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

American Library Association
American Library Association

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.

Another ADN editorial for Anchorage libraries

Our view: Keep lights on in libraries

Budget, staff cuts will constrain gain from treasure at our fingertips

What good is a book in the dark? What good is a computer kept behind locked doors?

Those are questions citizens of Anchorage might ask at this month’s public hearings on the 2010 city budget.

The Anchorage Public Library — Loussac and four branches, with a fifth in Mountain View due to open next year — stands to lose 14 staff positions, along with cuts in its materials budget ($100,000) and capital money ($30,000). If this proposal stands, the library will have taken almost a 10 percent hit in a year, according to library director Karen Keller.

What it means is shorter hours or more days when the doors are locked, fewer books, movies and CDs to borrow, less public access to the Internet and less time for public meetings.

Yes, we’ll save money in 2010. But we’ll also diminish the value of an institution in which we’ve already invested multiple millions of dollars, and which always gives a good return on our money.

Summer saw painful cuts

We’ve just restored a seven-day week for the Loussac Library and five-day-a-week service at the branches after a summer of staff furloughs that sharply cut back service. For 2010, the branches are looking at four-day weeks again. Loussac will stay open seven days — but with only four hours on Sundays.

Mayor Dan Sullivan’s budget for 2010 increases taxes by $6 million but cuts spending and city services while trying to maintain public safety and street maintenance at current levels. State revenue sharing that in past years provided property-tax relief will shore up the budget. And the mayor doesn’t want to tax to the legal cap — his budget is about $10 million below that — in this uncertain economy.

“I understand the situation the city is in,” Keller said.

But here’s the rub — actually, several rubs.

Community support is strong

The Anchorage Public Library has wide support in the community — the library draws more visitors in a year than the total attendance of every event in the Sullivan Arena. Since 2006, Keller said, the library has raised more than $14 million in donations and other non-city sources. Friends of the Library carries the summer reading program and other services, and the Anchorage Library Foundation provides ongoing financial support.

Yet the city has continually targeted the library for cuts.

As staff is cut, hours of operation are shorter and those collections enhanced by private donors are less accessible.

And once cut, staff and materials budgets aren’t likely to bounce back. “Historically, we haven’t been able to gain much ground,” Keller said.

Bill Wilson, a national library consultant here this week to help with long-range library planning, said the Anchorage library already is short-staffed compared to the average of libraries serving similar-sized cities.

Importance grows in hard times

Continually shortchanging the library shortchanges the entire community.

Institutions like the library become more, not less, important in hard times. Maybe you can’t buy that book, but you can borrow it. And it reads just as well. Or maybe you can’t afford to look up material on a database that charges for access — but the library provides that database. Maybe you can’t afford a computer, but you can still bridge the “digital divide” at the library and do a job resume or send an e-mail.

Libraries are social and civic centers for the city — from the Assembly chambers in the Loussac to lectures, plays, community forums and readings at the branches. Libraries all over the United States have become “third places,” after home and work or school.

Safe places. Places to learn and get productively and wonderfully lost. Lose track of time in the library and chances are it’s time well spent. Here’s a community institution that offers no end of paths to progress.

Look at the Loussac and its four branches. Name five other buildings in town where anyone in the community can find so much knowledge, beauty, enchantment, hope, entertainment, democracy and opportunity free for the asking — a universe, with a support staff to boot.

The mayor and Assembly need to think twice about such unkind cuts. Like Keller, we understand the situation. If these were temporary cuts, like this summer’s, the community could take them in stride. But if the cuts outlast the current economy, if a constricted library becomes the norm, that will leave us poorer for keeps.

BOTTOM LINE: Let’s look for ways to keep our libraries open, rather than just take the cuts.

Hometown, Alaska: The Future of Libraries

“Libraries make information available for everyone. But in a world of Google and Kindle, the work of libraries has changed. What is the new role of libraries, and how should they be redesigned to do these jobs? This week on Hometown, Alaska Charles Wohlforth hosts national library consultant Bill Wilson, who is visiting to help the Anchorage Public Libraries navigate this new world, and Carlton Sears, director of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County, Ohio, who has started innovative new programs in his community.”

Visit the Public Radio KSKA FM 91.1 website to download the MP3 of the broadcast.  They have also posted several documents on the Anchorage 21st Century Libraries Project.

It’s definitely worth a look/listen!