Category: libraries

One of the nicest online collections I’ve seen, and seasonlly appropriate: the photographs of Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley at the Schwerdtfeger Library at UW. [thanks rebecca]

One Vermont library is considering their role in the community and asking residents how they see the library fitting in. The VT Department of Libraries [just look at that web site, will you] is playing a shrinking role as a provider of regional library services, yet many towns in Vermont [including mine] still have no library. When there is a library it is generally funded by foundations and town allotments, which can make funding erratic at best and non-existent at worst.

I’m sort of happy I don’t really understand what is going on in these pictures. Just a bunch of girls in a library, fully dressed. Perfectly normal, right? [thanks edlef]

Short article about using the census data to help plan services for your library. I was really sort of astounded when I did our community analysis that there were almost no people in our service area who don’t speak English. I sort of assumed that as a default, you should pay attetnion to diferent cultural and language groups when plannign services. The sad fact about Vermont, or at least where I live, is that it can be pretty ethnically homogenous, even if there are still wide cultural and class differences. [thanks mac]

In the “do you want fries with that?” model, a library with a TV on in the lobby for the Internet users who “don’t like to read.” I have mixed feelings about this, the columnist seems to think that using the Internet is the same as [or similar to] reading, this is not always the case. Of course, if you are someone waiting for your ‘net fix at the public library, I would think you could perhaps pretend to be interested in books, or maybe the newspaper, just to humor us. I have seen people shuffle in place and stare off into space for upwards of half an hour because they couldn’t find anything else to do in the library until it was their turn. One of the Sisyphean tasks I have given myself is to try to find something else that these peope are interested in. [thanks dsdlc]