Book buying

In my collection development class last week we had a very interesting discussion of the ways that libraries buy books. The macro-level purchasing that so many libraries do has generally been working well for many years, but the professor pointed out that as library budgets are shrinking it may be necessary to take a more micro-level approach. Of course so many of the digital resources that libraries buy these days are only available in the bundled, all-or-nothing packages that individual item purchasing is a virtual impossibility for these items. This ties back into the conversations we had earlier in the semester about the journal pricing issues that libraries are facing. So much of the control over what a library acquires has been taken out of the hands of the librarians who actually work with patrons and either centralized to a small number of acquisitions people or handed over to publishers who determine how they're willing to sell to libraries.

The thing that I thought was most interesting about the whole discussion was the fact that so few people, even among librarians, really understand acquisitions and the advantages and drawbacks of working this way. I've worked in two libraries now and while I wasn't exactly at a level where I needed to know about this, it's interesting that I had very little idea about this whole process. If librarians don't understand this process it must be hard for them to use the system to really get the best materials for patrons.

Image Credit

Licenses and Learning

This Hoyden About Town post is a great example of why we need better education about copyright and licenses. I'd bet money on the fact that the designer who included both a GPL statement and an all rights reserved copyright statement had no idea if or why those two things are contradictory. Just like the Creative Commons/Flickr/Virgin Mobile case, there are plenty of people who apply these licenses without the least bit of understanding of what it is that they're agreeing to by using them.

Perhaps high school civics classes (Do they still teach those?) ought to start discussing copyright law and licensing issues.

Cataloging is Fun!

When I started library school I heard from several people that cataloging was one of the hardest things to learn. Certainly I can see that it takes a particular way of thinking to be a good cataloger, but so far I'm finding it fairly easy and quite enjoyable. Something about it appeals to both my logical and creative sides simultaneously.

When you've searched through the whole of the LCSH and finally come across just the perfect heading to describe the item you're holding it's a great feeling. It can also be incredibly frustrating, when you know what you want to do but can't seem to find it.

Then We Came to the End

For the book club I'm in I've just finished reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. It's his first novel, and a very impressive start.

The whole book, with the exception of one key chapter, is written in the first-person plural about the employees of an advertising agency in Chicago. The combination of "we" + verb and the knowing details about office life that are included very quickly draw the reader into the story. Although the characters in the book are a quirky bunch, they have elements that we've all seen among our co-workers, so it's easy for anyone who has ever worked in an office to see themselves in these people.

The story, told through a series of short vignettes, plays out over the course of a fairly short time, though with occasional flashbacks to the past. It is at times funny and heartbreaking, but by the end I actually cared about what had happened to each of the characters, and fortunately Ferris provides a chapter in which all is (mostly) explained. I highly recommend this book to anyone who works in corporate America, because it may just make your workplace seem a little more interesting. At the very least you'll be glad that you don't work at this place!

The thing formerly known as free time

So this blogging thing is a lot harder than it looks when you're trying to work two jobs and go to graduate school. Apparently some people have this thing called "free time" that I have often heard them speak of but do not seem to recall ever having.

Anyway, crazy life aside I am now actually working in a library for the first time since my undergrad years and so far loving every minute of it. My job description is very open-ended so I get to do a little of everything from wiki pages to journal processing. It's the perfect thing to get me some experience before I have to go look for a real job at the end of the summer.

Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sad Story

A monastery and its entire library burnt to the ground in the California wildfires recently.

This is a really good argument for libraries having a good disaster plan. And although digitization is not the same as preservation, situations like this demonstrate why digital books, with off-site backups of course, can be useful to help keep things available even if their print counterparts are damaged.

Accepted!

The proposal that I submitted to do a presentation on my Creative Commons and libraries research at the department's research symposium in January has been accepted.

Eek! Now I actually have to finish the work and put together enough material to fill half an hour. I usually hate public speaking so I can't imagine what I was thinking when I agreed with the Dean that this would be a good idea. At least there's a decent chance that it'll be like all the other department events that no one attends, so I'll only make a fool of myself in front of a tiny handful of people.

