how it should work: book donations @ your library

From Daniel Cornwall, via LISNews comes a good example of how a public library can be friendly and firm about accepting book donations. Here’s the example from the blog of the Seldovia Public Library.

Recently, a very large donation was left outside the library, without notice, for days in boxes too large for our volunteers to lift once they did discover them. In that time, the books became weather-damaged as well as suffering from the territorial marking practices of local dogs. Would you want to read these books or have your children read them? What a sad waste, and one that could have been prevented with a phone call.

no glove no love? the necessity of white gloves for conservation

In a paper published last year (pdf) but only getting noticed in the mainstream media recently, conservation consultant Cathleen A. Baker and librarian
Randy Silverman argue that for the handling of most types of materials, white gloves don’t help, may hurt, and create a false impression of protection where none exists.

Current reading room rules do little to instruct patrons about preferable handling practices, relying on the impression that wearing gloves adequately achieves collections care. Even if cotton gloves were capable of providing effective prophylactic barrier between patrons and the collection, their use promotes the false illusion that the hands, once encased, are somehow transformed into “safe” instruments. Wearing gloves actually increases the potential for physically damaging fragile material through mishandling, and this is especially true for ultra thin or brittle papers that become far more difficult to handle with the sense of touch dulled. Measures must be taken to reduce collection risks through instruction and example, we submit, but not through the use of gloves.

[livejournal]

feather books – digitally on display at McGill

I post about bookish things less and less lately. Please enjoy this one, straight out of MetaFilter. “The Feather Book, digitized by and on display at McGill University: A seventeenth-century book containing illustrations of birds and men — composed of real feathers, beaks, and claws. More information about the book and its contents and history can be read here.”

books fountain, etc.

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.