hawai’i’s libraries

The Moon Book Club gets foreign language books to Hawai’i’s libraries. Meanwhile, the Hawai’ian library system has 108 staff vacancies.

The library, beset by a critical staffing shortage and other needs, has an annual budget of only $35,000 for buying books in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Vietnamese…. the principal difficulty in expanding the collection is cataloging, especially the Asian titles written in characters that must be romanized for the database. They also must be categorized correctly, and it’s sometimes hard to find resources to help librarians do that. [thanks brandon]

do you have library envy?

A little thread on LISNews about “library envy” The latest library that I have been to that I was envious of was the library at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which I had the pleasure of getting a tour of when I was in DC. Ample funding, technology + books, multi-language collection, multi-lingual librarians, lovely space, good web site. It’s open to the public, so put it on your dance card if you are in the area along with LoC and the spectacle that is the decline of the DC public library system. I know the librarian there, so drop me an email if you’d like an introduction.