Category: libraries

food for thinking about libraries

Posted on by jessamyn

This weekend has seen lots of good thoughtful pieces on libraries, their purpose and their use. I’ve been reading them all [and making my edible book] so I haven’t been writing here. Here is a short list, in one post, of things I think you should go back and read:

  • read about ALA giving a citation to Laura Bush thanking her for being a “tireless supporter” of libraries, read some ALA Council emails [here’s mine] on the subject, then finish up with Mike McGrorty’s piece.
  • Read Chuck’s post and follow-up about technophilia and the changing role of libraries. Pay attention to the comments, and also see how this is rippling through the blogosphere, in places like Meredith’s blog and Librarians Happen. There are a lot of good thoughtful statements and comments circling around this issue.
  • Read more Michael McGrorty as a bit of a palate cleanser to get back to books for a bit before you re-enter the rest of the busy world of blogs, computers and everything else.

    I must confess that the reason I went to library school was more in the way of understanding the system and its operators than anything else. I thought they must possess some secret, something essential that I might discover and come away with. In the end, I found that it was nothing more than a set of skills set atop the same understanding of the library that I kept; half of me was a librarian all along. Sometimes I have seen it as love, other times as an obsession, but whatever it may be, the devotion to books and reading has saved me from worse fates, and the library, that temple of the book, has been my church, my rock and comfort since I was old enough to walk the stacks.

It’s weekends like this, at the end of National Library Week, that make me happiest to be working in and among libraries.

NYPL sells art to raise money for books, sort of

Posted on by jessamyn

I rarely get my news, library or otherwise, from the Drudge Report. But when the headline blares NYC PUBLIC LIBRARY TO SELL ARTWORKS; MONEY FOR BOOKS… I just had to click that link.

“We’re not a museum,” [NYPL president Paul LeClerc] said. “We don’t have a staff devoted to paintings and sculptures. One of the thrills of running a great library is keeping up with the explosion of information. If we don’t grow, we cannot maintain the claim that we are one of the greatest libraries in the world.”

[lj]

serving the “internet natives” @ your library

Posted on by jessamyn

This is a neat thing to find, a newspaper article discussing an event at an ACRL conference. The topic? Serving the new generations of college students who come to the library with all new expectations.

One University of Minnesota student had a bagful of electronics with him: iPod, PalmPilot, cell phone. He was bright, opinionated, well-spoken.

And when was the last time he was in the U’s library?

“Last year,” he said.

The collective intake of breath nearly turned the room into a vacuum. What’s a university librarian to do with this generation of college students?

[thanks kathleen]

libraries as prime places to steal books for resale

Posted on by jessamyn

At my library we have been considering raising the limit on the number of DVDs/videos a patron may check out at once. Currently the limit is four. There is no book limit. One of the reasons we were concerned about raising the limit is that DVDs in particular have such a high resale value on the Internet. I saw this article about a library employee who has systematically been reselling DVDs, books and other library items over the Internet for six months and using his access to the library computer to mark them as “checked in” He was turned in because he sold a book to a college president in Illinois who was suspicious about some of the library markings. This sort of thing happens all over, even in sleepy little neighborhoods like mine. Slashdot discusses. What do we do about this? [thanks john]