If you’re a library that is getting a strange letter from Project Vote Smart talking about lack of support from ALA, please read these messages from ALA President Michael Gorman and ALA Executive Director Keith Fiels. Upshot, they claim they are forced to “…no longer provide materials to libraries because they had tried for five months, unsuccessfully, to get a letter of endorsement from ALA leadership.” Gorman: “I have never received a request for an endorsement.” Fiels: “[I]t was never clear to me from based on the conversations with Ms. Buscaglia what exactly she needed from ALA or that the funding for the project depended on a letter from the President. Of course we would have provided a letter of support.” I can’t imagine what happened here.
Month: May 2006
libraries build communities, don’t you think?
Ten leading library experts were posed this question in the Spring issue of [SirsiDynix’s] Upstream: "What is the best example of libraries building communities that you have come across or experienced? How will libraries in the future be empowered to play even a greater role in their communities?" One of those experts was me (1.2 MB pdf), and at least a few other people you’ll probably recognize.
While I feel a little weird acting as if this library/community thing was something we’ve all recently discovered, it’s still great to hear everyone’s take on it, and I’m always happy to be able to say nice things about my favorite libraries.
SLA talk: Doing More With Less
Hi. Thanks so much to everyone who made me feel welcome and dealt with our extension cord search when they were already full of food and working on dessert at the SLA meeting this evening. I had a great time giving the talk and I hope you revisit it to follow the links we didn’t have time to click-click-click through. The talk is here: Doing More with Less, High Tech on a Shoestring. If you scroll all the way to the end of it and click on the “printable” link you can see the notes that I actually (sort of) read from.
me in NY, Monday May 8
I’ll be on a short trip on Monday to give a talk to the Hudson Valley chapter of the Special Libraries Association about low cost technology. Looks like they’re just breaking in to the blog world and I love their slogan “Making Edgier Easier. We’re IT!” (actually the IT division’s tagline (who has their own blog), thanks for the update folks!)
rfid library tags unlocked, vulnerable
RFID hacking in, among other places, libraries. More on RFID.
As he waves the reader over a book’s spine, ID numbers pop up on his monitor. “I can definitely overwrite these tags,” Molnar says. He finds an empty page in the RFID’s memory and types “AB.” When he scans the book again, we see the barcode with the letters “AB” next to it. (Molnar hastily erases the “AB,” saying that he despises library vandalism.) He fumes at the Oakland library’s failure to lock the writable area. “I could erase the barcodes and then lock the tags. The library would have to replace them all.”