Hot tempers at the library board meeting. “You are bound and determined you are going to build in German Township. I can see it in your gray hair and eyes,” one St. Joseph County Public Library [IN] board member told the library director. When you’re faced with an underperforming branch in a poor community and you’ve already started the planning process on a new branch in a more affluent community, how do you fold that into your long range plan? And what do you tell the public?
Category: libraries
two posts over at PLABlog
I went to two interesting sessions yesterday which I blogged about for PLA.
Creating a Digital Library on a Shoestring, Laurie Thompson and Sarah Houghton
Right of Center and Still Balanced – Susan Hill
I also went to a WebJunction event where I met some interesting regional librarians from Iowa, and a Library Journal awards dinner at the top of the Prudential celebrating the best small libraries where I met some new-to-Boston librarians from Missouri. It was a fun shindig made even better by the fact that the library who won last year, the Haines Borough Public Library is actually one that I’ve been to, way back when.
how to deal with a tornado @ your library
According to Heritage Preservation, the National Institute for Conservation 80% of U.S. collecting institutions do not have an emergency plan that includes collections, with staff trained to carry it out. The LiveJournal libraries community has an interesting thread about how to deal with emergencies at the library in the wake of the tornados that went through Kansas this weekend. Read one librarian’s story and the follow up discussion about other library’s disaster plans. Remember Greg Schwartz’s first day as supervisor when the tornado warnings hit. We’ve been learning a lot about how libraries deal with flooding in light of Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and other recent catastrophes, but many of us may not know what our disaster plan is, or where it is kept. Today’s list of links is on disaster planning.
- Conservation OnLine’s list of disaster plans for libraries
- Mary Finley’s Disaster Planning for Libraries bibliography
- Writing the Disaster Response Plan: Going Beyond Shouting “Help! Help!” by Stephen Henson
- SLAs Disaster Planning Portal
- The Public Library as a Community Crisis Center by Barbara Will
- Digital Libraries – Coping with Disasters by Roy Tenant
Chicago Libraries, the del.icio.us notes say “F*****g excellent!”
Happy Birthday Rutland Free Library
The library that I worked in for two years as an outreach librarian turns 120 this week and got a nice write-up in the newspaper with lots of good library history. [thanks steven]