“When they come up to the desk they are treated with respect and this may be the only place in their lives that they can experience that.” a public interest news story about LAPL and some of the homeless people who come there every day. Since it’s LA, you will not be surprised to learn that one of them has used the library computers to write a screenplay.
Month: December 2008
aaron’s job, let me show you it….
Aaron Schmidt got a new cool job: Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library. Sounds big and exciting. DC is really trying hard to dig themselves out of years of bad management and terrible funding crisises, it will be interesting to see if new people plus some infusion of new money can help with this. Congrats Aaron.
ALA’s Emily Sheketoff talks about library issues for the new administration
Emily Sheketoff is one of my favorite ALA employees to listen to. She always comes across as intelligent, sane and someone who has a deep and broad grasp of library issues in this new millenium including library technology issues. Here is a thirty minute interview with her on C-Span that aired a few weeks ago in which she talks abotu what some of the upcoming challenges will be for both libraries and the incoming administration in the coming years. I suggest you watch the entire thing.
Why is my Dad talking to me about the public library?
My Dad never goes to the public library. He buys his own books and is a little… fussy about public spaces. That said, when I go to visit him we talk about library issues because they’re interesting to me and he’s a techie and always curious how libraries seem to have gotten so much so wrong. He did talk to me about two library news items that I found interesting. One was the I Love My Librarian award winners which my Dad read about in the New York Times. The other was the Chelmsford High School Library’s Learning Commons project — which he read about in the Boston Globe — which provided an (incorrect) opening to say “Hey, my friend Brian is a librarian there! He has a blog!” I then got to prattle on about their town-wide history project which I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. So, there it is, get your library in the paper get the retiree crowd curious about you.
Google’s scanning magazines…..
Google Books includes magazines now. Here’s an image from the May 1911 issue of Popular Science. Update: here’s a list of the magazines currently scanned and indexed.