Thirty-one years ago, Kathleen Molz began an article on public library funding1 by contemplating a depression-era anthology2 by Carl Vitz on the same subject: Over forty years in time separate us from that earlier period, but it is only with a sense of deja vu that one re-examines some of the chapter headings of Vitz’s
◊ Change Management ◊
New library services: order tracking & event search
Recent library experiences made me think of two more items for the list of services I’ve proposed as a standard suite of public library offerings. Order tracking. I’ve submitted a few ILL requests to my library in the past 2-3 weeks and have no idea of their status. For all I know, my requests may
Tough questions, good ideas, photo Fridays
For me, library advocacy means celebrating achievements, asking tough questions, and sharing good ideas. I’ve tried to do that here. The blog archive has a number of essays, images, references and kudos that celebrate the contributions of American public libraries. For the tough questions and good ideas, I’ve collected posts on a single page, entitled “Good Ideas
Library bypass strategies
Last week, publishing consultant Joseph Esposito publicly mused about an ebook strategy in which publishers bypass libraries and create direct-to-reader content packages. Esposito described it not as “another evil visited upon libraries by avaricious publishers” but as “a prudent means to find other ways to derive revenue from publications without imposing a further tax on
A step change in form, culture, approach
Sara Lloyd’s 2008 call to arms for the publishing industry, A Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century,1 resonates for public libraries. What might the takeaways be in the closing paragraph alone? Whichever way it goes, in order for publishers to break their traditional boundaries and to develop into the publishing companies of tomorrow, a step
A moratorium on counting
Reading Bostwick’s account of statistics and reporting got me wondering about how much has changed in the past century. Not enough, perhaps, based on some recent information. 2002′s Accountability versus Count-Ability characterized the majority of library data collection as wasted effort. 2008′s Why Do We Count What We Count – And Does It Matter? captured three
Where’s the emerald city?
Follow the Yellow Brick Road to Loyalty by brand adviser Tom Asacker describes the four elements necessary for customer loyalty: A heart … people want to participate in something worthy, so “give them the feel-good emotions they desire.” A brain … people “want to know who you are; what your intentions are; what makes you
What we lose through automation
While training for a new volunteer role at my library, I learned the process for getting an event listed with our public access cable channel. Someone emails me a Word document with program listings. I hand transcribe them onto paper forms and deliver them to the library. Another volunteer picks them up from the library
We’ll get by with a little help from our ?
On one of the national library listservs, folks recently shared information about the size of their Friends groups. The numbers seemed low given their cardholder populations: Population Cardholders Friends 245,000 174,000 600 100,000 45,000 200 Coincidentally, at about the same time I attended meetings of two separate Friends groups in Massachusetts. Officer terms were due
End-user dialogue
In e-books, e-book readers, but what about end-users?, Carl Grant, President of Ex Libris North America, observed: … there is a important point-of-view missing or only slightly represented and that is the view of the end-users. While presumably, many of us
talk to end-users, directly or indirectly, and try to interpret what we believe
