MAO and MPL have parted ways, but the new Minneapolis Public Library will opening May 20th with a less edgy but still dramatic ad campaign. Of course MPL.org is actually Milwaukee Public Library, perhaps they can get in a heavy domain name bidding war now.
Category: libraries
project vote smart and libraries
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.
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.”
RLG + OCLC = ???
Will Walt Crawford start blogging for It’s All Good? We can only think about whether that would be a consequences of the pending OCLC and RLG merger. Here is OCLC’s press release. Here is RLGs press release (note, they are the same). I’ll link to RLG’s version when I can find it, or when they write one.
According to the release, the current president of RLG, James Michalko, will get a new job title: “Vice President of RLG-Programs Development, working under the leadership of Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President of Research and OCLC Chief Strategist” The press release also notes that “Any change in RLG service offerings will be announced well in advance.” and doesn’t mention what will happen to OCLCs service offerings, presumably nothing. The press release uses nice words like “combine” a lot, an awful lot actually, but when I think of combinations, I think of how you mix butter and sugar to make something that is part both and part neither. This seems to be the sort of combination where you mix sugar and water and what you wind up with is water, sweetened. It will be interesting to see how this works out. [web4lib]
Morgan Library, renovated and beautiful
If money were no object, what would your new library look like? I spotted this blurb at the Gothamist about the new additions to the Morgan Library, a private library in downtown Manhattan. Sort of neat to know what just a little front-end design work can do to a pretty standard OPAC. Like it? Consider a curatorial internship there. If you’re in New York, there are also many other private libraries in New York City.