PVLD Director's Blog

Child of the Library

Love the sentiment!

 (I'm still having trouble getting videos to show fully on the screen, so you can click here for the correctly sized version)

Another reason to carry a library card

The Manager of our Adult Services Department, Sylvia Richardson, has this letter posted in her office window:

Download Library card letter

It is not all that uncommon for us to be contacted by someone who has found a wallet containing a library card (or a keyring with a library card keytag attached) asking us to try to contact the owner, but I thought this was a particularly lovely example of someone going far out of their way to help a stranger!

Reading - the first freedom

My friend Eileen, owner of the fabulous White Square Fine Books and Art in Easthampton, MA, shared this blog post via Facebook today.

It's  a salutory reminder to librarians of the unintended consequences of policies that we might implement with the best of intentions, like requiring a child to be able to print their name before they can get a library card (which I should stress is not PVLD's policy), but more importantly it is a beautiful description of the tension between the adult responsibility to protect young people, and the joy that comes from  "reading - the careful selection of books and being given enough privacy to quietly read them myself" which is, as the author points out one of a child's "first freedoms".

I can so vividly remember getting my first library card, and the joy of picking out a big stack of books to take home...books that I chose my very self.  Can you?

 

 

 

 

PVLD recommends?

Last week I had the privilege of spending some time with Joan Frye Williams and George Needham.  One of the things we talked about was whether librarians' strongly-held professional values of patron privacy and confidentiality are causing us to miss an opportunity to use the data we have collected in our computer systems to deliver better and more focused services.

The very next day the Travelin' Librarian psoted this picture on his blog:

 

Since I work in a library and have access to the fabulous book sales organized by our Friends of the Library I haven't been inside a Barnes and Noble in years, so maybe this is old news, but my first thought was "Wouldn't it be cool ifthe library could deliver this kind of personalized recommendation to our patrons?"

Right now we simply don't have access to the kind of algorithms that would make this possible, but even if we did I suspect many librarians would shy away from this kind of personalized recommendation as compromising patron confidentiality.

Personally I love getting these kinds of recommendations from businesses that I frequent.  Sometimes the algorithm is a bit off and the suggestions aren't really a propos for me, but even then often they lead me down a new path of discovery.   

I'd love to know what the readers of this blog think.  What if the library could offer you personalized reading suggestions based on your checkout history?  Would that be of interest?  Would you worry about your privacy?  If privacy is a concern would being able to "opt out" address it?  Comments, please!

What is the life expectancy of the public library?

Later this week our PVLD management team and all of our full-time librarians are gathering for a discussion, facilitiated by Joan Frye Williams and George Needham, on the topic of what it means to be a professional in the 21st century.

As so often happens in the serendipitous world of the blogosphere, this morning I happened across a guest post on Tame the Web that pointed me to this challenging blog post predicting that public libraries will be dead within 15 years by Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company from a few months ago.  It's a response to media reports about a comment he made in a speech at the private Atwater Library in Montreal, and makes compelling argument that e-books will essentially kill the public library (what he calls the consumer library...as opposed to academic and other libraries with a more specialized purpose), and that all of the things our profession talks about as reasons for continued existance - unique local content, programs and activites, access for the underserved - will not be sufficient to justify the investment in our infrastruture, or alternatively will so fundamentally change what we are that the term "library" will no longer apply.

In his post Shatzkin systematically debunks many of the most cherished arguments of public librarians, as articulated very clearly by Gary Price, but agrees with Price on an important and intriguing point - "that  librarianship will be needed by people long after buildings full of books are not", requiring a whole new and as yet unimagined business model.

If Shatzkin is right and we need a new business model that is not about delivery of content in the form of books, or about bridging the digital divide, or about offering programs in a community center model,  or reliant on the creation, preservation and distribution of local content....what is it?

I'm looking forward to hearing what ideas our supervisors and librarians have when we get together later this week, and wish I had a clearer vision myself!

 

 

New ways of working

This article from Fast Company provided a fascinating look at how a new generation approaches work, and how at least one hotel is cashing in on it. 

It seems to me that, minus the mid-day tequila and the champagne and french fry lunches described in the article, libraries could learn some lessons from how the Ace Hotel is making its lobby a go-to workspace.  What would it take for libraries to become an environment where "...just by showing up, whatever you are working on becomes more interesting"?

Some of the things described in the article include - communal tables, free wifi, availability of food and drink (and the ability to consume it while you are working), a certain "buzzy" level of noise, and an environment that has "the feel of visiting with friends".  We certainly do some of this already, and at PVLD we know that some of our visitors are here working in much the same way as the people described in the article...as evidenced by this group of young entrepreneurs from a technology start up:

 

I wonder, however, whether we are doing enough?  I think in the library world being "business friendly" has meant making sure we have a strong collection of business resources (books, magazines, databases, etc.) and sometimes extends to offering workshops and seminars for the business community.  I'm pretty sure that is NOT what attracts young entrepreneurs like those pictured above to the library.  They already know how to get the information they need, and the often cumbersome and archaic user interfaces on our subscription databases probably would turn them off in any event.

Whenit comes to serving the business community maybe its time to stop thinking in terms of resources and programs, and think more about how we can set up our phsyical facilities, our technology infrastructure, and our policies (e.g. around food and noise) to support these new ways of working.

Doing second things first

As expected, I've been too busy to blog thanks to a combination of ongoing family challenges and a very busy summer at work.  I expect things to calm down a bit as August unfolds, but in the meantime I am focusing on this advice via Execupundit.  As much as I find blogging rewarding, lately it definitely meets the definition of a "second thing" -

The reason most major goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.

- Robert McKain