October 2010

12 User points of need – where to place your services online
Say you have a new service or page you want to advertise, what possible places could you put it? As libraries expand their reach online, it’s no longer as simple as putting a link on your webpage.

In this post, I’m going to list systematically a dozen locations you could add online, some are directly under the control of your library (e.g. library pages), others are on third party servers that you indirectly control (third party hosted services), others could be totally third party systems (Facebook pages etc) and yet others could be under the control of other units (e.g Courseware systems).

Let’s just take a link to a web chat (I know there are many ways the handle chat widgets, from embedding the chat box directly to various types of links that popup/expand etc but here I’m just considering a link regardless of how it behaves because chat is just an example). Where can you link it?

Manuscripts Suggest Jane Austen Had A Great Editor
Kathryn Sutherland, a professor at Oxford University, has been studying more than 1,000 original handwritten pages of Austen’s prose. She’s found some telling differences between the handwritten pages and Austen’s finished works — including terrible spelling, grammatical errors and poor (often nonexistent) punctuation.

Sutherland talks about the manuscripts — now compiled in a digital archive — with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly.

OMG, he’s lost his bookmark…in the woods…with books he HASN’T even read.

The Washington Post’s Ron Charles presents… “I’M NOT A WITCH, I’M A BOOK CRITIC”. Guest appearance by author Lisa Scottoline in a reenactment of Hitchcock’s shower scene from Psycho. Wild.

http://failbrary.org/ FAILBRARY FUN! Share your pain and learn from your mistakes. Don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s been done before.

NORTHAMPTON MA– A late Smith College professor has bequeathed $1 million each to Look Memorial Park and Forbes Library, the biggest donation either has ever received.

Dilman Doland, who taught psychology at Smith for 30 years, died on Sept. 8 of last year at the age of 88, leaving an estate in excess of $10 million. Doland, who had no children of his own, willed much of that to his surviving brothers and their children, but set a generous amount aside for some of his favorite institutions, including Smith.

Kathleen Doland worked as a reference librarian at Forbes from 1956-1962 and her husband remembered the library in his will, bequeathing it $1 million as well. Director Janet Moulding said Doland had already established a reference room in her wife’s memory some years ago. By the terms of the will, the gift must be put into a trust and its interest used only for the reference department. Moulding said the library’s trustees have appointed a committee to perform a needs assessment and determine how much interest they can expect to realize on an annual basis.

Doland received the Trustees’ Award in 1999, Moulding said and was a frequent patron, often stopping by her office to say hello. Moulding said she was astounded by the gift.

Dave Lankes gave his students a choice to either do a path finder on trends in evaluating scholarly impact, or make a video loosely answering the question “You need a masters degree for that?” Seems that a large percentage of the class get that question when they tell a spouse/parent/co-worker/friend they are going to library school. So here are some of their responses in. [My favorite]

Schomburg Center in Harlem Acquires Maya Angelou Archive
a total of 343 boxes containing her personal papers and documents — have been acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The trove has notes for Ms. Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”; a 1982 telegram from Coretta Scott King asking her to join a celebration at the King Center; fan mail; and personal and professional correspondence with Gordon Parks, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln and her longtime editor, Robert Loomis.

The acquisition is to be officially announced on Friday by New York Public Library officials at a news conference with Ms. Angelou, said Howard Dodson, the executive director of the Schomburg.

Machine of Death website

MOD website links out to stories at BookSlut, BoingBoing, and other places about this project