I loved this video:
Upcoming events
There won’t be a December FLIP meeting, but (as mentioned in a previous post) we are planning a movie night here in the Consortium Library. Mark your calendar for Friday, December 18 (probably starting around 7:30 p.m.). No final decision has been made on the flick, so if you’ve got a favorite, please add your suggestion(s) in a comment!
Also, we are starting a book club! The first selection is Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. We plan to meet sometime around the end of January or beginning of February to discuss, so start reading (or add it to your Christmas list) now. More details coming soon…
Neither of these events are limited to only those that attend FLIP meetings. If you are interested in hanging out, chit-chat, and/or library fun, please come!
Librarians on late night
Two librarians were recent guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk about the materials they feature on their blog Awful Library Books. Pretty funny stuff.
Here is the link to the video on YouTube (7 mins):
Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly on Jimmy Kimmel Live! (11/11/2009)
Book club? Movie night?
At the last FLIP meeting, we talked about all kinds of things, as we are wont to do, but perhaps the two most fun were the ideas of a FLIP Book Club (not a flip-book club) and a Library Movie Night. The book club could be anything, really, and if we wanted to move away from library-themed books, we could actually extend it out to patrons. Maybe we could do something for The Whale and the Supercomputer. But it could also be a professional development kind of thing, internally. (Coral’s suggestion: Everything is Miscellaneous.)
The Movie Night could be some kind of library-themed movie–I hear this has been done before?–in 307, in the evening, with people throwing in for pizza or something. It would be pretty informal, and “library-themed” can mean anything from “Party Girl” to “Desk Set” to a documentary about libraries. Ideas are welcome!
Do either of these thoughts interest you, though? If so, comment!
EBSCO offers five scholarships to attend 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting
EBSCO offers five scholarships to attend 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting
CHICAGO – The American Library Association (ALA) and EBSCO are partnering to offer five scholarships for librarians to attend the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston. The meeting takes place Jan. 15-19, 2010, and offers an opportunity for continuing education, meetings and interaction with colleagues.
Each EBSCO scholarship will be in the amount of $1,500, and one of the five scholarships will be awarded to a first-time conference attendee. The scholarship money is to be used for conference registration, travel and expenses.
Deadline for entry is Nov. 23, 2009, and the application information can be found at:
http://www.ala.org/ala/awardsgrants/awardsrecords/ebscosponsorship/ebscosponsorship.cfm
Scholarship recipients will be notified no later than Dec. 15, 2009.
To apply, candidates must complete the application criteria and submit an essay that answers the following question: “What do you believe to be the biggest challenge in managing electronic resources in libraries today, and what solutions do you envision?” Essays and applications will be judged by a jury designated by ALA.
About EBSCO
EBSCO is the world’s premier full-service provider of information, offering a portfolio of services that spans the realm of print and electronic subscription access and management, research databases and more. The company’s e-resource renewal and management tools help librarians accomplish in hours what once took weeks. For more information, please visit www.ebsco.com .
Contact: Cheryl Malden
ALA Governance Office
(312) 280-3247
cmalden@ala.org
And now, the front page and TV
Are local libraries in process of checking out?
(Published as a feature story in the Anchorage Daily News on Nov. 7, 2009)
And on the local news (KTUU Channel 2, Nov. 10, 2009)
Library supporters try to come up with plans for future
The Future of Kindle?
This is a great review of Kindle from the academic perspective published in Inside Higher Ed and forwarded by one of the professors in my MLIS program.
Getting involved with ACRL
Thought this might be of interest. ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) is a division of ALA.
Subject: Upcoming ACRL OnPoint Chat: Getting Involved With ACRL
November 12, 2009: Getting Involved With ACRL (10:00 a.m. Pacific | 11:00 a.m. Mountain | 12:00 p.m. Central | 1:00 p.m.
Eastern)
In this discussion, ACRL Vice-President Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Executive Director Mary Ellen Davis will answer your questions about the wide variety of ways to make the most of your membership by getting involved in ACRL. Learn how and when committee appointments are made along with other ways you can become more active in the ACRL community and contribute to the profession.
