My Dad never goes to the public library. He buys his own books and is a little… fussy about public spaces. That said, when I go to visit him we talk about library issues because they’re interesting to me and he’s a techie and always curious how libraries seem to have gotten so much so wrong. He did talk to me about two library news items that I found interesting. One was the I Love My Librarian award winners which my Dad read about in the New York Times. The other was the Chelmsford High School Library’s Learning Commons project — which he read about in the Boston Globe — which provided an (incorrect) opening to say “Hey, my friend Brian is a librarian there! He has a blog!” I then got to prattle on about their town-wide history project which I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. So, there it is, get your library in the paper get the retiree crowd curious about you.
Category: libraries
Library stimulus request is not a bailout
Dear Tom Jackson, when economic times get hard, people use libraries more, not less. ALA’s request for stimulus money from Congress at a time when “73 percent of all libraries nationwide provide the only free Internet access in their communities” is not at all the same as bailing out the big three US auto manufacturers. It would be great if we could unite as a country and set priorities so that, yes, urgent medical care for children was possibly higher on Congress’s “what to fund” list than library’s electric bills but our economy doesn’t work that way. Access to good information is as important, if not more important, than it was six months ago and libraries provide critical services for these tough times. Sincerely, a rural librarian [thanks nicolette]
Roxbury Vermont library now has indoor plumbing
I often refer to the Roxbury Free Library when I’m talking about the digital divide. It was easier to get this library set up with wireless internet access — which they’ve had for years now — than it was to get them a bathroom which they just got this week. Yay! Here are a few other photos I’ve taken of the library.
work like a patron day – october 15
I’m at work today, not at the library but at the pool. The pool always goes through a lot of soul searching deciding whether to be open on minor holidays like US Columbus Day. The big rift is this: it’s a holiday so lifeguards and building managers would like a holiday. It’s also a holiday so the people who would be swimming have the day off and might want to use the pool. It’s pretty hard to make the right choice. If you’re closed, people will say they wanted to be there. If you’re open and no one shows up, your staff gets bored and annoyed.
The same thing happens with libraries, in a big way. Here in Vermont pretty much every library is closed on Sundays. This is nice for the librarian who wants to work mostly M-F but bad for the patron with regular work hours who would like to get to the library. I do admit that I applied for a library job in Vermont at one point and balked at the mandatory Sunday evening hours.
This is all my way of leading up to Brian Herzog’s Work Like a Patron Day which you may recognize seems similar to a few of Ryan Deschamps’ zero-tech 2.0 no brainers. The basic idea is to try to take your librarian hat off and see how your library feels to someone who uses all the public services and utilities — bathroom, computers, web interface, etc — and see if you get the same vibe off of it as you do as a staff member. Brian has demarcated October 15 — six months after National Library Week — as WLAP day and has some more information on the Library Success wiki. Try it out and see what you think.