hi – Page 3 – librarian.net

links about some good and bad things in libraryland

First off, I’d like to point out this question from Ask MetaFilter which asks the age old question “I am trying to automate my small school/church/club library. What software should I use?” I gave a few answers, as did a few other people, but the short answer is “There’s no good tool for this” as near as I can tell. Please let me know if I’m wrong.

A few more links people sent me over the last week or so.

Toronto Public Library cutting service to Sick Kids [hospital] reading room saying that the hospital should play more of a role in the provision of library services.
Phoenix is considering closing six public library branches prompting one columnist to ask “Cut all librarians before any cop?”
Marilyn Johnson has written a book — This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. Here is an interview with Marilyn and a good looking book review from the Boston Globe

2009 in libraries

Posted on 02Jan1001Jan14 by jessamyn

I’m a nerdy list-maker. This should come as a surprise to no one. In addition to all the other reasons I enjoy the end of the year, it’s also when I make my year-end summaries. I did a guestroom wrap-up on my personal blog. I have two bookish wrap-ups to put here. This first one is about library visits. 2009 was the first year I kept track of all my library visits in an orderly fashion. Longtime readers of this blog may remember I did library reviews in 2003. I found I had a difficult time with constructive criticism if I knew the people who worked at a library, so I stopped doing this.

This year I made 67 library visits, about one every five days. A lot of these were for work [either local work or giving talks] and the rest were either fun or curiosity. I used a website called Daytum to track my visits which was really easy. So, here’s a short annotated list of what I was doing in libraries last year.

Aldrich/Barre (1) – killing time before dinner with friends in town. The first library in Vermont I did any work for.
Austin (1) – LBJ library, sort of a flyby right beore it closed for the day.
Belfast, ME (1) – a small pretty library we stopped at while on vacation
Belmont, MA (5) – my boyfriend’s local library
Boxboro, MA (1) – my mom and sister’s library
Cambridge, MA (1) – got to see it after the renovations were done. It’s nice!
Camden, ME (1) – another fancy little Maine library
Chelmsford, MA (1) – home of the Swiss Army Librarian
Concord, NH (1) – stopped in here during a rainstorm
Des Moines, IA (1) – I helped change their photo policy!
Elko, NV (1) – A small library with a great mining collection
Hartness/Randolph VT (7) – my local college library
Houghton Library, Harvard University (1) – special tour and Samuel Johnson exhibit
Howe/Hanover, NH (4) – one of my favorite all-time libraries
JFK Library, MA (1) – mostly a museum and a general disappointment
Kimball/Randolph VT (6) – my town library, a great place
Library of Congress (1) – thanks Dan Chudnov for the tour.
Long Branch, NJ (1) – fun to poke around in while I was at NJLA
Montreal, QC (1) – ducked in here during a subway bomb scare
McGill/Montreal, QC (1) – gave a talk, saw the library
NYPL (2) – hiding out with good wifi in the periodicals room, highly recommended
NYPL/SIBL (1) – fancy library, right downtown
Portland, ME (1) – another hideout from the rain
Portsmouth, NH (1) – gave a talk and stuck around
Rochester, VT (1) – classic small-town library in a funky old building
Toronto, ON (1) – no wifi, sort of surprising
Tunbridge, VT (21) – where I work most of the time
Westport, MA (1) – my Dad’s library.

Desk Set – from the NYTimes fashion pages to your library….

Posted on 09Dec0909Dec09 by jessamyn

Remember that puff piece in the NY Times about the librarians that got together to drink in Brooklyn and how wacky it all was “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers”? I hadn’t followed it much since then, but apaprently this crew, The Desk Set, has been doing all sorts of fabulously fun things and it’s worth seeing how to do librarian chic right. Check out their event posters. Plus, they’ve having a holiday party, the BiblioBall, to benefit Literacy for Incarcerated Teens this Friday. If you’re in the NY area, I’d suggest checking it out.

DIY Book Scanner, details

Posted on 03Nov09 by jessamyn

I’ve mentioned Daniel Reetz’s DIY portable book scanner here before. It’s a great combination of an interesting thing to look at, an interesting project to contemplate and a bit of a gauntlet tossed down as far as bigger questions of why we leave scanning up to the big companies, etc. At the end of my Tiny Tech talks I usually mention it as something in the realm of the possible, even if in a Dream Big way. Daniel was at D is for Digitize last month — a conference I missed because I was in Nevada — and I noticed some interesting back and forth about his scanner project show up in the Library Law blog.

SirsiDynix Corp lobby paper against Open Source technologies

Posted on 29Oct0929Oct09 by jessamyn

Interesting thing in my inbox today from WikiLeaks. Read it and see what you think about it. Any SirsiDynix customers actually receive this and want to go on the record about it? From the WikiLeaks page:

This document was released only to a select number of existing customers of the company SirsiDynix, a proprietary library automation software vendor. It has not been released more broadly specifically because of the misinformation about open source software and possible libel per se against certain competitors contained therein.

SirsiDynix is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with one of the largest public libraries in the U.S. (Queens Borough, NY) and this document does illustrate the less-than-ethical nature of this company.

The source states that the document should be leaked so that everyone can see to what extent SirsiDynix will attempt to spread falsehoods and smear open source and the proponents of open source.