About 10 years ago I had an experience with a small group of teen girls that taught me a lot about the impact of a facility’s use of space on young people. We were at the Mount Holyoke College library and I wanted to show the teens the college’s information commons. To get there, we … Continue reading Space: The New Frontier
This old Irish joke is as old as the sod: “It’s always puzzled me,” said the Irishman, looking up from his newspaper, “how every time the Lord gets it right. People always seem to be dying in alphabetical order.” The other Irishman responds, “I guess that means God is a librarian.” I was reflecting the … Continue reading Is God Really a Librarian?
“I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a 6-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to … Continue reading The Library Is the Real School
As summer days grew longer and the heat increased, so did my trips to the public library. This summer, I had a companion: a longtime friend’s 84-year-old mother—now another good friend. While I cruised the children’s section, Doris would head to the shelves with large-print books. Her library use heightened my sensibilities about how we … Continue reading An Old Friend in the Library
It’s no surprise: As a profession, we are facing a rapidly developing issue of growing significance, and that is e-content. It comes down to this: Libraries often cannot offer the types and amounts of e-content our users want and need. A lot of material is simply unavailable for us to access and circulate in electronic … Continue reading Essential Bookmarks
We all know about life imitating art, but what about novels imitating film—film noir in particular? Patrick Conrad’s No Sale (the words written in lipstick on a mirror by Gloria Wandrous, the Elizabeth Taylor character in Butterfield 8) is only the latest in a short list of noir fiction that draws on film noir. I’m … Continue reading An Homage to Film Noir
Meet Michael. In June, he graduated from a high school where he was encouraged to use his own technology for teaching and learning, and to connect to the district’s Wi-Fi network, where he shared almost complete open internet access on school- and personal-learning devices while on campus. The district’s guidelines for appropriate conduct are delineated … Continue reading A Tale of Two Students
It’s a question every used car buyer has to answer: “Is it the years or the miles?” Am I better off buying that vintage Pontiac LeMans with the really cool styling or that stodgy-looking two-year-old Honda? Looks can be deceiving. The vintage Pontiac was driven by a little old lady from Pasadena who used it … Continue reading Your Mileage May Vary
Most libraries in the US are small. For public libraries, this means that the population served is under 25,000 people. Similarly, two-thirds of academic libraries serve institutions with fewer than 3,000 students. When it comes to school libraries and many special libraries, staff numbers are typically small as well. What this means, practically speaking, is … Continue reading Practical Matters: Prepare, Protect, and Market Your Library
It’s amazing how quickly things change in the world of technology. When I wrote a book in 2005, I printed out all my research sources so I could highlight and take notes on them. I kept track of things I found on the web using a social bookmarking tool that only helped me find the … Continue reading Tools for Optimal Flow
I wrote here a few months ago about reading—its power and ubiquity and transcendence of format: “The authors and publishers get it; the ways in which the stories are displayed come and go, and what matters are the story and the storytelling.” Events in the ensuing months—the Department of Justice settlement with publishers, which may … Continue reading Amped-Up Ebook Apps
The world today is clearly not that of our library predecessors, of Melvil Dewey and Charles Ammi Cutter, not even of Seymour Lubetzky or Michael Gorman. The changes that have taken place since the introduction of the personal computer and the globalization of communication over the World Wide Web are huge, and they affect in … Continue reading A New World of Data
