Rahm Emanuel vs. Librarians

It's a battle royal as Chicago faces budget cuts.

From a piece on NBC Chicago...

Chicago's libraries previously got short shrift from former Mayor Richard Daley, who cut hours and jobs in previous budgets.

“My libraries are very heavily used," said Ald. John Arena (45th). "At a time like this older people and low-income residents use the library for their internet, to look for jobs. Overall, the cuts are just too extreme."

Emanuel said in his budget speech earlier this month that he worked to keep neighborhood branches open because he values them. But librarians and even parents say it's not enough.

“We think this is not the place to find savings," said Julie Samson, a Portage Park mother. "It just deprives so many families and children of such a safe place to learn and have fun.”

Greta Lindall, 5, echoed her mom's words. "I like that we can go to the library and borrow books and bring them back. I really like the Laura [Ingalls Wilder] books.”

Do Libraries Really Destroy Books?

Out of necessity, sometimes yes.

From an article on NPR...

When you want to talk about libraries, you talk to the American Library Association, so I spoke to Betsy Simpson, the president of the ALA's Association For Library Collections & Technical Services. She told me that while there are always choices to be made because it's simply not possible for every library to collect and retain every book, it's not as if they're throwing books in the shredder because they don't care. "Libraries really take seriously their mission to preserve the cultural record," she says.

But it's tough. Not only are there challenges that come from the limited space and the vast number of new books that come out every year (and month) (and week), but the number of functions that library users are looking for from libraries is increasing as well. "The space issue is a concern," Simpson says, "because more and more, there's a realization that our users need space to interact and collaborate and space to contemplate." When you need more space for group work, you can't pack every inch of your library with more shelves just to avoid getting rid of books.


Furthermore, there are ways other than destroying books to deal with space limitations, and libraries typically try those first. Simpson points out that libraries have book sales and, in some cases, permanent bookstores for books they don't want to keep (there's a bookstore just like that where she works, at the University of Florida). On top of that, there are growing initiatives to create "shared print repositories," where books can be stored offsite and remain available for retrieval when they're needed. It's not as convenient as keeping books on-site, but it means you can still give your users access to that book.

Occupy Walll Street

They now have a library.

They now have a newspaper, too.

Men of the Stacks

A sexy librarian calendar? Yes.

40 DIY Projects to Improve Your Home Library

The list, care of Accredited Online Colleges.

From said list...

Inverted bookshelf: Turn your books upside down with this illusion bookshelf.

Book page wall art: Take prints and pages out of books and mount them on your wall for easy library decor.

Book shaped reading light: Open up a book of light with this DIY reading light project that is put right inside a book.

Portable cushion: Use this DIY project guide to make a fresh cushion to hang out on in your reading area.

Desk made of books: Turn recycled books into an attractive, functional desk with this DIY project.

Handling Harvard's Special Collections

Who Has Been Leaving Book Sculptures in Scottish Libraries?

No one knows.

The Future of Libraries

Tim Martin discusses it in the Telegraph.

From the article...

Until recently, the privilege of consulting books like this has been largely reserved for the very rich or very scholarly. Full facsimiles are rarely produced these days, making second-hand copies frighteningly expensive, and the only other way to see the form in which these things were originally committed to paper has been to seek out the holy calm of the rare books rooms at one of the great libraries.

Now, however, a combination of technological progress and financial expediency is causing libraries to rethink their approach to some of their most valuable assets. Last month, the British Library released an application for Apple devices that allows readers to download and read some 45,000 books from its 19th-century collections, at a subscription fee of £2 a month.

At the same time, it began to sell scans of older and more valuable treasures, such as the Leonardo notebooks and the Mercator atlas, through Apple’s iBook store.

Designed for iPhones and iPads, these are formatted like books, with attractive page-turn animations and several enhanced features. Pressing a button flips Leonardo’s mirror-writing or reveals a gloss, for example, while the Carroll manuscript offers the slightly surprising opportunity to have the entire book read out loud by Miriam Margolyes.

Fire in a Burning Institution

An arsonist tried to destroy the library at the University of Missouri the other day.

From a piece in the Missouri Review about it...

