salinas!

Posted on by jessamyn

At ALA Council on Wednesday, Council passed a resolution that was strongly critical of the Salinas library system closing and written by Michael McGrorty. Eventually the resolution in its final form will be online, in the meantime, the situation in Salinas is still looking pretty contentious, as are other libraries getting severely reduced hours such as the ones in Philadelphia.

Councilman Sergio Sanchez, who cast the lone vote of opposition to the libraries’ closure, said Salinas residents should practice civil disobedience and physically take over the city’s three library branches to keep them from closing. “We got to prepare for another fight,” Sanchez said. The libraries are scheduled to close this spring, sometime before June 17, the last day library employees can work.

hi – 20jan

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi, I’m back and testing the new server I’m on. After all that wifi whining and winning, my laptop’s new logic board dropped dead on me Tuesday afternoon, so sorry no more local posting. I’ll do some summarizing of Council activities once I’m home from work.

Posted in hi

what I was talking about

Posted on by jessamyn

Jenny chimes in on what the library overlap is or could be with the social bookmarking services we’ve been seeing get so popular lately. She’s doing a tech summit to tell librarians about it which I’ll be sorry to miss.

When someone gets used to retrieving items using the words they think of, not the words we think of, do you think they’ll still be willing to type “LastName, FirstName” to find an author? Will they understand a title search that accepts exact phrases only? (Those are rhetorical questions and the correct answers are “no” and “no,” even if you offer keyword searching hidden elsewhere on your catalog.)

ALA Council Work in process

Posted on by jessamyn

– ALA referred a Workplace Speech resolution encouraging free exercise of workplace speech to legal counsel before it was voted on by council.
– ALA passed a resolution endorsing the Health Care Access Resolution.
– ALA debated a cell phone ban during ALA meetings but wound up voting it down after some amusing discussion.
– Council debated a resolution supporting lobbying to include standards for school libraries in a revised version of the expanded No Child Left Behind legislation. “If you can’t beat them, we join them” according to one Councilor. Passed unanimously.

Posted in ala