Category: libraries

slice of life in the library in orange county

Posted on by jessamyn

The Orange County that I work in is very different than the Orange County library Scott LaCounte reflects on in this column

When the patron told me members of the international community were watching her because she had knowledge of secret documents in the governments possession and not to be surprised if federal investigators soon questioned me, I knew it was going to be an interesting night.

Working in a public library, I have come across a number of strange things and even larger number of strange people.

two links on the economics of libraries

Posted on by jessamyn

These two links that I’ve seen in the past two days seem to be saying very interesting and similar things.

1. Peter Brantley the head of the Digital Library Federation wonders how access to networked information resouces is affecting what we do in reasearch libraries in his post If Libraries had Shareholders. Lively commenting.
2. Over at the Freakonomics blog Stephen Dubner asks If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today? where he talks about the enormous influence of publishers in today’s book world and wondering if they’d even let you start up an institution where you’d share the things they are trying to sell.

why your OPAC won’t be on Facebook, for now

Posted on by jessamyn

Steve Lawson has some details about why library apps for Facebook aren’t being approved along with all the other applications that are being created to use Facebook’s API. It’s got nothing to do with the libraryness of them, just that Facebook doesn’t allow applications to do web searches, for whatever reason.

Actually the reason to me is fairly obvious. Facebook would like to keep you on Facebook. They would like to take your loyalty for other sites like Flickr and YouTube and shift it to Facebook so they can serve you Facebook ads while you look at the online content you were looking at anyway. The fact that when you are searching an online library catalog you are not technically searching the web may be a detail that might act in libraries’ favor this time, but it’s still an overall Bad Thing for the profession, in my opinion (though I acknowlege that this is a debatable point). I hope this Facebook thing can be resolved decently. I can see a few ways that it might be — returning search results to the FB interface, FB loosening up over OPACs for two easy ones. I don’t do much on Facebook except look up friends’ phone numbers and change my stauts every so often, but it’s got a killer grip on today’s students and young people (and oldsters like myself) and it would be nice if we could find a way to leverage that to help do our jobs better.

update: be sure to read the comments for Ken Varnum’s story of working successfully with Facebook to get the UMich catalog app on there.

are librarians innovators? do libraries innovate?

Posted on by jessamyn

I read the web4lib mailing list in RSS format. It’s fascinating because not only is there a lot of good advice, and a lot of familiar faces, but I also learn a lot in terms of what people do and do not know about technology which helps me do my job. There are also some more thought-provoking longer threads sometimes about things like the 2.0 bandwagon, whether Twitter/Facebook type applications are a flash in the pan, or the recent thread about whether libraries innovate.

It all started, I think, with a lita-l mailing list topic that I didn’t see concerning the “ultimate debate” happening at ALA. The event was blogged on the LITA blog and debated a lot on web4lib though the thread is sort of all over the place. And then the topic was picked up by other blogs, which someone on web4lib graciously added to the mailing list as a list of links.

I wonder about the topic myself. The libraries I work with around here are very innovative, but mostly in stretching a super-small [usually five-figure] budget and rarely in technological ways. However, when you’re the only free internet in town, taking a step like offering free wifi when the library is closed, or having a way that people can use your computers to download ebooks checked out from other libraries in other states seems pretty innovative indeed.