The ridiculous step.
“Google brought books to life—instead of reading through survey texts, I could search for footnotes, which led me to more precise titles, which led to still others and others, in much the same way that we navigate the Web using hyperlinks. Eventually, of course, I had to drag myself to the library to pick up physical copies of the works in question—a step that I considered ridiculous. I would gladly have paid Google and the authors for the right to electronically review the books and papers, but there was no way to do so.”
Farhad Manjoo, Wednesday, May 6, 2009, “Your Search Returned 12 Million Books”. Slate.com
A sign of the times; I’ve suggested this previously, but I’ll do it again. Academic libraries need to figure out digital delivery of books, and soon. If Google or Amazon or somebody else does it better and easier, the library ‘market share’ will erode. If somebody manages to do it for ‘free’ (ad-driven, or otherwise), then we’re sunk.
Opening Hours (updated)
I really like some of the details in this picture. You can see the accumulation of small flies between the laminated sign and the glass. Of course, you can see me taking the picture, but what dominates the image is the lush greenery in the background, reflecting in the door window.
Update: I realized some context would be helpful here. Kuranda is a small tourist town up in the rainforested area near Cairns, Australia. When we were there we had spare time to wander around the town, so I had to check out the library. It was closed. (I have a few more photos from Cairns online.)
“Social Media Galaxy” – A presentation to University Advancement
I was invited to speak to McMaster University Advancement about using social media tools for professional development, both personally and as an organization. I introduced and spoke about twitter, linkedin, facebook, second life and youtube. It was a whirlwind tour, but I hope I was able to inspire some new ideas. Take home message: social media offers alternative means to reach and communicate with users via free and relatively easy-to-use tools. Having said that, monitoring and maintaining these tools takes work and planning – it is not enough to simply create them.
One aspect that I didn’t get to discuss at all, really, was that of ‘management’ or organization. For twitter, at least, there are a number of clients or websites available that often do a much better job of handling tweets than twitter.com does. On Mac, I’ve become quite enamoured with tweetie, but you can find plugins for Firefox, or chat programs with built-in twitter support. itweet.net is a great web-based alternative.
On a larger scale of management is FriendFeed, a website that collects your information from a number of social media sites, including twtitter, facebook, flickr, picasa, etc., etc. Those that like FriendFeed like it a lot, so it is worth investigating.
Groomed for Management
In a week of thought-provoking ideas, I wish to touch on one in particular: should management in libraries necessarily be librarians?
We are seeing this issue come up again and again, and is an early theme in library education. “There will be a shortage of management in libraries, we need to be sure that new librarians have the appropriate skills.” Of course, the reality is that even with the new emphasis on management courses in the curriculum, librarians have little formal training in management. Furthermore, the vagaries of business and budget are often at odds with the principles that many librarians espouse. (Not only that, many are just uninterested..)
I recall a particular moment in during the degree program where we had a guest speaker from the local public library system. This individual was the director of the library system but was not a librarian, but rather a management professional. The class discussion afterward was very critical of the business-like changes that were being made.
So, then, should that give license to libraries to hire trained management personnel to perform management duties instead of librarians? The fundamental problem is clear: individuals trained in management do not have library training and MLIS grads have little management training. Where is the middle ground?
There is also another issue here. As professionals, there is some expectation that our peers and supervisors will also be professionals. Imagine a hospital that was managed by a non-doctor. Is this an apt comparison?