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Archive for the 'library services' Category

Seven Ways Your Library Can Help During a Bad Economy

Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008 in libraries, library services and economics. 0 Comments

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The Transparent Library: Check Your Ego at the Door

Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008 in libraries and library services. 0 Comments

“Egos complicate procedures and keep good people down. Egos squash good ideas and can take the best of an organization and turn it on itself,” say the Michaels (Casey and Stephens), who advise losing yours if you want to successfully lead a project, department, or other staff, and give tips on fostering other workers’ talents that will benefit you and the library in the long run while keeping everyone happy and feeling connected.

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The Disconnected

Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008 in libraries and library services. 0 Comments

There are roughly 3.8 million men and women nationwide between the ages of 18 and 24 who are neither in school nor employed but regularly use libraries for the Internet, email, and related activities. Queens Library’s Kathy Degyansky (also appearing in a web-exclusive video) says PLs are positioned to “touch the lives of these adults” and that “librarians have a role to play in providing services that can help the disconnected” with securing jobs, furthering education, and even emotional support. Find advice on how to spot dropouts and those with low literacy skills, as well.

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Canadian Libraries Thrive in the Internet Age

Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008 in libraries, library services and Canada. 0 Comments

Business is booming at Canada’s major public libraries, which credit everything from the high price of buying books to social networking, vampires, and a new social acceptance for frothy bestsellers. In Edmonton, Alberta, 385 people are on the waiting list for Fearless Fourteen, the newest offering from romance-turned-crime writer Janet Evanovich. In Surrey, B.C., Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn (right), a vampire novel written for young adults that is still on order, has 220 members on its waiting list.

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From Awareness to Funding: A Study of Library Support in America

Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008 in libraries, library services and OCLC. 0 Comments

OCLC was awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to explore attitudes and perceptions about library funding and to evaluate the potential of a large-scale marketing and advocacy campaign to increase public library funding in the U.S. The findings of this research are now available in the latest OCLC report, From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America. Among the findings from the report: Library funding support is only marginally related to library visitation; Perceptions of librarians are an important predictor of library funding support; Voters who see the library as a “transformational” force as opposed to an “information” source are more likely to increase taxes in its support.

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From Quiet Refuge to Summer Hot Spot

Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008 in libraries and library services. 0 Comments

It’s a hot, humid summer afternoon, a time when local libraries used to be languid sanctuaries of quiet and solitude. But no more. Today’s local libraries in the summer are more like accountants’ offices at tax time. Elementary schoolchildren are coming in by the droves to record the books they’ve just finished for the summer-reading program. Teenagers are working on the computers or signing up for video-game tournaments. And parents, already looking as if the summer has gone on too long, are finding respite in comfy chairs, looking through stacks for a good read or taking a moment to plan the next activity in their never-ending summer challenge to entertain the children.“It’s truly amazing the number of people coming in,” said Alice Knapp, director of public services for the Ferguson Library here. “It used to be back 20 years ago, circulation in the hot, hazy days was slow. We’d circulate 2,000 books a day. Now, systemwide we are circulating between 3,500 and 4,000. We are getting complaints that the library is too loud, which we love because it means we are well used.”

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The New Digital Awareness

Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008 in libraries, library services, digital, technology and digital divide. 0 Comments

Reference librarian Shannon Bohle says that with the constant bombardment of new twists on technology, “we need to take a step back and consider how librarians in the last decade have found themselves on the fast track from the sequestered content villas of subscription databases to the sprawling information architecture of our new socially networked digital environment.” Moreover she conflates digital awareness with social awareness, even pointing to the digital divide “among us as librarians and among our own institutions.”

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Predictable Irrationality and Academic Libraries

Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008 in libraries, American Library Association, library services and databases. 0 Comments

Economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions keynoted the June 30 President’s Program of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA. His address, while not specifically geared to libraries, engaged the audience and stimulated some thoughtful responses from a panel of librarians, some of whom said they’d go back and streamline their lists of databases so they don’t overwhelm users. Here’s another account, from ACRLog.

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Bike Library ‘Victim of Its Own Success’

Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008 in libraries, innovation and library services. 0 Comments

The Fort Collins, Colorado Bike Library plans to quadruple the number of bikes available to loan by next spring, after finding itself dramatically and happily oversubscribed. The library permits anyone with an ID and an e-mail address to borrow a bike for a week at a time. The library started with 50 bright red bikes this spring, and is now down by two, officials said. “We are a victim of our own success,” said Jeff Morrell, president of Bike Fort Collins. “There’s a waiting list every week.”That’s sort of an understatement: The manager of the Old Town Square branch said people have actually darted away from half-eaten meals in the plaza to snag a newly returned bike. Another woman was so reluctant to return it that the police were nearly called, he said.

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Books to Borrow and Books to Buy: Library is Packed with Free Information

Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008 in libraries and library services. 0 Comments

Several years ago the American Library Association had a clever poster to encourage reading and patronage of libraries. The poster read “Free Information: Bring Your Own Container.” The container, of course, would be your brain. Your public library has mountains of free information to offer - books on just about every subject, both fiction and nonfiction, magazines, videos and often computers. What a great place to feed the mind, have fun and grow. Children grow quickly, and their tastes and interests change just as rapidly. The public library can accommodate their changing interests and expand on that by offering information on new subjects and ideas.

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10 Suggestions for Summer Book Groups

Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008 in libraries, library services and books. 0 Comments

When vacations, families, and the great outdoors call, book groups can quickly take a back seat. Here are 10 ideas to help your group avoid doldrums and dog days.

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NetLibrary Announces Distribution Agreements with 19 Publishers from Around the World

Published by rwatstein July 5th, 2008 in libraries, library services, OCLC and publishing. 0 Comments

NetLibrary, OCLC’s platform for eContent and the leading provider of eBooks for the institutional library market, has announced agreements with 19 publishers that will add thousands of new eBooks and eAudiobooks to NetLibrary’s growing catalog of more than 170,000 titles.With increasing worldwide demand for electronic content, NetLibrary continues to enhance and expand its catalog by partnering with preeminent publishers of scholarly, trade, STM and reference content. New publisher partners adding eContent to NetLibrary include:

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Survey of Academic Libraries, 2008-09 Edition

Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008 in libraries, librarians/information professionals, library services and economics. 0 Comments

The Survey of Academic Libraries, 2008-09 Edition is based on data from 75 college libraries in the United States and Canada. Data is broken out by size and type of college, as well as for public and private institutions, to allow for easier benchmarking. The report’s more than 300 tables of data present findings about trends in staffing and salaries, budgets, grants and endowments, special collections, content and materials spending, use of e-books and online services, capital budgets library building renovation and facilities management, information literacy, and many other issues of interest to academic librarians.

Some of the report’s findings are: Only 22.5% of the colleges sampled believed that librarians’ salaries had been going up faster than the rate of inflation, while more than 34% believed that their salaries in the past year had gone down in real terms. Librarians in private colleges were more likely than their counterparts in public colleges to believe that their salaries had gone down in real terms in the past year.

For the libraries in the sample the mean rate of growth in content spending in nominal terms was only 1.75% from the 2006-07 to 2007-08 academic year. Spending actually declined for the public colleges in the sample and grew only at about the rate of inflation for the private colleges. The expected rate of increase in spending for the 2008-09 academic year is only 1.66%. Private colleges in the sample had a mean expected increase of 3.1%, slightly less than the expected rate of inflation, while the public colleges essentially foresaw an increase of less than 1/10th of 1 percent, a decline in real terms of about 3.5%.

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