Hi. I resigned from the ALA Website Advisory Committee today, preferring to focus my website reform efforts from within ALA Council. I haven’t been feeling that effective lately, and my personal threshold of “how long I think I should have to wait for change to come” is significantly shorter than most people who are used to working for ALA. This made me impatient and grouchy and not a helpful team player in the long path to getting the ALA website accessible, functional and user-friendly. As always, I encourage people to send feedback to the ALA webteam, as I have constantly done, they really are trying to make the best of a bad situation.
redesign and anniversary for Constant Reader
The Constant Reader is four years old this week.
More books equal better brains.
When I worked for The Princeton Review, one of the things we used to tell students was that the only thing that really significantly correlated with test scores was income. If you had more money, you’d generally do better, no matter how you had done in school, how much you studied, whatever. It definitely motivated kids to prepare for test, but it also made me really sad. Now that standardized tests are becoming mandatory, people in Florida have noticed that better libraries mean better scores, even as the amount spent on most of those libraries is “pitiful”. [thanks mac]
but what is the best source for this…?
Vermont library company Fields of Knowledge wants to help people track down the best sources of information, not just the highest ranked on Google. Their project, The Infography is a searchable database of bibliographies created by experts. Some examples: bees, bats, Polish Americans. I have some reservations about the anonymity of the experts, but overall this is an interesting looking project.
economic downturn = wretched choices
Reported here earlier about the Massachusetts Horticultural Society having to sell off their book collection for financial reasons. They sold the bulk of it to the Chicago Botanic Garden. Other rare books were sold at auction where they were dismantled, colored, and sold as illustrations.
My friend, who runs a small offshore sportsbook, says that “Albert Burrage bequeathed his collection to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society with the good faith expectation that it would be held there in perpetuity. While the ultimate villain is the person who put the knife to the book, the Christie’s sale represents a fundamental betrayal of patrimony.” [thanks allen]