Getting barred from the library can be enough of a problem for those of us who typically spend a lot of time there. But the news of the violence done to our building is additionally troubling, as we have gotten no word on why someone would do such things to a library, of all places.

Admittedly, it’s most likely that this young man (identified in the newspaper story linked above) wanted merely to harm property, and there, manifested in the library, was a large building full of it. Better to destroy fragile computers in a library than desks made of metal and wood in a classroom building. But that explanation is insufficient, as far as my partner and I are concerned, and we’ve been utterly bewildered as to what a library had ever done to this man, to make him want to inflict his vandalism on it.

Destruction of libraries goes probably as far back into our history as there have been libraries to destroy. In 1258, the Mongols conquered Baghdad and destroyed its Grand Library, throwing books into the river and murdering scholars, or so I’ve just learned from Wikipedia. Perhaps the most notorious case of library destruction in human history is the burning of the Library of Alexandria, which, it turns out, you can easily spend half an hour reading about online without realizing how much time has gone by.

What Will Amazon's Digital Library Do To Real Libraries?

Publisher's Weekly discusses Amazon's proposed new launch.

From the article...

But can local branches, many already running dry, survive if Amazon gives Prime, which is becoming more and more of a deal at $79 as it decorates its price tag with feature after feature, and its users the capability to access any book a library could provide, without having to leave one’s home? Publishers, reportedly worried that Amazon’s digital library will devalue books in the eyes of consumers, obviously have the rights to the books and can put the brakes on the plan. But once one publisher signs, and assuming it finds success, expect a flood of others to follow. And really, it’s hard to imagine a feature that puts books right in front of your nose and charges you no additional cost not taking off.

Interestingly enough, Amazon’s digital library for a subscription fee idea is basically what Google was looking to achieve before it was condemned to litigation limbo. Google, in scanning thousands and thousands of books, was looking to present to subscribers a vast well of literature and research materials. And what makes this whole story even more interesting is that their first clients were to be institutions–like libraries.

Don't Forget to Return Your Overdue Books to the Library

Or else you'll go to jail.

Also, don't laugh at the library. You'll get arrested.

Little Free Libraries

A charming story, by way of Utne Reader, about, well, little free libraries, that are beginning to pop up.

From said story...

Andrew Carnegie built an impressive 2,509 libraries around the turn of the 20th century. Now Rick Brooks and Todd Bol are on a mission to top his total with their two-foot by two-foot Little Free Libraries, reports Michael Kelley in Library Journal.

The diminutive, birdhouse-like libraries, which Brooks and Bol began installing in Hudson and Madison, Wisconsin, in 2009, are typically made of wood and Plexiglas and are designed to hold about 20 books for community members to borrow and enjoy. Offerings include anything from Russian novels and gardening guides to French cookbooks and Dr. Seuss.

Each Little Free Library runs on the honor system, displaying a sign that asks patrons to Take a Book, Leave a Book. “Everybody asks, ‘Aren’t they going to steal the books?’” Brooks told Kelley. “But you can’t steal a free book.”

International Children's Digital Library

Touting itself as a digital library from the world's children, ICDL exists, according to their mission statement, to support the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge. The Foundation pursues its vision by building a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children.

Enjoy!

The Unfortunate Tradition

My hometown library, the Seattle Public Library, is closed all week because of budget cuts. It's not the first time this has happened. It's becoming something of a tradition. So much so, the New York Times is starting to write about it.



From the piece...



The Seattle Public Library, a beloved civic trophy in a book-loving city, whose directors are plucked away for plum jobs by presidents and philanthropists and whose buildings are often beacons of design, is closed all week — yet again. The furlough, intended to save about $650,000 from the system’s $50 million budget, has become something of a late-summer tradition in recent years, hardly as welcome as the weather.



“It’s an unfortunate tradition,” said Marcellus Turner, who started as the city librarian on Aug. 15 and promptly got a few days off, unpaid.



“Library Closed Aug. 29 — Sept. 5 Due to Budget Cuts,” say the bold red signs on the doors at the central library, a jolt of glass and steel by the architect Rem Koolhaas.



