Eagle found in trash after being stolen from library. Phew!
Month: March 2005
thousands of hits, good news or bad?
Somehow missed this last week — an excellent point/counterpoint [in the form of a blog entry and comment] over at the OCLC blog. Topic? That ongoing “Do we make the library more like Google, or make Google more like the library?” I think it also points out another hidden conflict area that is fast becoming a favorite topic of mine: to what extent do we let the software dictate the way the user can search, and hopefully find? ALA’s ballots are being distributed over a one week [for e-ballots] or two week [paper] schedule. Why can’t we send them all at once? Because ALA worries about server overload problems. Is this saving the time of the user? Does Google?
Pretend you’ve never ever been in a large library. Pretend you know absolutely nothing about taxonomies. Pretend you don’t know the difference between a magazine, a journal, an index and a book. Pretend you don’t know what you don’t know, and don’t know how to articulate your unknowingness. Once you’ve pretended all this, make a pretend visit to a very large library for the first time.
libraries as prime places to steal books for resale
At my library we have been considering raising the limit on the number of DVDs/videos a patron may check out at once. Currently the limit is four. There is no book limit. One of the reasons we were concerned about raising the limit is that DVDs in particular have such a high resale value on the Internet. I saw this article about a library employee who has systematically been reselling DVDs, books and other library items over the Internet for six months and using his access to the library computer to mark them as “checked in” He was turned in because he sold a book to a college president in Illinois who was suspicious about some of the library markings. This sort of thing happens all over, even in sleepy little neighborhoods like mine. Slashdot discusses. What do we do about this? [thanks john]
what quirky libraries have you been to lately?
Andrea visits the Fire Library
ALA Elections – some picks
I haven’t spoken much about who I’m voting for in the ALA Elections because I suspect only a very small subset of you care, and because I haven’t even gotten my ballot yet. That said, Library Juice has two lists of picks from people who I generally agree with politically. If you are a voter in the ALA elections, vote for people you know, don’t just use all your votes because you have them. Bullet voting makes each vote count every so slightly more. Leslie Burger is my pick for president, but then again I voted for Michael Gorman.