My Mom sent me a link to this book fountain photo on Flickr and I figured I’d spend some more time looking around at various tags: book, library [with this book chopper, and this inter-tidal loan] and librarian where I found these Bibliotecária figurines. There are 449 groups that contain the word library and 39 with the word librarian. Keep in mind that many of these photos are published under a Creative Commons license which means that they can be used by you or your library for many different purposes. Check the rights information underneath the “Additional Information” heading in the lower left.
leslie burger and what to do with ala
Leslie Burger, incoming ALA President has a blog. I would love to know what Michael Gorman has to say about this, or as Caveat Lector calls him M-ch–l G-rm-n which always makes me smile. Leslie has already gotten going, meeting with some of the blogger types at Midwinter to solicit opinions about using and implementing “new” technology at ALA to help the organization. Her latest post The LIE, BQE and ALA talks about building on the idea of social networking to make ALA more relevant and useful to an incoming group of librarians, a group that may be wondering what ALA can do for them. Many people, myself included, chimed in with suggestions, and I’d encourage you to do the same.
Happy Birthday Rutland Free Library
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.