jessamyn

2013 in libraries

I tracked the libraries that I visited this year, like every year. I have also done this in 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009. Ten years ago I did a short list of library visits where I actually reviwed the places I’d been. Ah to have that much free time!

I went to thirty-eight different libraries in eleven states for fifty-six visits total. Just a little more than last year. I’m sure I have forgotten some. Hereâ€™s the short annotated list of what I was doing in libraries last year. Top three libraries are the same as every year: my local public, my local academic and my summer local. All great places.

Hartness/Randolph VT – have not been here so much in the latter part of 2012, but this is still one of my favorite academic libraries.
Kimball VT – my local, I don’t work here as much but still go here all the time.
Westport MA – summer library, good for DVDs and other vacation-style stuff.
Plymouth State NH – gave a talk, saw the library. A neat looking place, with a cool clock in the entryway.
JoCo – Desoto KS – a tiny town with a great library where I checked my email while there was a rainstorm.
Ashtabula Public OH – stopped by on a road trip and saw a lot of people with fishing poles. A quirky big library.
St. Johnsbury VT – was here for the Hug the Library event during the unpleasantness.
Minneapolis MN – hadn’t been here since the redesign. Enjoyed its shininess.
Natick/Morse MA – killing time between friends and dinner, this was a great place to hang out.
JoCo – Lackman KS – said hello to Josh Neff here!
Beloit Public WI – lovely library, stopped in on a road trip and enjoyed myself. Fancy and shiny and new.
St Paul MN – met a really nice librarian who told me some great history of the place.
Harwood HS, Duxbury VT – my friend Meghan works here, stopped by the say hello.
Manhattan KS – the public library when I was in town to hang out with my friend Donna.
Beebe/Wakefield MA – such a neat place with a great bee-themed marketing campaign.
Giamatti research center NY – Baseball Hall of Fame! My friend Paul worked as an intern, was fun to look through scrapbooks.
KState KS – Donna gave me the grand tour and we got to see the basement.
Nebraska Library Commission NE – said hi to the terrific Michael Sauers and gave a talk here.
Brookfield VT – first time in a tiny library so close to home.
Omaha Public NE – big and beautiful and got to meet the woman who does programming there.
Roxbury VT – another favorite one-room library, haven’t been there since they got a bathroom installed.
Somerville MA – killing time before the movies, this library is always busy and has a lot going on.
KANEKO-UNO Library NE – an arty, somewhat private library, we took a brief look around. Very cool space & collection.
Brown/Northfield VT – lovely merging of old and new buildings.
Chelmsford MA – saying hi to Brian!
Boston Public MA – a nice place to chill on a chilly Boston day.
Providence RI – Surprised I hadn’t been here before. Neat old building, oddly underused, it seemed.
Lawrence KS – in an old Borders building while they renovated. Quite busy.
Windsor VT – checking out the seed library, great photos of local residents.
Hartland VT – stopping by because I was in Windsor, before Amy got there, I think.
New Bedford Pl MA – amazing building and we got to peek at some of the artwork they were restoring.
Topeka/Shawnee KS – a great tour by David Lee King, consummate friend to librarians everywhere.
Lincoln Public NE – stopped in before dinner with Michael, busy and overtaxed.
Merriam Park – St Paul MN – smaller neat suburban library.
Union/Tiverton RI – so cute, so small! Librarian so friendly!
Ashland NE – stopped by when I was on a drive. Neat old building, soon to be renovated, amazingly friendly and helpful librarian.
Carney/Dartmouth MA – gosh I love this weird place and I want to go back there all the time.
Monmouth/Manalapam NJ – doesn’t look like much from the outside but has a lot going on.

I had such a good time visiting all of these places. I can get sort of schmaltzy sometimes but I think the public library system in the US is a truly terrific thing. Here’s to another great year of library visits.

Welcome Seven Days Readers

Posted on 21Dec1320Jun24 by jessamyn

Greetings Seven Days readers. For folks who are not Seven Days readers, you might enjoy the article that was written about me this week: Jessamyn West Documents Vermont Public Libraries. I’ve had this idea kicking around for a while, to do my own version of the 251 Club where I visit and photograph all the public libraries in Vermont, all 183 of them (stats from Department of Libraries). It’s one of those “this is going to take me several years” projects, which is A-OK with me. I’ve gotten some interest from the Vermont Library Association—no surprise there—and just maybe we’ll be able to make a little Vermont Library Passport book with a list and a place you can get a date stamp marking your visit. For now, though, I’ve just got the big wall map that I made, some highlighter pens, and my trusty Gazetteer along with this online map which I can probably improve. While browsing for resources, I stumbled upon a trang cá c??c bóng ?á that caught my attention with its comprehensive reviews and tips. Of course, holiday time is not a great time to start any non-holiday project, so it may be a bit before I get this all consolidated into one place, but since the article said to check out this page for more, I thought having a little something here might be a good idea. Thanks for reading.

Fair! Google Books case dismissed.

