libraries

hawai’i’s libraries

The Moon Book Club gets foreign language books to Hawai’i’s libraries. Meanwhile, the Hawai’ian library system has 108 staff vacancies.

The library, beset by a critical staffing shortage and other needs, has an annual budget of only $35,000 for buying books in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Vietnamese…. the principal difficulty in expanding the collection is cataloging, especially the Asian titles written in characters that must be romanized for the database. They also must be categorized correctly, and it’s sometimes hard to find resources to help librarians do that. [thanks brandon]

battle of the bands @ your library?

Posted on 04Jun04 by jessamyn

Whiel I am sad that Bloodhag lives too far away to come to my library, I am happy that other libraries are jumping on the loud music band bandwagon. [thanks mac]

something to offend everyone @ your library

Posted on 31May04 by jessamyn

Illinois library won’t remove childrens’ book with a picture of an armed burglar in it.

“A good library collection should have something to offend everyone,” said [children”s librarian] Jan Bojda, “If they don’t, they are not doing their job.” [chitrib, thanks jemmy]

do you have library envy?

Posted on 31May04 by jessamyn

A little thread on LISNews about “library envy” The latest library that I have been to that I was envious of was the library at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which I had the pleasure of getting a tour of when I was in DC. Ample funding, technology + books, multi-language collection, multi-lingual librarians, lovely space, good web site. It’s open to the public, so put it on your dance card if you are in the area along with LoC and the spectacle that is the decline of the DC public library system. I know the librarian there, so drop me an email if you’d like an introduction.

SPL, media darling

Posted on 31May04 by jessamyn

Speaking of library envy… Seattle Public Library is open and getting lots and lots of pictures taken of it. I’m sort of smitten with the weird crazy colors in it; they were one of the things I was going to miss about the interim location they had been in. This has also got to be one of the smartest ideas for placement of Dewey numbers that I’ve seen. SPL was really the first library system I worked for [as a VISTA volunteer] after getting out of library school, so despite all my kvetching about them I have always sort of been rooting for them to get it together.