ACRL OnPoint is a live series of informal monthly chat sessions that provide the opportunity to connect with colleagues and experts to discuss an issue of the day in academic and research librarianship. All ACRL OnPoint chats are free, open to the public, and require no registration. Meebo chat rooms have a limit of 80 total participants. Due to this restriction, ACRL OnPoint discussions will be delivered on a first-come-first-served basis. Complete details and login information are available on the ACRL Website at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/events/onpoint/index.cfm
Netflix of Academic Journals?
Ran across this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Interesting implications–rented articles can not be downloaded, printed or shared. They do have a free trial–I might have to try it out.
The Netflix of Academic Journals Opens Shop
By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.
The Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can “rent” an article—which means you can view it on your computer without ownership rights or printing capabilities—for as little as 99 cents for 24 hours. Users can also subscribe for monthly passes. Currently the site has 30 million articles from various peer-reviewed journals.
William Park, chief executive of Deep Dyve, says the model will not only allow more people to read articles they might otherwise not see, but will actually encourage users to purchase more content from journals. He says that now, only about 0.2 percent of people visiting journal Web sites go on to buy articles, because they don’t know exactly what they are getting from just a title and an abstract.
“Nobody would buy a car without at least evaluating it first,” Mr. Park says. “The same is true for anything, whether it’s a dollar or $10,000.”
Mr. Park says that Deep Dyve has revenue-sharing partnerships with hundreds of publications (about 80 percent of which are scientific) and hopes to expand to more of the humanities within the coming months.
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Netflix-of-Academic/8648/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
ADN on Anchorage libraries (again)
Our view: Library recession
Don’t let Loussac and branches fall out of the 21st century
Published: October 25th, 2009
Anchorage Daily News
The mayor’s proposed 2010 budget envisions contraction for the Anchorage Public Library just when the system is expanding to Mountain View.
What city government can’t do, citizens can. No public institution belongs to all of us more than our library. Let’s keep it growing.
Fewer days, shorter hours. Staff cuts. Fewer materials purchased. And this at a time when our library should be in the forefront of the changes well under way for libraries of the 21st century.
Cuts are coming to a system already on the low end of the high-tech side of modern libraries. An interim report by library consultants found Anchorage, with its 117 computers, well below the basic standard of 140 for a public library in a community the size of Anchorage.
What does that mean?
It means demand exceeds supply, especially at peak-use times — for example, when the Permanent Fund dividend filing deadlines are approaching, or during income-tax season. Library director Karen Keller said users often are limited to an hour. Job applications and resumes can take much longer. So can research, from school projects to car repairs — Keller said exasperated do-it-yourselfers use the library to tap the databases of the Chilton’s or Haynes auto repair publications. This is an example of proprietary information that the library buys for everybody to use.
Cuts also are coming at a time when the library has just started running computer training labs with laptops at the Muldoon branch — a small example of what the library could do with a computer/media lab, where patrons could get training and work on projects, where entrepreneurs might find economical means to build a Web site for a small business.
Such a lab is third on Keller’s wish list for the tech side.
Her first wish?
“Juice up my bandwidth.” Keller said the library could easily to stand to quadruple the available bandwidth so that users wouldn’t have to suffer slow-speed connections that can squander precious time on machines that must be shared.
Her second wish?
“Increase the number of machines.” By the consultants’ numbers, it would take 23 computers — laptop or stationary — to match the basic standard.
Ambitions like these are not grandiose. Ambitions like these merely reflect where healthy, effective libraries are heading. The Knight Foundation has recently announced grants to libraries across the country to provide similar computer and Internet services.
Why? Because what Andrew Carnegie, who endowed hundreds of libraries in the 19th and early 20th centuries, said still applies today:
“There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”
So where does that leave us in this time of cuts?
The library will have to take its share, but the Assembly should take a close look at the mayor’s proposal and make sure that share has the least effect on library services. And if prospects improve and first quarter budget revisions allow, let’s restore what we can.
Given cuts, the time is right to fortify the Anchorage Library Foundation and Friends of the Library. They do yeoman’s work from collections to summer reading. Check out AnchorageLibraryFoundation.org.
What city government can’t do, citizens can. No public institution belongs to all of us more than our library. Let’s keep it growing.
BOTTOM LINE: Don’t let temporary budget woes do permanent damage to the library.