June 2011

Operation Reading Road Trip

Operation Reading Road Trip This is a record of our family’s goal to visit each of the 37 branches of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library System (B&ECPL) in one year. At each location we will get a log book signed and dated, take our photo and check out a book(s). Through this endeavor we hope to remind citizens of Erie County and beyond of the important uses of our public library system. Please comment on our adventures. Our quest began on the last day of school in 2010; June 25th. Here we go…

Have a Library Story You’d Like to Tell?

…but don’t want to create your own blog (or connect the story to a specific library or librarian…)? Here’s an answer from a LISNews blogger who calls him/herself ‘librarytales’.

Check out the blog and feel free to participate. Here’s the first post from “LiliumCruentum”:

“After working in a public library for several years I have accumulated all kinds of crazy stories to tell. After my animated re-tellings, friends and family often joke with me about how I should create a website to share some of my funny, crazy, and touching experiences from work – so this blog has been long overdue!

Please feel free to submit some of your own “tales from the library” – whether you are a patron or an employee! The good, the bad, the unexpected, scary, hilarious, horrendous, enlightening, and of course the crazy – you can email them all to me, along with your name, at [email protected] (Neither your email nor your last name will be published – only your first name or screen name.)

I look forward to hearing from you all, and to sharing some of my own experiences with the world as well!”

Are eReaders Environmentally Friendly?

Hmm, the jury is still out on that subject, but this blog post does point out an interesting statistic: for every five books that men read, women read nine.

After discussing the multiple considerations and the pros and cons of both delivery methods (e-books & paper), the author David Turnbull, an environmental law student, concludes this:

the only strong conclusion that can be gathered is that traditional print is the greenest option available today. The established consumer base, sustainable forested supply of paper, and paper recycling programs allow book purchases to be the greener option. However, in the near future, eReaders will in fact become more sustainable through the course of their lifecycle, eBooks will be much cheaper to purchase, and their lifecycle will be much longer. Perhaps we will have to wait until the distant future to find out the verdict once eReaders have achieved hegemony over old-fashioned print.

Read more: http://greenanswers.com/blog/244280/are-ereaders-environmentally-friendly#ixzz1QhN0msWD

5 Conversations [About Libraries] I Don’t Want To Have Anymore

5 Conversations [About Libraries] I Don’t Want To Have Anymore
I don’t want to talk about copyright anymore.
I don’t want to talk about “21st Century Skills” anymore.
I don’t want to talk about the “digital divide” anymore.
I don’t want to talk about eBooks replacing print books anymore.
I don’t want to talk about protecting students from the evils of social media anymore.

Save our libraries fire the librarians

It was hard to pick my favorite quote from this one. You really need to read the entire thing!
Save our libraries, fire the librarians
Reason 1: Our library is corrupted by the far-left ALA.
Reason 2: Our library has slanted bookshelves.
“The time has come for Nassau County and Fernandina officials to light a prairie fire and signal to all America that our libraries will be rescued from the Radical Militants who arrogantly want to control our and our kids’ minds and bodies.”

J. P. Morgan Library’s John Bidwell Talks about Curation & Such

Before he became the first name of a bank, J. P. Morgan was a Wall Street mogul who, a century ago, bequeathed his collection of 14,000 or so rare books to what his son would transform into the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Avenue. Since then, the collection has grown to about 80,000 printed books, supervised since 1999 by John Bidwell, 63, the Astor Curator of Printed Books and Bindings. He majored in history at Columbia University, and received his master’s at Columbia’s School of Library Service and his doctorate in English from Oxford. Dr. Bidwell commutes from Princeton, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Andrea Immel, a curator at Princeton University Library.

What makes a book rare: There are plenty of books that are valuable and not rare, and plenty of books that are rare and not valuable. Example: The Morgan is celebrated for being the one institution in the world for having three Gutenberg Bibles. You might say it’s not extremely rare because there are 50 known copies in various states of completeness in the world. On the other hand, we have plenty of early books that are the only known copy in the world, some of them deservedly so.

Library rat: I’ve had no other job but to work in libraries since I was a college undergraduate. As soon as I realized it was time for me to go back to graduate school, I knew I wanted to work in rare book libraries, and that’s all I’ve done.

More from The New York Times.

TEDxLibrariansTO:Librarians as Thought Leaders

TEDxLibrariansTO:Librarians as Thought Leaders
The first speaker was Amy Buckland. The driving force behind her talk was the idea that access to information is a human right. She spoke passionately about how librarians need to fight to make the world a better place. Rather than thought leaders,Buckland wants librarians to become revolutionaries willing to overthrow and challenge the system. She hit on many points that I think a lot of librarians worry about,e.g. the broken world of scholarly publishing,big companies controlling electronic content,the digital divide and privacy issues. If librarians work harder to be “doers”instead of “sayers,”they can effect all of these things in a positive way.

City Sued Over Book

City library director Vicki Elkins never imagined that the hardcover book about Zephyrhills history she helped compile would end up controversial. It was supposed to be a gift to the community, preserving its history in 285 pages that took nearly a decade to compile. Then in April, more than two years after Zephyrhills From A to Z’s release in December 2008, a resident sued the city not about its content, but about its price tag of $29.95, plus tax.