February 2012

Mark Todd reports in The Star Beacon that Conneaut Public Library Executive Director Kathy Pape expressed concern over students congregating at the library. Community leaders expressed concern about the unattended children and questioned where parents were in the social mix.

Little, Brown to publish J K Rowling’s first adult novel

Little, Brown is publish J K Rowling’s first novel for adults worldwide in the English language, both in print and e-books.

David Shelley, publisher, Little, Brown, will be Rowling’s editor and will be responsible for publication in the UK with Michael Pietsch, executive vice-president of Little, Brown and Company, responsible for publication in the US. The book will be published by Hachette in Australia and in New Zealand and by Hachette’s companies and normal appointed agents for the English language in other markets.

Nobody cares about the library: How digital technology makes the library invisible (and visible) to scholars
In an information landscape increasingly dominated by networked resources, both sides of the librarian-scholar/student relationship must come to terms with a new reality that is in some ways more distant and in others closer than ever before. Librarians must learn to accept invisibility where digital realities demand it. Scholars must come to understand the centrality of library expertise and accept librarians as equal partners as more and more scholarship becomes born digital and the digital humanities goes from being a fringe sub-discipline to a mainstream pursuit. Librarians in turn must expand those services like special collections, support for data-driven research, and access to new modes of publication that play to their strengths and will best serve scholars. We all have to find new ways, better ways to work together.

Great libraries from little seeds grow

County residents with library cards can “borrow” a packet of 10 to 15 seeds. Each packet is labeled as containing seeds that are easy to grow or that require medium or advanced gardening knowledge. These “borrowers” plant the seeds, grow the plants, then voluntarily collect and return seeds from those plants to replenish the collection.

Here’s a link to the seed library site:

“The Seed Library’s mission is to help nurture a thriving community of gardeners and seed savers. In addition to providing access to free seeds, we hope to help support gardeners and seed savers, from beginner to expert, through the process of growing, harvesting, and seed saving.”

Librarian completes marathons on all 7 continents
Glen Avery, the technology librarian at Houghton College, recently became one of only 330 people to have completed a marathon on all seven continents.
A 1976 graduate of Houghton College, Avery is hoping to repeat the feat again, something only eight people have ever done. The 61-year-old Avery also was recently featured in a two-part interview with Bob Price of the Family Life Network.

With a Republican debate happening yet again and “Super Tuesday” coming up, there are political things to ponder in Library Land. Ohio is a state that takes part in Super Tuesday voting and a variety of property tax levies can appear on the ballot. At Erie Looking Productions, The Air Staff gets to pass upon a renewal request by the Ashtabula County Children Services Board to preserve funding. The issue runs for five years if approved.

Library funding issues have popped up from time to time. On the last two issues that have come up locally, I have voted against them. As I look ahead to voting on Super Tuesday, I can explain why.

When it comes to backing candidates or issues, I do not look for those engaging in “managed decline”. In that instance, you’re not winning. You’re just stretching a miserable failure out for an unconscionable period. I do try to avoid those who plan to be steady hands on the tiller who do not want to make waves. Life is dynamic and is not something static that merely requires care and attention of the best technocrat available.

As cultural institutions, libraries need visions. Libraries need dreams. Without visions or dreams, especially ones that can be articulated clearly, libraries are not living cultural institutions but instead mausoleums. Mausoleums can easily be forgotten and left to decay. Institutions with life in them do not go down that path.

What frontier do you want to conquer at your library? Where do you want the cultural institution you operate to be in one year? What about in four years?

Grand strategic visions are not what is needed right now. Discrete milestones over a short enough period help stakeholders grasp what your dreams and vision entail. It is far harder to sell a vague intangible like “change” compared to something concrete like “creating a new science fiction collection of five hundred to one thousand items prior to broadening the romance collection to include more durable copies of works by Christine Feehan”.

Out of the Republican field of potential nominees, Newt Gingrich perhaps offers one of the broadest visions and comprehensive dreams. He speaks of conquering space and shifting away from the current effective outsourcing to the Russian Federation of getting Americans to space. There’s plenty to not like about his policy ideas. Unlike contenders on either side of the political divide, he does express a concrete vision of a dreamed about future. Whether or not you agree with him, dreaming of a Moon Base is more concrete than the vague intangibles offered by the rest of the pack.

I have no clue how I will vote on Super Tuesday. Plenty can change between now and then. A big concern is to find candidates with dreams of tomorrow that they can articulate and that have tangible end points.

Do you have such a dream at your library? Even more importantly, have you told anybody what it is?

Envisioning Dreams by Stephen Michael Kellat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Everyone’s Trying to Track What You Do on the Web: Here’s How to Stop Them

The adage goes, “If you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product, not the customer,” and it’s never been more true. Every day more news breaks about a new company that uploads your address book to their servers, skirts in-browser privacy protection, and tracks your every move on the web to learn as much about your browsing habits and activities as possible. In this post, we’ll explain why you should care, and help you lock down your surfing so you can browse in peace.

Check out The Argentinian Book Tank as bookmobile, aka a “weapon of mass instruction”.

Amazon pulled more than 4,000 e-books distributed by the Independent Publishers Group off its site this week after it failed to exact better terms from the distributor.

Full article

You knew it was coming to this: An instant book on the incredible rise to stardom of the New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin, the Harvard-educated, undrafted point guard who is the NBA’s first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent.

Hachette Book Group says it is publishing Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity, by Timothy Dalrymple. It is due in stores in May, the company announced Wednesday.

The book will chronicle Lin’s high school, college and early career in the NBA, while highlighting the media explosion ignited by his success the past two-plus weeks as a starter with the Knicks.