Foreign tourists walk away disappointed at missing a stroll through a new city landmark. A bicyclist pulls up, looking to return a few DVDs, but a sign tells him to wait until next week — and that he will face no late fees. Internet search engines promise information about the library but instead deliver a page with the closing explained in multiple languages.

Is the Personal Library Doomed?

So asks Publishers Weekly.



From the small opinion piece...



Looking over someone’s Kindle contents tells me something, but not much. Was this title even read? Has it been re-read, loved, slept with? Read in the bath and therefore slightly waterlogged? Where are the dog-eared pages, the satisfying kinesthetic memory inherent in heft, shape, size? And don’t forget about bookmarks: those tell their own stories. In my own books, I re-discover bookmarks from long-defunct bookshops I loved, receipts and restaurant napkins I used to mark my place that now serve as travel diary entries, photos and other random flat paper items I grabbed to use as placeholders and then left there, giving me sudden bright glimpses of my own forgotten past. And there are items in the pages of books that were left there by other readers, little messages in bottles from across mysterious seas. My sister gave me a beautiful old King James Bible, an ornate leather-bound version from the 1800s, with illustration plates protected by onion skin. Pressed into the heart of the book, between onion skin and paper, was a four-leaf clover. I love this so much I can hardly stand it. A person of faith, perhaps, who owned this book before me, hedged his or her bets with a little piece of pagan luck! Show me an e-reader that can provide that kind of wacky archaeology.



The convenience of e-readers is handy, but libraries are treasure troves. I have so many friends and acquaintances who have shifted the bulk of their book buying to e-readers that I am starting to think about more than the usual anxiety about the future of publishing and bookselling. Book fanatics will always be here, and our libraries will survive. But I am starting to wonder whether the casual personal library is in danger.

Bringing Books to the Homeless By Bike

Let us know praise, Laura Moulton.



From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor...



Ms. Moulton is Portland’s mobile librarian. Since early June Moulton has been bringing books to the public with her library-on-wheels Street Books, an outdoor library for people who live outside.



“The power of the book,” she says, “offer[s] a way to transport oneself out of a current reality.” Books are also “a tool to help pass time, which a lot of people living outside have a lot of.”



Moulton, a novelist and mother of two young children, bikes her library to Skidmore Fountain and Park Blocks – near Portland State University – on Wednesdays and Saturdays respectively. She brings about 40 or 50 books with her for each shift. But she says her basement is full of paperbacks that have been donated to her since the project began.



Each book holds an “old school” pocket on the inside cover with a loan card inside. Street Books patrons receive a library card that they can use to check out as many books they desire at a time.



“Being able to give them a card and tell them, ‘I hope to see you again’ – that’s a powerful thing because these are people who cannot get a library card [at the local library] because they have no address,” Moulton says. Her patrons show a high-level of accountability in returning books, which contradicts some assumptions about homeless people.

Librarians in the U.S. - 1880 to 2009

How has the profession of librarian evolved over the years? Oxford University Press recently studied census data and came up with all sorts of interesting tidbits.

From the post...

For the first 110 years of data, the number of librarians increased, especially after World War II. In 1990, the trend reversed. Over the past 20 years, the number of librarians has dropped by 31 percent, though the decline has slowed.

Considering the nation today, the states with the largest librarian populations are: Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Texas and California. Meanwhile, the states with the highest concentrations of librarians (or librarians per capita) are: Vermont, D.C., Rhode Island, Alabama, New Hampshire.

How Much is a Librarian Worth?

It depends where they are in the world. More, here.

Why Librarians Should Be More Like Lady Gaga

I’ve always been famous, it’s just no one knew it yet.
— Lady Gaga

From a piece in the Washington Post about how to keep libraries and librarians relevant...

Shift perception! We need to be more like Lady GaGa than Lady Bird Johnson. We need to establish a clear, pervasive, vibrant, and involved presence in their school, community, and on the web. The more visible librarians are the less likely that they’ll be taken away. Those teacher librarians who are hiding their brilliant programs under a bushel, that’s when they’re most likely to get cut. We need to stay positive, be proactive, and always be professional!”