New State Library director in Hawai’i struggles with not enough staff and not enough money. [thanks brandon]
Month: March 2004
librarian shortage leading to library shortage
Due to what is being called a “critical staff shortage” the American Museum of Natural History Library’s Speciall Collections are closed to the public.[thanks carol]
dead technologies that don’t yet live in Vermont
Michael also mentioned a talk that Jenny gave at CiL during the Dead and Emerging Technologies section. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes if your patrons are clamoring for it and your library can support it, things like wireless, RSSfeeds and roving reference librarians are must-haves. On the other hand, I look at our library with our 15 public access terminals that we can just barely maintain, our lack of any technology plan and the levels of connectivity of our patrons generally and I wonder how we get from here to there? And how much our desire for the shiny parts of these technologies led us into a system that we can’t handle, and that leads us to give bad service to patrons? And I wonder how much of this change should be foisted on patrons and how much of it should be patron-driven or at least patron-focused? I have no good answers, and I’m happy that people are really pushing the envelope of using the technology to bring the best parts of libraries to the public. On the other hand, I’m acutely aware that small and rural libraries have to make very tough choices when they decide how to spend their limited money — Vermont libraries get next to no state funding for the public library system — and I’d like to see more of a focus on appropriate technologies rather than new-technologies-at-any-cost-in-any-situation boosterism. I guess that’s my job.
librarians v ashcroft 4ever
Found over at NITLE’s blog, the nice folks over at the Internet Archive are suing over recent copyright revisions claiming that making public domain items retroactively copyrighted is not only wrong, it’s unconstitutional.
where does it break down?
One of my particular skills that isn’t necessarily library related is being able to analyze systems and see where their weak points are. This can make me a bit of a pest around work [“well what happens if your plan doesn’t work as expected… what is the Plan B?“] but I like to think that the stuff I design is more fault-tolerant than the average stuff. In the reference world, this is the difference between giving someone an answer versus a good answer versus “I don’t know” as an answer. It can be tough to measure the cost of failure in this example, but it’s not as tough in other situations. Susan Feldman talks about the high cost of not finding information.
What we can’t do is measure the increase in creativity and original thinking that might be unleashed if knowledge workers had more time to think and were not frustrated with floundering around online…. Information disasters are caused not by lack of information, but rather by not connecting the right information to the right people at the right time.[lisnews]