Has your library started collecting self published titles? (Or do you know someone or someplace that does?) Email bhoffert@mediasourceinc.com! Library Journal wants to talk to you, but not in a creepy way.
FRIENDLY REMINDER. If you are someone who does this, or know folks who do, HIT US UP.
I don’t have anything to offer, but maybe others do…
12th February 2013
Reblogged From libraryjournal
Notes: 18
1. Undergraduate students are not you at that age.
2. Every college/university has its own way of treating librarians.
3. For most students, asking librarian for help is a last resort.….
10. You will spend more time in meetings than you can imagine.
I knew they had video content, but not music. Awesome. :)
Some think of the Internet Archive as just the Wayback Machine, but we have other great collections. Our music collection is worth listening to and made some jumps recently:
Our live music collection now has over 100,000 concerts from over 5,000 bands (including an almost complete collection of Grateful Dead concerts)
…
And the first “music video” from 1894-1895 that was found recently, reconstructed painstakingly by the legendary Walter Murch, and then he donated it to the archive.
(Source: infodocket.com)
Here’s my opinion. People, read what you want. Let others read what they want. And if a book is popular enough, we will have it at the library so that people have access to it, no matter what it is about. We don’t care; we just want people to have access to the books they want to read. So, why should you care? We are buying for the entire community, not just one angry person. Mind your own business.
I’ve been watching the situation with this book unfold from the sidelines (my lib is a subject-specific science library, so fiction in general is out of scope). This post has some great arguments, but I especially like the part I quoted above since it applies to any situation where someone complains about an item held by the library.
(Source: twitter.com)
The digital branch allows patrons to view and explore digital content using their hands and eyes the same way they might explore a traditional collection, with added functionality like immediate access to staff recommendations, most popular titles, and new content. Digital branch technology and features will change and improve as Douglas County Libraries’ eContent collection grows and patron use of digital content evolves.
I like the sound of this, especially that the library owns the ebooks outright (my library does that with the electronic reference works we get from Gale, for instance).
(Source: twitter.com)
There is often talk about the loss of serendipity due to libraries moving more to closed stacks but I’m starting to disagree. It’s not about losing what’s in the stacks– it’s about greater access to content that is linked together more effectively. We’re in the growing pains stage right now, but imagine what it could become. It could be another new information revolution. This isn’t about just migrating print to a digital platform, but building an integrated and immersive experience. Building personal collections that talk with each other and then add more to that collection.
[…]
If discovery and serendipity are really the desired outcomes then you should prefer access to such an interlinked digital knowledge universe. This would ensure that you stumble upon books and other content from other disciplines– not just the ones at eye level the next shelf over.
(Source: twitter.com)
Circulation/User - PhD Granting Universities
from ACRL Tech Connect: The End of Academic Library Circulation?
(Source: lisnews.org)
Oh, look, it’s actually Thursday now! :) It’s also the last day I have this week to really get stuff done—tomorrow I’m only working a half-day and have a ref desk shift and an all-hands meeting, so I won’t have much time to focus.
- Paperwork is first on the agenda: printed expense report in order to be reimbursed for the travel cost of working in the other office yesterday (which required rebooting our massive copy/print/fax machine, which takes FOREVER), tallied up reference question stats for January and collected that sheet and my timesheets to turn in for the month, started new stat sheet for February.
- Email management: skimmed/deleted new messages, did the filing I couldn’t do yesterday. Checked email periodically throughout the day.
- Reference monthly report: evidently I’m the first person to put stuff in for the January report, so I created the file and pasted in my bits under the appropriate headings—this involves checking my calendar for committee/inter-unit work, picking a few ‘interesting’ reference questions to mention, and checking my finished tasks for things like training/prof dev items to include. January was a pretty quiet month, in retrospect.
- First check of my Twitter feed and gmail, but skipped greader for now in favor of getting something done before my 10:30a refdesk shift (it’s easy to skim feeds while on the refdesk).
- Worked on the announcement that I’ve been poking at for two days. Debating whether to present the improvements as bulleted list or group them into like-items and write a short paragraph about each group. Have now written drafts both ways and I don’t know which is preferable. [I’m probably spending way too much time on this, but it’s the first thing like this that I’ve done, so there’s a lot of agonizing time involved. :) ]
- Sent both variants (plus a detail question) to the systems guy who did the improvements for an initial critique to make sure I’ve represented things accurately.
- Two hours on the refdesk. Mostly a quiet shift, but I had one of those exceedingly well-timed interactions where a coworker and I had been discussing who was handling an email about a certain topic (I hadn’t seen it yet, so I skimmed it while we were talking) and right afterward I got a phone reference question on a very closely related topic. So I was able to use some of the information from that email to help the patron. :) Also skimmed Twitter and Tumblr during the shift.
- Did my Twitter stats wrangling for January while on the refdesk.
- Upon returning to my desk, I sent the final drafts (haha, talk about a contradiction in terms!) of that new features announcement to the systems guy and the head guy; after this they’ll send it to the entire team for review/critique.
- Responded to an opinion question about checkboxes within the system’s search results (i.e. when you select a citation, how long should that selection persist? Across pages is obvious, but what if you run a new search? Should they stay or go?).
- Read some of the articles I found on Twitter and Tumblr during my refdesk shift; added a few things to my Tumblr queue.
- Reviewed the funds summary report to see if I’m one of the subjects that is guilty of not having made any selections yet this fiscal year—looks like I’ve ordered a few books, whew, but I should find some more. Added that to my to-do list for Monday to consider when I’m reviewing the weekend notifications of new items in GOBI3. (I primarily select for library and computer science but also get item notifications for biotechnology.)
- Over lunch (which didn’t occur until nearly 2pm, haha, but that’s pretty typical for me) I added notable new Twitter followers to my masterlist. I really ought to convert the list into a database or something rather than the massively messy word doc that it is, but when I started it I don’t think I expected the library account to have so many followers. :)
- Composed and sent the Twitter summary emails; one general summary goes to most of the library staff—and provides the deadline for the next month’s tweets—then more specific summaries are sent to each of the contact people from the areas that contribute content to the account.
- Finally tackled my RSS feeds, checked in on Twitter again.
- Worked a bit on the library tweets for February; scheduled tweets for tues/wed and added a note to my calendar for Monday to check up on the tweets still awaiting approval if I haven’t gotten a response by then (need to have a response in order to go any further with the scheduling). Did as much as I could to work around the missing tweets, including tweaking a few #followfriday posts and adding them to the schedule. Verified links for the tweets I scheduled.
And that’s it for me today.
Today’s soundtrack:
At SUNYLA this year, someone asked me about collection measures, and I think that’s when I said “I don’t care” and made several people very happy. Even if that’s not when I said it, I still don’t care.
I said it again today, when a friend innocently asked a bunch of us what our staff FTE and collection size are. I answered the FTE question (22), but … I still don’t care about the size of our collection. Here’s why.
Collection sizes are measuring sticks that tell you something about the relative wealth of an institution over time. They also used to be the way to assess the value an institution put on information resources, a way to assess the volume of information available to its community, and a way to justifiably say “my library is among the top 10 libraries for research into the origins of space monkeys”.
But here are my objections:
- Collection counts are print-era measures, and I don’t run a print-era library.
- Collection counts are input measures, and I’m more interested in output successes.
- Collection counts are an irresponsible way to evaluate the health of a collection.