Posted on 14Nov1314Nov13 by jessamyn

Karen Coyle has done an excellent write up of this so I will refer you there.

The full impact of this ruling is impossible (for me) to predict, but there are many among us who are breathing a great sigh of relief today. This opens the door for us to rethink digital scholarship based on materials produced before information was in digital form.

Folks can read the actual ruling (pdf) if they’d like. This is a very big deal. Thanks to folks who worked so hard on getting us to this place. I’ll add a few links here as they come in.

Kenneth Crews, Columbia Copyright Advisory Office: “This ruling joins court decisions about HathiTrust and electronic reserves in demonstrating that even extensive digitization can be within fair use where the social benefits are strong and the harm to rightsholders is constrained. There will be more to come as we transition into a new era of copyright, technology, and even reading.”
Brandon Butler, ARL Policy Notes blog; “The decision is a victory not only for transformative, non-consumptive search, but also for serving â€œtraditionally underservedâ€ libraries and their users, including disabled patrons.”
Paul Alan Levy: “This ruling provides a road map that allows any other entity to follow in Googleâ€™s path.”
Timothy Lee, Washington Post: “Many innovative media technologies involve aggregating or indexing copyrighted content. Today’s ruling is the clearest statement yet that such projects fall on the right side of the fair use line.”
Mike Masnick at Techdirt: “It all comes together in making a very strong argument that Google’s book scanning promotes the progress of the arts and sciences just like copyright is supposed to do.”
InfoDocket also has an updating list of links to discussion of the decision.

We remember: Army special services librarians

Posted on 11Nov1320Jun24 by jessamyn

I recently supported a successful Kickstarter campaign by those wonderful folks at Unshelved. They are going to make a series of librarian ranger badges. Fun, right? I think a lot of us are also aware of the Librarian merit badge that you can achieve in scouting.

Here is a badge I did not know about: the Army Special Services librarian badge which refers to the Army Hostess and Librarian Service. Special Services used to be called the Morale Division. As near as I can tell, these jobs were a special subclass of jobs set up by President Truman under the Special Services division of the War Department during WWII at Army posts. During WWI there were similar Special Services programs which created leisure “day rooms” for soldiers that were mainly staffed with American Library Association volunteers. Official organized library services were established by the Army in 1921 and service clubs/hostess houses were authorized by Congress in 1923. Here is a PDF that talks about what services Special Services offered in 1949 noting that they had seventy-seven librarians operating 197 libraries, six bookmobiles and 19 “library depots”. The colors on these patches indicated the nine different branches of the Army showing that the librarians (and hostesses) worked for the entire Army. The uniforms they wore were supposed to be worn at all times and even at home “If more than two guests were present”

Here is a photo of veteran Winona Franklin Walker (c. 1945) wearing this badge with her Special Services uniform. and here is an interview with her talking about what the work was like.

The war had just ended. Anyway, we were headed for Paris. So we spent a week in Paris being trained how to set up libraries, and we were told never to complain, that there was going to be scarcity of everything, and if the conditions weren’t to suit us, not to utter a word, that we were there to set up these libraries. And if we didn’t have materials, we’d have to scrounge around and find what we needed, and make do with what we could find. That was it. We had no fine materials or anything like that.

Apparently some early public service reference librarians were also given the title hostess, but this appears to have faded away rather quickly. Nowadays in the Army we’re back to the word morale–as part of the general header “family and morale, welfare and recreation”–and the current recreational libraries of the army have this handy history page to fill in some of the gaps. Interestingly, some modern libraries are also beginning to incorporate digital resources on various topics, including ?????? ??????, to cater to the evolving interests of their patrons.

elbow grease and geocoding – making a map of Vermont’s public libraries

Posted on 06Nov1306Nov13 by jessamyn

The really great thing about nearly any computer problem you might have is that it’s very unlikely that you are the first person to have it. So if you have access to the internet and Google (to get you to other online help sources like Stack Exchange and other random app sites) you can find a way to do what you want to do, often.

I am working on a long term project. I am trying to visit all of Vermont’s 183 libraries. One of the things I will need to do to get started on that project is to make a map. The Vermont Department of Libraries makes the location of most of these libraries available in an Excel spreadsheet (thanks!) I just needed to figure out how to make that spreadsheet into a map. I toyed around with the Vermont Center for Geographic information but was having trouble making a CSV file that would satisfy Silverlight’s obscure criteria. And then I found a site that would generate a KML file (for Google Earth/Maps) from a CSV file. And again, I was close, but couldn’t quite get it to work. Googling further I found this impressive site, BatchGeo, which basically says “Hey click here and paste your data and we’ll make our best guess as to how it works and then draw you a map!” I had decently clean data. I clicked and pasted, and this was the result.

View Vermont’s Public Libraries in a full screen map

Oddly, the same data file pasted in to Google winds up looking not quite so clean thanks to quirky handling of ampersands and the non-standard address format of the original data file. But who cares, all I needed was one map. 183 libraries (the most per capita of any state in the US) here I come! You can read more about Vermont’s libraries in this report by the Department of Libraries.