Month: January 2008

these are not my del.icio.us links

Posted on by jessamyn

But I do have a backlog of things to tell you about and only a medium amount of time to tell them to you, so I will be a little brief. I have been in New Hampshire peeking in at some of the election stuff and visiting with friends and now I’m really going to get going work and travelwise starting tomorrow. While I did my reading wrap-up here, I did my swimming and guestroom wrap-ups over at jessamyn.com. This year I may try to revive my “libraries visited” list now that I’ve got Flickr to help me out with the organizing, but it’s too early to tell if that will really work.

I’ve been to one library this year so far, the all-new Sargent Memorial Library in Boxborough MA. The library was way the heck up a hill and in a teeny building when I was growing up and we went there all the time. The librarians were always encouraging me to read whatever I wanted and my Mom stopped in often to get the new Ed McBain mysteries. The library outgrew its space and an all-new library was built and opened in 2005. I went there with my Mom yesterday and said hi to the library director who said she reads my blog (hi Maureen!). The last time I went to the old library as a patron I was probably in my late teens and I don’t think they even had computers yet. The new library is huge and lovely and has wifi. It’s also walking distance from the elementary school which is good news all around. It was fun to pop in there and get a real eyeful of how things have changed.

So here are a few things I thought you might be interested in, and my apologies for the brevity.

bring your favorite mug or water bottle to ALA

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m not going to ALA. As I mentioned before, I’m not a member and Philadelphia in January is not my idea of a good time. However, I do stay in touch with many ALA-ers and Monika Antonelli brought this Task Force of the Environment Campaign “Cup by Cup for a Greener ALA” It’s very very simple

  1. Bring a reusable cup to Midwinter
  2. Fill it with a favorite beverage
  3. Raise your cup and tell colleagues how you are helping the planet
  4. Drink, repeat & support TFOE-SRRT efforts toward a sustainable ALA.

One of the things that is distressing about having these big destination events is the huge amounts of waste that are generated. Council alone prints up tons of paper documents that were already distributed electronically, many of which are recycled (hopefully) or thrown out (likely) right after the meeting.

Even conscientious librarians who might bring their meals if they were just going to work wind up buying bottled water and packaged snacks because they’re trapped in the wasteland that is vast convention centers. Spend a little bit of time beforehand this year and try to pack a travel mug, a few powerbars or some fruit, your own pen and notebook, and maybe some teabags or Emergen-C that can keep you from spending time, money and resources just keeping yourself fed, hydrated and in prime note taking shape. Enjoy yourselves.

Congress requests EPA libraries to open again

Posted on by jessamyn

And now we start the big fight over EPA libraries again. I don’t know about you but I find this so upsetting. Not that someone could be so shortsighted as to think you could close a bunch of libraries with practically unique information and replace them with a (shoddy, sorry) database, but that the whole idea of closing a LIBRARY isn’t seen as a last-ditch thing you only do when you need to, I don’t know, burn the books for fuel to keep from freezing to death. In any case, my bad for not reporting more on this, I had OMG fatigue. This latest article Congress Directs EPA to Re-Open Its Libraries is cautiously good news, but very very angering to those who care about information services. Granted, it’s a partisan article, but if the facts are indeed correct the whole thing has been and continues to be a fiasco. I’d love to hear from other readers with direct knowledge of any of this.

Prior to the closures, the budget for the EPA library network was $2.5 million. By earmarking $3 million, Congress increased the total library budget, allowing the agency to absorb the expense of collecting dispersed collections and replacing jettisoned facilities. For example, EPA closed its largest regional library in Chicago and sold all of its fixtures, valued at more than $40,000, for less than $350. [emphasis mine]

The rationale for the library closures was never clearly spelled out by the agency, which maintained that it wanted to digitize all of its holdings. Its original claim of cost savings did not bear up under scrutiny and clashed with the enormous expense of digitizing hundreds of thousands of documents. In addition, the agency did not anticipate copyright restrictions, which barred many of its holdings from being digitized.

bibliocide made simpler at Seattle’s new library

Posted on by jessamyn

The Stranger is a local indie paper in Seattle that has never been particularly fond of Seattle’s new library. I found their latest article “Killer Library” subtitled “The New Central Library Offers Civic Validation, a Huge Collection of Material, and a Staggering Number of Startling New Ways to Die” totally hilarious. It’s a mix of genuine design flaws (up escalator only? really?) with just quirky architectural decision (of course people call that little platform over the huge atrium area Lover’s Leap, have you lived through a Seattle winter?). I like how their platonic library patron is exactly my age. update: amusingly, everything old is new again and this article is from a while ago. I still enjoy it. [thanks megan]