The library that I worked in for two years as an outreach librarian turns 120 this week and got a nice write-up in the newspaper with lots of good library history. [thanks steven]
radical reference: semi-orgasmic experiences on the job
Eli Edwards writes about the experience of doing radical reference in Clamor Magazine and the RadRef project past and present.
According to co-founder Jenna Freedman, a librarian at Barnard College in New York City, “We thought [the protestors] would need reliable sources of information in a time when all hell was expected to break loose and rumors would probably be flying around everywhere. Our job in the street was to be calm and knowledgeable and to have good resources available to us in the RR kits or at the other end of a phone.â€
ownership of problems – opac, tech staff and gremlins
It’s easy to get mad at the OPAC vendor when the upgrade to their product brings your whole system down for months, but there are many stories in that one news article. The director of that library was a candidate for ALA President last year and no stranger to automation. The library used to be a Dynix library, before it became a Sirsi-Dynix library. It is now a Polaris library.
I’m sure this story is an extreme example of OPAC upgrades going wrong, but comments in the thread and elsewhere seem to imply that it’s not that unusual and it’s a telling downside to the relationships we have with our vendors. Whose responsibility is it when upgrades go wrong? Is that responsibility codified in print? What is the library’s responsibility as far as technical staffing and maintenance of the ILS system? Who determines the upgrade schedule, and what the upgrades will consist of?
I’m not a systems librarian, I just run a lot of blogs on a lot of different servers and so I sympathize with the troubleshooting nightmare that OPAC upgrades must bring. On the other hand, this library has been using Dynix since 1985, that’s pre-Web. So — and I oversimplify here — online catalogs went “online” before they had to think about the way we’d be pointing and clicking through web-based information 10 and 20 years hence and they did some pretty cool things. For a lot of people my age, interacting with a library catalog may have been one of their first used of public access computing. Then the Web took off and the dumb terminal interface to the library catalog seemed not just quaint and outdated but an active wall between library content and library users. And what did library vendors do? And what did librarians do?
I love reading what Steven Abrams has to say about librarian 2.0 and what Liz Lawley has to say about edge cases and early adopters. I like to think that some amount of money that we’re paying for our OPAC upgrades and our buggy operating systems keeps them talking. And yet, we have few (and possibly fewer lately) philosophizing practitioners, people who can solve the problem now, not just talk about how the problem should be solved.
Moving to more open web-like customizeable user-centered content and services is a tricky tightrope walk for any company with shareholders, or one eye on the bottom line. Library patrons aren’t like book buyers — if your OPAC is lame, they’re likely not going to go to another library [though they might just leave libraries altogther, although we haven’t seen that happening]. I’d really like to know what happened to the Rochester Hills Public Library’s circulation stats when they had a lousy OPAC for a few months.
the library llama sings about you
Lloyd the Library Llama sings the Blogga Song, more humor from the Laughing Librarian (inspired by this).
google book search, what about govdocs?
One of the things I really enjoyed about the Internet Archive Open Library project was the software they used to attempting to determine whether works they were scanning were or were not under copyright. It was an elaborate set of questions and answers with access to some copyright databases. In contrast, unless I’m mistaken, Google Books just draws a line at 1923 and assumes everything after that date is in copyright. This includes government information which as you know is made with tax dollars and generally in the public domain. So why does Google Book Search treat all post-1923 books as under copyright? Just over-cautious?