I’ve been looking at Michigan library websites in anticipation of my talk at the Michigan Library Association conference that I’ll be speaking at this Thursday. I try to have local examples of various 2.0 endeavors and Michigan is hard because people always say “AADL, duh!” but there’s so mch more going on. My favorite little project has been the Spies Public Library’s 1,000,000 pennies fundraiser in honor of the library’s 100th anniversary. The library is in the UP, practically in Wisconsin, in Menominee. My favorite part of the whole thing, besides it just being a novel idea to raise money, is the chart at the bottom of the page. Watching the dollar amounts go up 5000 pennies at a time really gives you a sense of a community activity. I’ll be talking about their “low tech 2.0” approach on Thursday. If anyone’s at MLA, please stop by and say hello.
artificial scarcity of audiobooks
John Miedema, one of the Slow Library posse, has an excellent blog up called Slow Reading. He’s been talking about audiobooks lately and his recent installment concerns the patron experience with digital audiobooks. His library uses Overdrive. He is techie enough to not have problems with the install experience, and for this installment he was content to listen to the audiobook on his computer. But he did have one observation about the availability of this content that is supposed to resemble books.
My selected title was not currently available, so I placed a hold on it. It struck me as odd that I would have to place a hold on a digital resource. After all, making an extra copy of a digital resource does not cost additional money. I know, I’m being simplistic. The rights holders have to impose some kind of exclusivity on the product so that people will pay more to get more copies. Still, it irks. I was emailed a couple days later that my title was available for download. Nice. I was told I could only have it for fourteen days. Well, I may be a slow reader, but I suppose I can listen faster. Last note on exclusivity — if I finish early, I can’t return it before the “return†date to let someone else have it earlier.
Like John, I understand why this is built into the audiobook mechanism but as a library patron and possible librarian working with this type of material, I find it obnoxious. As a patron, you get the book for two weeks whether you need it for that long or not. As the library, every time the item is checked out it becomes “unavailable” for two weeks whether the person reads it in a day or in ten. The content costs a fixed price which has a built-in limitation of how many times it can circulate. This offends my thrifty library sensibilities.
Add to this the confusing problem of non-label releases like Radiohead’s new album — pay what you want to download it, or you can pay $80 for a boxed set — and libraries are left having to make ad hoc choices about collection development issues because of bizarre market forces not because of what they feel should be in their library. Cynics can argue that this is the way libraries have always been with major publishers and book jobbers accounting for a disproportionate amount of library sales and shelf space but I’m curious if these new technological advances are going to make this problem better or worse.
some library halloweens
Just a few links that I spotted from libraries doing Halloweeny stuff.
- Ann Arbor District Library pumpkins
- Alien Bowling at the library Halloween party
- Not quite the library, but Statistics Canada does an annual creepy stats roundup about this time. Here’s Halloween b the numbers, found at the canuck librarian.
- Come to the library… if you DARE, a photo set from the Manatee County Public Library in Florida
- University of Iowa Libraries put up a Halloween Digital Collection of the spookiest bits from their stacks
- a blog post discussing Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes. I mention this specifically because their blog gets to do what many library blogs can’t do and that is link directly to the item in the library’s catalog. Yay GA PINES!
I had fun noodling around making this list. One of the benefits of having been around the blog block a few times is that I can remember looking at libraries doing Halloween stuff, at least a little, back in 2000. There were almost no libraries with blogs, Flickr didn’t exist yet, and the whole idea of the read/write web was sort of a hazy shimmer on the horizon. While you’ll notice in that old post that Karen Schneider was already writing about our profession with her way with words (in the NY Times!) and Marylaine Block — who has a great recent column on party people in libraries creating community — was advising people to give books instead of candy for Halloween, it was still a small-seeming web. So, without turning this into another “blah blah library 2.0” cheer, let me just say that I think it’s gratifying to see this explosion on not just user-generated content, but library-generated content. I hope the next seven years are just as fruitful and fascinating.
because it is hallowe’en in many places
Here are Twenty Spooky Stories that you are allowed to read and share because they are on the Internet available for reading and sharing. How nice. [thanks defective yeti!]
Why isn’t your headline “why the hell are women still earning less than men?!?!”
I read Library Journal pretty regularly. I enjoy it, the writing is often great and John Berry and I see eye to eye on a lot of things. There have been a few lousy headlines about library topics that we’ve seen in the popular media, where the library was on what I would consdier the “right” side of an issue and the headline made them look like they were not. I read the whole article on salaries called What’s an MLIS Worth (for the record, I have an MLib.) and I have to say I could not get over the fact that women in librarianship, in all parts of librarianship earn less than men.
This fact is buried about four pages into the article in a section entitles “Gender Inequity Remains” and states “While women have seen positive improvements in salaries, finally topping $40,000, their salaries continue to lag approximately 6.5% behind salaries for men.” LJ then goes on to explain that they think this is because more men work in academic and vendor-type jobs where salaries are generaly higher. It also states that women have higher starting salaries generally and do better in special libraries where their salaries are 17.6% higher than men, but this section was one of the smaller ones in terms of total population; there were only 14 men’s salaries examined (and 86 women’s). Men in public libraries, on average, earn more than women, except in Canada. Men in academic libraries, on average, earn more than women. I’m sure there are many good reasons why this “effect” exists, but I’m a little curious whether there are really just a few totally plausible explanations for this, or if librarianship despite its intelligent, introspective, feminized nature is just as bad as everyplace else with its remaining gender inequity?