PVLD Director's Blog

Libraries and e-books - difficult choices ahead

This is my first day back at work after a week-long vacation in New York City.   

While I was away the blogosphere and colleagues' Facebook pages were awash with the news that HarperCollins is imposing a limit of 26 on the number of checkouts that will be allowed for titles purchased by libraries and made available to patrons via the Overdrive downloadable e-book platform.  As this cartoon, shared by guest blogger Justin Hoenke in this post on Tame the Web, libraries are already  behind the 8-ball when it comes to offering e-books thanks to cumbersome digital rights management and technology:

 

The new limits on the number of checkouts will either make library e-books even more costly for libraries to offer (we'll have to re-buy popular titles once the checkout limit is reached - and e-books purchased through Overdrive already cost about 2x what a physical copy of the same book costs) or inconvenient for patrons (if libraries do not have the funds to re-purchase the item and there is still demand).

The checkout limits present a challenge for libraries like PVLD that have our own subscription to Overdrive, but they present a much greater challenge to the many public libraries who can only afford to offer the Overdrive service as participants in a consortium in which patrons of all member libraries share access to the same e-book collection creating the potential for much greater demand for each individual title. 

While I understand that the publishers are scared about the shift from print to digital and what it might mean for their revenues it seems to me that making it more difficult for libraries to offer e-books is extermely shortsighted. 

As author Courtney Milan so clearly articulates in this blog post on "Eating Your Seed Corn", for many people accessing books (whether print or electronic) at the library is for many people a step on the path to becoming avid readers and book purchasers when they have the means.  Limiting access to e-books via the public library  may protect publishers' near-term revenue at the cost of cutting out entire generations of future customers...as Courtney so eloquently puts it, in effect eating their seed corn.

It seems to me that the company most likely to be the publishing equivalent of the bookstore world's Barnes and Noble (as opposed to Borders) will make it as easy for people to access e-books at the library as it is to access library books in print (and as an aside I don't think it is a coincidence that Barnes and Noble designed their e-reader to work with library e-books). 

Using library books will never be as easy or convenient as just buying books - you still have to wait your turn for in-demand titles, have access for only a limited time, etc.  That's why so many avid adult readers in our community tell me that their kids use the library, and they themselves loved the library when they were younger, but now that they have jobs, family commitments and more disposible income they prefer to just buy their books.  Like Courtney I wonder if they would be the book consumers that they are today if they had not had the earlier experience of using the library? 

In the meantime, PVLD like all other affected libraries, will be carefully monitoring e-book usage and being even more careful about what titles we "buy" (which really means "rent" in the HarperCollins model) and will likely have to either make the most popular titles less available so that we can privde access to a broad collection to suit diverse interests or spend more money on the most popular titles so we can meet demand at the expense of collection breadth.

Difficult choices indeed.

 

Telling our stories

There is a seemingly endless stream of alerts about proposed cuts to library funding (whether local, state or federal) flowing across Library Association email lists, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds...and each new alert accompanied by a plea to contact legislators and tell them how wonderful libraries are and why it is a mistake to cut our funding.

In that context I found this blog post by Nancy Dowd on her "M Word" blog particularly compelling. 

As she so rightly points out, the people whose support we need to enlist are our community members...and many of them are facing serious fiscal crises of their own.  When families are facing pay cuts, layoffs, increased healthcare costs, and in some places tax hikes they truly do need to be convinced that the "sacrifice of having to pay taxes to support my library is worth it to my family if you want my support."

As Nancy so eloquently points out, this means telling the stories about the real difference we make in people's lives...not spouting platitudes or reeling off statistics.

This was brought home to me again at an excellent fundraising leadership development workshop (part of the Annenberg Foundation's Alchemy program) that I had the privilege of attending as part of a team from the Peninsula Friends of the Library this week.  We spent some time at the workshop trying to hone our 3-5 minute "pitch" about why a donor should give to the Friends.  We were with a couple of dozen other non-profits, and it was clear that the most compelling pitches were those that conveyed how the organization transformed lives.

This is an area where most libraries, and I count PVLD among them, really could do better.  We need to talk about the seriously ill woman who is so grateful to one of our librarians for the help she has gotten in researching her condition that she has sent not one but two bouquets of flowers over the past months; about the people who use our computers to write their resumes and send in online job applications because it is the only computer access they have; about the child transformed from reluctant to avid reader thanks to the patience of the childrens' librarians who worked hard to find him a book that captured his imagination.

Even better we need to get those people whose lives we have transformed to tell their own stories - loudly and publicly!

Definitely something I am going to think about as part of the ongoing Alchemy process and our library marketing efforts.

Libraries as "first responders"

This Huffington Post article by Scott Turow about the importance of public libraries says it all!  Thank you Patrick Sweeney for sharing....I just love the love the description of libraries as "first responders" for the unemployed.

Philosophy and productivity

Nicholas Bate does it again -  the secret to productivity?  More philosophy, less mechanics.

Pack up your worries....

