Library Stuff

“In a city facing budget deficits and reduced staffing, at least the Chicago Public Library has managed to add services and jobs without outspending its budget. The city announced Sunday that the Chicago Public Library would add four hours to Mondays in a number of locations without having to increase funding, a feat accomplished by making library staffing more efficient, officials said. “We did a major staffing evaluation of all locations and came up with a new way of how we would staff our libraries,” Chicago Public Library Commissioner Brian Bannon said.”

via Chicago Sun-Times

“Libraries’ ability to lend books could be severely impaired if the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t squelch a new interpretation of copyright law in next term’s Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, according to an amicus brief filed last week by groups that represent more than 100,000 U.S. libraries.”

via Alison Frankel

“Glendale’s library system whittled nearly $550,000 from its budget this fiscal year, but an agreement with the Maricopa County Library District will offer some gains to residents and non-residents who use the city’s three branches. This month, Glendale will join 15 other cities and communities — including Avondale, Phoenix and Peoria — in the Reciprocal Borrowing Program. The program will allow non-residents to use Glendale libraries free of charge. The county also will pay for a new library management system, including an improved database that Glendale patrons can use to search for books and other materials.”

via Arizona Republic

“It’s in the nature of books that the vast majority of books any given person owns will not be in use at any given time. Under the circumstances, establishing vast municipal stockpiles of books for people to borrow is much more efficient than relying on a series of household stockpiles. But over time digital technology is eroding this rationale (the day has not yet come when every individual is equipped with a smartphone or tablet capable of reading e-books but it’s quite foreseeable), and it makes more sense to shift away from stockpiling of books and toward things like the Oakland Public Library’s tool lending program. I have a hammer, several scredrivers, a power drill, a hacksaw, and a bunch of other tools that I’m almost never using and households all over DC are in this very same position. The most successful libraries we be the ones who spend less time thinking “how do I extend my traditional reading-and-learning mission into the digital age” and more time thinking “what sort of club goods are being underprovided thanks to transaction costs, enforcement problems, and information issues.”

via Slate

“Crisis, what crisis? Despite a report earlier this week predicting that public libraries could disappear by the end of the decade, the culture minister, Ed Vaizey, hailed the “thriving library service that we have in England” as he announced a series of initiatives at Thursday’s Future of Library Services conference. Unveiling plans to boost cultural activities in libraries, automatically enrol primary school pupils in their local libraries and an ambition to put Wi-Fi in libraries across England by 2015, Vaizey claimed that the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals’ prediction of 600 library closures “regularly quoted in the media… is very wide of the mark”

via Guardian

“Amid ever-evolving trends in technology, the question has come to me: Is there a future for the public library? And if so, what will that library look like? From what has been written on the subject, from my own experience and from talking to library consultants and futurists, the consensus is that the library of the future will be more and more of a social and knowledge hub for the community it serves. Libraries have been around in various forms for some 3,000 years. Throughout history, the role of the public library has been as a storehouse of universal knowledge, an archive of manuscripts, art and important documents, a centre for information and the collected record of a community’s history and culture. Has this mandate really changed in the ensuing years?”

via Montreal Gazette

“Across from the United States Supreme Court, two hundred people gathered at the Library of Congress to celebrate Monday — and not because of the court’s immigration decision. From suited university presidents to red-shirted Boy Scouts from Cincinnati, these partiers gathered at a symposium to commemorate a troika of American institutions: the land-grant university, the National Academy of Sciences and the Carnegie libraries. The celebration was marked by a keen awareness that libraries have been vital engines of America’s social mobility from their earliest days. Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and former New York Public Library president who raised a $327 million to revive the institution in the 1980s, led an afternoon panel discussing libraries’ foundational importance to a democratic America. Gregorian’s central point: the Library of Congress is and must continue to be the “guardian not only of our nation’s memory but of humanity’s.”

via TIME

“The poll showed 62 percent of readers didn’t know if their library had e-books for lending, and only 12 percent of Americans 16 and older who read e-books had borrowed at least one from a library in the past year. “The most important thing libraries can do is make sure e-books are accessible through the rest of the library system,” said Micah May, the director of strategy at the New York Public Library, about raising e-book lending awareness.”

via Reuters

“WHAT IF YOU THOUGHT seriously about the library as a laboratory, as a place where people do things, where they make things?” asks Jeffrey Schnapp, addressing his “Library Test Kitchen” class. Libraries as centers of knowledge and learning have a rich history—but an uncharted future. The digital revolution, besides changing the nature of books, is transforming the role of libraries in preserving and disseminating information. “What if the Library of Congress were to become a digital library?” continues Schnapp. “What, then, is the role of the physical public library? This is a source of enormous anxiety at the local level because public libraries” face increasing political pressure, including budget cuts, but “play absolutely fundamental civic roles, often as the only public space that remains in smaller communities.”

via Harvard Magazine

“The written word is going digital, right? Not so fast, say big publishers, who limit the number of times an e-book can be loaned, offer them at inflated prices or refuse outright to sell electronic copies to public libraries. Macmillan, Penguin Books, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster and the Hachette Book Group refuse to sell e-books to libraries. Others, including Random House and HarperCollins, will sell but with limited “loans” or charging more than three times retail price, Denver Public Library spokeswoman Jen Morris said. “Everyone is getting fed up,” she said.”

via The Denver Post