March 2010

And so it was yesterday, just before the main headquarters of the Boston Public Library opened at 1 p.m., that nearly 100 protesters gathered outside the Copley Square building with petition sheets and statistical charts to go along with their “Don’t Close the Book on Us!’’ placards and their chants of “Save our branches!’’

One of the organizers, Brandon Abbs, told protesters about a website — that shows how the library’s board of trustees, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, the City Council, and state officials each play a role in a potential decision to shutter up to 10 of the city’s 26 branches. The site emphasizes ways of helping the library system make up for its $3.6 million budget shortfall.

Video and story from Boston.com.

The Future of National Libraries
a paper from the National Library of Scotland (NLS) that considers the influences that will shape the development of the NLS over the next 20 years.
Some interesting Commentary Here and Here and Here from Top Trends, a blog about current and future trends. He says Overall, this is an uninspiring report. If what you’re after is a clear view on where things are heading, read the recent report by the Scottish National Library instead.Nevertheless, there are a handful of good ideas buried in the report. Here are 10 that caught his eye and could form the basis of future public library strategy.

Google to print a leaflet as part of push to get all Britons online by the end of 2012
Google, one of the world’s most prominent evangelists for all things digital, has turned to one of the most traditional of old media routes to try to persuade more British people to go online: it is printing a leaflet.

The Simple Guide to the Internet is part of the search engine group’s commitment to Race Online 2012, an initiative started by the UK government’s digital inclusion champion, Martha Lane Fox.

Wikipedia, the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it’s a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5th, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit.

Full article here

The view from birdie’s booth at this past week’s Public Library Association Conference in Portland, Oregon. Photos taken in and around the In My Book® Booth, with librarian/author Nancy Pearl, multitudinous librarians and Marilyn Johnson’s new title, ‘This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All’

A Library That Most Can Only Dream Of
The existence of this beautiful 10,000-square-foot library, which opened on March 18, prompts so many questions: How could such state-of-the-art technologies be marshaled in service of the old-fashioned act of book reading? How could such fancy design be affordable in an era of wrenching budget crises? And in choosing where to build the coolest, greenest new branch around, why pick Battery Park City, a neighborhood already so blessed with amenities?
(Thanks Bruce!)

From The Resource Shelf:

If we’re reading this correctly, in less than a year the new digital service from National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), Library of Congress, had more than one million items downloaded. That’s with a user base of around 15,000 qualified users (vs. 800,000 users for the “traditional” program.) Very Impressive!

The website AppAdvice.com has gotten a peek at the ibookstore Apple will launch with its iPad: Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling “The Help” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” by Seth Grahame-Smith are both listed at $9.99.

Of “the 32 eBooks featured in the New York Times’ Bestsellers section, 27, including the entire top 10 are priced at $9.99,” writes AppAdvice’s Alexander Vaughn. The highest price he saw in the demo was $12.99.

Does this mean that the ebook pricing war has been settled? Will $9.99 be the rule? When the iPad was announced in January, Jobs said that the prices would “be the same” as Amazon’s. And those seen in the ibookstore screenshot are — each one matches Amazon’s Kindle price.

But of course, there’s more to it than that.

Full article here.

A librarian friend of mine has started to contribute to LibriVox. I had heard of the site before but never looked very closely at it.

Here is how the site works:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Their goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

Link: LibriVox

Library picture of the day

Study rooms / reading rooms jutting out from library. Problem is that rooms are cylinders so jutting is not really the correct word. See for yourself: The Central Library of the University of Gdansk

Picture of library that shows more of the building and the context of the cylinders.