Although it isn't always obvious on the surface, I am a worrier.  Even relatively minor things, like giving a presentation or chairing a meeting, can wake me up at night as my subconscious churns through what I need to do and what might go wrong.  Lately it feels like I've had even more to worry about than usual - a death in the family and its impact, our dog's surgery and recovery, my responsibilities as Chair of the Chamber of Commerce and how to navigate the Chamber through some challenging issues, the PVLD budget and staff workloads....the list seems endless.

That's why a couple of blog posts that I came across recently felt particularly timely.

The first, by Michael Wade of Execupundit about Categorizing Worries reminded me that the worries keeping me up at night can in fact be parsed into different categories with different strategies, and that among them are both those things that we can do nothing about and should put into a "zone of indifference" and "those that we know how to remove and yet we permit them to linger and ruin our days. They lounge in the back of our mind. We know they should be resolved and yet we tinker with other things, hoping that when we turn around, they will be gone."

One of my challenges is to just get on with the things that, as Michael puts it, "should be on the Can - and Will - Be Resolved Today list".  One of those is the self-imposed pressure to blog at least twice a week, so don't be surprised if the pace of entries to the blog slows down a bit!

For those that can't be dealt with quite so easily, I thank Peninsula Friends of the Library Board member, fellow blogger and friend Fran Pullara, for reminding me via this beautiful poem by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi that in truth my blessings far outweigh my worries:

You Worry Too Much

Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You say,
I make you feel dizzy.
Of a little headache then,
why do you worry?   
You say, I am your moon-faced beauty.
Of the cycles of the moon and
passing of the years,
why do you worry?
You say, I am your source of passion,
I excite you.
Of playing into the Devils hand,
why do you worry?

Oh soul,
you worry too much.

Look at yourself,
what you have become.
You are now a field of sugar canes,
why show that sour face to me?
You say that I keep you warm inside.
Then why this cold sigh?
You have gone to the roof of heavens.
Of this world of dust, why do you worry?

Oh soul,
you worry too much.

Your arms are heavy
with treasures of all kinds.
About poverty,
why do you worry?
You are Joseph,
beautiful, strong,
steadfast in your belief,
all of Egypt has become drunk
because of you.
Of those who are blind to your beauty,
and deaf to your songs,
why do you worry?

Oh soul,
you worry too much.

You have seen your own strength.    
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.
You are the security,
the shelter of the spirit of Lovers.
Oh the sultan of sultans,
of any other king,
why do you worry?

Be silent, like a fish,
and go into that pleasant sea.
You are in deep waters now,
of life's blazing fire.
Why do you worry? 

 

Smaller than a Kindle and you get movies too....

From View From the Ledge via Nicholas Bate:

 

 

 

Maintenance

Maintenance, and by that I mean the effort it takes to keep things in good condition, has been on my mind a lot lately. 

Partly that is because we have been working on PVLD's mid-year budget update and our forecast for 2011/2012, making me even more aware than usual of the cost of maintaining our three heavily trafficked library buildings.  and of how tempting it is to defer expenditures in this area.

Partly it's because of a very interesting conversation I had with two of our major donors, both of whom have manufacturing backgrounds (as do I), are aware of the challenge of sustaining investment in maintenance when budgets are tight, and are interested in giving in ways that supports facilities maintenance needs.  This is a fairly unusual interest area for donors, and it stimulated the idea of creating a building maintenance endowment fund to help secure the long-term maintenance of our facilities.

And partly it's because in the library environment we put a lot of focus on our "library" services like our collections of books and magazines, programs and events, and information resources and sometimes forget how important the often less visible maintenance efforts are in providing an outstanding customer experience.  We can have the greatest collection in the world, but if the elevators are always out of order or the roof leaks that is what people will remember.

That's why I loved this post from Cultural Offering about the value of maintenance as a demonstration of "an appreciation of form" and the role of maintenance in creating history.

Here at PVLD we are fortunate to have an amazing team of Maintenance Workers who, despite being few in number do an amazing job keeping 3+ (the "+" is our Annex!) buildings, open 6 or 7 days a week and visited by more than 50,000 people a month, clean and in working order.  They are the guys that are here at 5AM to get the buildings cleaned before they open and stay until well after the libraries close to do their work without disrupting other staff or the public.  They are the ones that clean up the messes that happen in heavily used public spaces....and sometimes they are really nasty messes, too.  They are the ones that set up the chairs and tables for, and clean up after, the hundreds of library and community meetings and events that we host each year - sometimes dealing with three or four major events on the same weekend at three locations - and put up with event organizers that don't really know what they want or keep changing their minds.  Over the past few years they have taken on more and more of work that used to be done by contractors - from carpet cleaning to fire alarm testing to plumbing and electrical projects to painting - saving PVLD money and improving quality...without any significant increase to staffing.

As Cultural Offering says, "Upkeep and maintenance is a constant, important and underappreciated task.  But it pays."

So thank you James, Jose L, Jose P, Larry, Lorenzo, and Tommy - what you do is important, and we DO appreciate it!