who may have been both. No one had name tags. The woman at the desk was doing the typical multi-tasking thing, helping a lot of people at once, and asked my dad “Can I help you?” He said he was there to get a library card. She went off to get the forms he needed to fill out. Actually I knew that was what she was doing. To his mind she just turned away and started answering someone else’s questions and left us standing there.

She came back and asked for some identification and my dad gave her his driver’s license which showed that he lived in the town. At this point I sort of expected a “Oh you’re not a summer tourist!” awareness but that didn’t happen. She handed us a form and told us to fill it out and meet her at the reference desk (about five feet away) when we were done. The form was your standard one page application. This is a photo of my dad filling it out. We waited for her to come back to the reference desk for about five or ten minutes while she continued to answer other people’s questions (someone needed to use a computer, someone couldn’t find the phone books). At one point she got up to show someone where to find something and then she came over to us and said to the circ staff “I’m going to help this man because he’s been waiting so patiently” which I found a little odd. The library had what seemed to be a normal amount of people for a Monday afternoon, and yet it seemed chaotic for whatever reason.

We then stood by the reference desk while she retyped what my dad had written into the computer. She had trouble reading my dad’s email address (he writes in all caps) and made him read it out loud to her a few times. His email domain is tomandcindy.com and she crossed out what my dad had written and wrote it out underneath with an ampersand in it. My dad had to politely point out that email addresses don’t have ampersands, ever. I couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t see what his email address was by reading it, maybe I’m just attuned to his writing. After doing this, she handed us a card and asked “Can I help you find anything?” We said no and left. No welcome brochure, no “welcome to the library!” nothing.

Turns out the library had sent us a welcome email which we got when we got home a few hours later. It included a link to the catalog and some information about the library network and, of course, my dad’s library card number and PIN in plain text (libraries are not alone in this terrible practice, but it makes me cringe nonetheless). My guess is that my father will never go back to the library. There was some good-natured ribbing about this when we got home. I’m aware that it’s not the library’s job to make all sorts of different people feel like it’s their very own place and cater to their every need and personality tic, but then again it sort of is, isn’t it? I’ll be thinking about this some more while I think about how my library welcomes new people to the community.

Today is, if you believe The Writer’s Almanac, the date in 1731 that Ben Franklin founded the first circulating library. The blurb is neat to read but short on references, so here is me fleshing it out a little.

It was on this day in 1731 that Ben Franklin founded the first circulating library, a forerunner to the now ubiquitous free public library. He started it as a way to help settle intellectual arguments among his group of Philadelphia friends, the Junto, a group of civic-minded individuals gathered together to discuss the important issues of their day.

Each of the 50 charter members bought an initial share into the company (40 shillings), which helped fund the buying of books, and then paid a smaller yearly fee (10 shillings) that went to buying more books and maintaining the library. In exchange, the members could borrow any of the books. Donations of books were gladly accepted.

They called their charter the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the next year, Franklin hired America’s first librarian, Louis Timothee. At first, the books were stored at the librarian’s house, but by the end of the decade, they were moved to the Pennsylvania State House, which is now known as Independence Hall.