Library Stuff

“Library supporters in the town of St. Johnsbury, Vt., are rallying around the town athenaeum staff, which was dismissed as part of a restructuring. About 200 people surrounded the athenaeum on Saturday, calling on the library’s trustees to rethink their decision last month to reduce the staff from 14 full- and part-time employees to five-full time employees. The librarians were dismissed and told they could reapply.”

via AP

“After another million-dollar budget cut to the Gwinnett County library system, county leaders think it’s time for that organization to change its approach. “I would encourage the library to look at a new business model,” Gwinnett District 2 Commissioner Lynette Howard said Thursday (Jan. 3) as the county’s elected leaders passed the 2013 budget. Amid a still-tight revenue situation, commissioners cut $1 million in materials from the library’s budget, the latest of several large reductions to that system.”

via Gwinnett, GA Patch

“The public clamor for expanded hours at the San Francisco Public Library may be louder than library staff and stakeholders presume, according to a new survey. Sixty-four percent of the nearly 2,500 people surveyed by the library said they would use their branch more if it was open longer. Only 45 percent of library staff and 44 percent of groups associated with the library felt a significantly higher number of patrons would use it, though about a quarter of both groups admitted they didn’t know what effect more hours would have.”

via City Insider

“A fiery Jeanette Winterson has called for the hundreds of millions of pounds of profit which Amazon, Starbucks and Google were last week accused of diverting from the UK to be used to save Britain’s beleaguered public libraries. In an impassioned speech at the British Library this evening, the award-winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit said: “Libraries cost about a billion a year to run right now. Make it two billion and charge Google, Amazon and Starbucks all that back tax on their profits here. Or if they want to go on paying fancy lawyers to legally avoid their moral duties, then perhaps those companies could do an Andrew Carnegie and build us new kinds of libraries for a new kind of future in a fairer and better world?”

via The Guardian

“With his plan to sell 2,000 new yellow-taxi medallions still in doubt, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has proposed slashing money for libraries and after-school programs and increasing fees on school lunches and parking meters to compensate for more than $600 million in lost medallion revenue.”

via NY Times

“D.C. library advocates told D.C. Council members Thursday that they want libraries to be open longer, but are worried that extra hours would mean more staffing. “We want extended hours, but there needs to be funding to staff these hours,” said Susan B. Haight, president of the Federation of Friends of the DC Public Library. “My concern is that legislation will be passed and the funding will not follow. An unfunded mandate does not work for us.”

via Washington Examiner

“There’s a briefing for council today on whether or not our public library system sucks. Looks like the verdict will be that it does not totally suck, but it should, because we do. The briefing is based on a nationwide bench-marking system Dallas participates in with most other second-tier cities in the country, along with some third-tiers and some downright damn suburbs. The survey shows that we care about our libraries, visit them and use them at above average rates.Our visitation per capita, for example, is ahead of Phoenix, San Antonio and Miami-Dade but behind Austin and … no, c’mon. Arlington? They gotta mean Arlington, Virginia. I’ll have to watch. Maybe some sharp councilperson will raise that question. If Arlington, Texas goes to the library more than Dallas, Texas, then just shoot us.”

via Unfair Park

Dallas libraries already do a lot of amazing things that go well beyond loaning books. The perpetually under-funded system has a crack reference staff, hosts all kinds of training and seminars and public forums, and, oh yeah, is free to users. Dallas libraries want to do more, but that’s where the “perpetually under-funded” part comes in.

Today, the city announced an effort to do something about that. Council member Ann Margolin and Atmos Energy’s Sandra Doyle are leading a team to recruit corporate partners to help fund several needs at the library. It’s called, appropriately enough, Corporate Partners for the Dallas Public Library.”

via City Hall Blog

“Walk into Arlington County’s Central Library at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. The parking lot is full. Grade-schoolers and their younger siblings are scattered around the children’s section. Adults are plugged into the wireless signals from their devices or browsing novels and DVDs. At the moment, the Digital Projects Lab where residents can record videos is free, but it won’t be for long. Try Montgomery County’s Germantown Library on a Sunday afternoon. Someone is using the computers to search for a job. Someone else is leafing through the collection of Vietnamese-language books. The librarian at the counter fields a question about e-books.”

via The Washington Post

“The kids are back, but the media center at one of California’s largest high schools is quiet, even for a library. That’s because the 4,000 students at James Logan High School in Union City are starting the school year without access to the aisles of books and computers sitting in a darkened room, unused.

“Due to budget cuts, the library is closed,” read printed signs on the library doors. Carla Colburn, the school librarian for eight years and a teacher for 26, is the only person who goes in there now. For one period each day, she goes to the library and prepares book carts for English-language-learner classrooms or history classes working on research projects.”

via SFGate