And who knows, maybe I'll be amazing and someone will see my fabulous presentation and offer me a job on the spot. (Hey, a girl can dream right?)

Stephen Abram Presents

My program had a special presentation by Stephen Abram tonight and it was wonderful, really informative and inspiring all at once. For example, did you know that having a library can increase a school's standardized test scores by an average of 25 points?

His talk was overall about the future of libraries and how they ought to be at the forefront of the radical economic change that is coming now. He had lots of really good examples about how librarians have influenced the development of the web (did you know that the Google guys' adviser was a librarian?) and how library skills fit into the new information economy. He also talked about the importance of librarians advocating for themselves and their services, and the ways in which we need to think differently about marketing. One of my favorite lines was about promoting the verbs in the library, not the nouns.

I was happy to note that many of the things he recommended that librarians should do I am in fact already doing - blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

XKCD does EULAs

Brilliant!

OCLC Metadata link roundup

There has been a lot of chatter round the library community about the new OCLC policies for sharing metadata. I don't have much to add to the discussion but just wanted to pull together a couple of good pieces that I've seen on the subject.

After Delay, OCLC Lays Out New Policy for Records Use and Transfer (Library Journal)
OCLC Updating Records Use Guidelines; Confusion Over Effective Date(Library Journal)

Maelstrom Over Metadata (Inside Higher Ed) - particularly good for non-librarians who need a primer on what OCLC does

Terry's Worklog (also see this post on breaking up OCLC)

I voted today!

I went and voted on my way to work this morning. It was super quick, in and out in under 20 minutes, even though the people at the polling place were a little confused about things and didn't seem to have a very good system for getting folks through the lines.

Perhaps we need more election workers who aren't 80 years old?

Anyway, after voting I stopped to get my free Krispy Kreme donut and was very disappointed that I only got a plain glazed donut and not the star-shaped one with patriotic sprinkles that the ads promised.

Now it's just a matter of waiting, and resisting the urge to hit up all the news sites every five minutes to see if anything has been reported.

Harder than it looks

My final project for one of my classes this semester is to create a series of screen casts teaching users all about RSS feeds - what they are and how they work. When I designed this project I thought it would be a fairly straightforward task, just go step-by-step through the process of using RSS and describe what you need to do at each step.

Boy was I ever wrong! Perhaps I'm being overly ambitious in what I can reasonably achieve here, but this project is turning out to be much more complicated. First there's the fact that I don't actually have the screen casting software on my laptop, which means that I have to have every detail planned in advance before I go to the lab to do the recording.

Also, describing what RSS feeds are is not as simple as you might think. It seems pretty obvious to me since I've been using them for ages now, but when I actually try to translate it into language that's understandable to a newbie things get complicated. I can't assume that the user will understand all the terminology so I have to work backwards to explain things I hadn't planned on explaining.

Most frustratingly, in order to properly demonstrate how to set up a new account in Google Reader and in Bloglines, I have to do it from scratch as I record it, which means that I won't know until I'm sitting there how it will actually work. I could set up dummy accounts just to practice, but then I'd have to set up two new accounts for each service, none of which I'm likely to use after this project, and that seems a little excessive.

Ultimately I think this project will be more interesting than either of the other two options I could've picked, and certainly will result in my having learned more usable skills as far as creating screen casts goes, but the process is going to be more painful than anticipated.

Cataloging for a Cause

I just read about this effort on the part of LibraryThing to help St. John's Episcopal Church in Boston catalog their collection of books. I think this is a fantastic idea, and something that it would be really interesting to see done in other places.

For instance, I can imagine a cataloging class taking on the collection of a small non-profit as part of their final project. Or perhaps one of the many library association chapters that exist most places could do a similar pizza-and-cataloging party on a Saturday. They wouldn't have to use LibraryThing, any database or cataloging software would do, and the results would be really helpful for the non-profit since they would have better access to their own resources.

Hmm... I wonder if it would be possible to set up something like this. I guess the major issue would be finding a place with a lot of books that aren't already cataloged but should be.

Obama and Maddow

Rachel Maddow is going to interview Obama tomorrow night on her show!

This is going to be some must-watch TV for sure, I have to find someone with cable who will let me watch at their house.