June 2007

The skinny black line that runs along a hardwood floor in the Kenneth Baldwin International Reading room has taken on added significance this year as border officials contemplate a crackdown on three unguarded streets linking Derby Line and Stanstead, Quebec. What many here fear is that border authorities will close the book on an unspoken agreement under which locals can come and go from the library without reporting to customs, even if they cross the border en route.

Records vanish. They are stolen, lost, thrown away or simply stored out of sight and out of mind. They’re eaten by moths, dust, mold, insects and mice. In Georgia, the humidity turns improperly stored papers to mush. saw historical societies completely wiped out,” said David Carmicheal, director of the Georgia Archives, who visited Mississippi after the flood. “Those places will never really recover a sense of their history.”

But everyday disasters may do the most damage.

Christine Ford (public relations director for the Monroe County Library NY says: “You may have heard lots of talk over the last decade or so about the relevance of a library. Since the mainstreaming of the Internet and the invention of Google, some ask why do we still need libraries. Well, the old library of the past, is in fact, on its way to becoming not so relevant. In today’s world, a library must evolve or go the way of the dinosaur.

A living library is something new and exciting.”

A German government agency will start spending money ensuring that the articles about “specialized renewable resource topics” will be accurate. To do this, they will recruit experts to write articles on the German-language Wikipedia. Read more about it at Ars Techia.

Are mass book groups the problem rather than the solution? Are Richard and Judy (England’s answer to Oprah’s Book Club) to blame?

According to the London Herald , “Some critics believe book clubs such as Richard and Judy’s are responsible for a homogenisation of our reading culture.”

The Herald reported that publishers “can no longer afford to take chances and authors who have enjoyed modest successes over many years are suddenly being dropped in favour of potential big hitters.”

Cathy Kinnear, manager of an independent bookstore in Glasgow, said, “The book clubs are not about giving people choice. They are actually narrowing it. We can offer recommendations that are targeted at our customers, bearing in mind local preferences rather than picking out a few books for the whole nation.”

How does the “one city one book” phenomenon play into this issue? How about the NEA’s Big Read? Are programs such as these limiting choices and preventing ‘smaller titles’ from being found?

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A team of archivists and preservationists is hard at work in Washington DC with librarians and museum personnel from around the country. Thanks to a grant from the non-profit Heritage Foundation and the IMLS, they are learning the how-to’s of preserving fragile, time and temperature-worn documents.

A recent survey, following the destruction evidenced by Hurricane Katrina, showed the following:

*More than half of the country’s 30,000 libraries, museums and archives have had articles that were damaged by moisture

*26 percent of collecting institutions have no environmental controls, including 40 percent of libraries.

*80 percent of collections have no disaster plan

More on the current summit from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Access North Georgia and WV Gazette.

PALINET is aware that not all of members have the technical support or skills necessary to install or test the open source applications that are currently available. They’re looking at a number of ways to address this issue, but they’ve taken two initial steps already. First, a member Technology Caucus has begun regular discussions of open source software tools in monthly meetings. Yesterday, a group of library developers met at the PALINET offices in Philadelphia to install test copies of Koha and Evergreen for evaluation and comparison. They’re hoping to put together a couple of really clean, well integrated, model systems, which will demonstrate the kind of functionality that is possible with these open source ILS solutions.

They’re also just finalizing an agreement with LibLime, a leader in open source solutions for libraries, to offer discounted setup and support for the Koha Classic, and Koha Zoom ILS software.

Anonymous Patron writes “The New Britain Connecticut Public Library was the second stop for famous rock and band The High Strung. The “Detroit-based band that sounds like the Beatles with a funkier edge, played a 12-song, one-hour set to about 50 library patrons of all ages. The basement concert kicked off the library’s summer programming for teenagers.” ROck-N-Roll with it here.”

Anonymous Patron writes “A 13-year-old boy created a disturbance at the Iowa City Public Library on Monday when he brought a pistol-shaped toy gun on the premises, shooting another juvenile with plastic ammunition, police said.

More from The Daily Iowan.”