David Weinberger points to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and the idea of “advice as process.” I’m going to keep this idea close to me as I move through another year of moderating Ask MetaFilter: “giving advice is a social activity, not merely a transfer of purported knowledge.” How much of what we do as librarians is reference and how much is advice?
the book/ebook divide
As librarians, we don’t tell people what you’re reading. If you have a commercially produced ebook reader and you read purchased ebooks, people know what you’re reading. EFF has put together a very useful E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy as a follow-up to their earlier blog post about ebook privacy. There are options, of course. As librarians, my personal opinions is that we should be taking this stuff very very seriously.
love letters to your library
photo from Contra Costa Library, thanks!
I got an email that ALA’s @yourlibrary site had redesigned and I went over there but found it’s the same old clutter of information. It is possible I’m getting curmudgeonly. I also got an email from former co-Councilor Heidi Dolamore who is working on an advocacy project that I like much more: the Pinole Library valentine campaign. The Pinole Library’s website is here. You can see that the library is open 24 hours a week over four days. They’re starting a campaign to show how much people support the library by having people write notes on these valentines.
2009 reading list, a year end summary
I skipped doing this last year because I was sort of embarrassed at the shortness of my list. I vowed to read more this year and I guess I did. Here are previous year end lists: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. As you probably know, my booklist lives in a separate blog and it has its own RSS feed. I’m not a voracious reader and I’ve been heavy into genre fiction this year, but here’s the wrap-up of what I read in 2009.
number of books read in 2009: 39
number of books read in 2008: 31
number of books read in 2007: 53
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78
average read per month: 3.25
average read per week: .75
number read in worst month: 0 (November)
number read in best month: 7 (February)
percentage by male authors: 82
percentage by female authors: 18
fiction as percentage of total: 51
non-fiction as percentage of total: 49
percentage of total liked: 81
percentage of total ambivalent: 6
percentage of total disliked: 3
So… I’m still doing pretty poorly reading books by female authors though I’ve been balancing fiction and non-fiction pretty well. I loved a few books I read this year, specifically the book about the WPA writer’s project by Kurlansky and the fiction book by Howard Frank Mosher that was set in Vermont. Now that the bus to MA has wifi and I have an EVDO card for my laptop, I read less when I’m in transit. Now that I play scrabble most evenings with my boyfriend 9and also, that I have a boyfriend at all) I red less at night. I haven’t gone over to ebooks in any way though I bet I’m reading the same amount of words, but less of them are in book format.
I have a few books that I got mostly through in 2009 that I’m sure I’ll finish off in 2010. I also have a bedside table for books now that I didn’t have before. Wish me luck, and happy reading in 2010!
2009 in libraries
I’m a nerdy list-maker. This should come as a surprise to no one. In addition to all the other reasons I enjoy the end of the year, it’s also when I make my year-end summaries. I did a guestroom wrap-up on my personal blog. I have two bookish wrap-ups to put here. This first one is about library visits. 2009 was the first year I kept track of all my library visits in an orderly fashion. Longtime readers of this blog may remember I did library reviews in 2003. I found I had a difficult time with constructive criticism if I knew the people who worked at a library, so I stopped doing this.
This year I made 67 library visits, about one every five days. A lot of these were for work [either local work or giving talks] and the rest were either fun or curiosity. I used a website called Daytum to track my visits which was really easy. So, here’s a short annotated list of what I was doing in libraries last year.
- Aldrich/Barre (1) – killing time before dinner with friends in town. The first library in Vermont I did any work for.
- Austin (1) – LBJ library, sort of a flyby right beore it closed for the day.
- Belfast, ME (1) – a small pretty library we stopped at while on vacation
- Belmont, MA (5) – my boyfriend’s local library
- Boxboro, MA (1) – my mom and sister’s library
- Cambridge, MA (1) – got to see it after the renovations were done. It’s nice!
- Camden, ME (1) – another fancy little Maine library
- Chelmsford, MA (1) – home of the Swiss Army Librarian
- Concord, NH (1) – stopped in here during a rainstorm
- Des Moines, IA (1) – I helped change their photo policy!
- Elko, NV (1) – A small library with a great mining collection
- Hartness/Randolph VT (7) – my local college library
- Houghton Library, Harvard University (1) – special tour and Samuel Johnson exhibit
- Howe/Hanover, NH (4) – one of my favorite all-time libraries
- JFK Library, MA (1) – mostly a museum and a general disappointment
- Kimball/Randolph VT (6) – my town library, a great place
- Library of Congress (1) – thanks Dan Chudnov for the tour.
- Long Branch, NJ (1) – fun to poke around in while I was at NJLA
- Montreal, QC (1) – ducked in here during a subway bomb scare
- McGill/Montreal, QC (1) – gave a talk, saw the library
- NYPL (2) – hiding out with good wifi in the periodicals room, highly recommended
- NYPL/SIBL (1) – fancy library, right downtown
- Portland, ME (1) – another hideout from the rain
- Portsmouth, NH (1) – gave a talk and stuck around
- Rochester, VT (1) – classic small-town library in a funky old building
- Toronto, ON (1) – no wifi, sort of surprising
- Tunbridge, VT (21) – where I work most of the time
- Westport, MA (1) – my Dad’s library.