End of year thoughts

In another forum, I was asked:

You have a less "books=sacred objects" view than many of the people we know in common. Would you say your view is common among librarians of tour acquaintance, or are you an outlier there (too)? Have you always felt that way about books or did you come to it along the way?

Excellent question. To be clear, I believe that individual books can be sacred objects - important/rare editions, religious texts, original manuscripts, individual inscriptions, etc. - but that the format of any physical manifestation of ideas isn't sacred in and of itself. Books are ultimately just collections of glue and paper and cloth; it's the concepts they hold or the meaning we imbue them with that can make them sacred.

In particular, I believe that everyday books are meant to be engaged with, interacted with and responded to. For someone who's a tactile and kinetic learner, this means that I have to write out my thoughts and responses for that engagement to happen; the most convenient, immediate and relevant place to do that is in the text itself. I write in books all the time, and prefer to own the books that really speak to me so I can do so without guilt. I've always worked this way, back into middle school; in college, I preferred to buy the most written-in, highlighted books I could find to continue the conversation the previous owner(s) had started. Marginalia fascinates me, and its place in history is vital. Writing in library books does have historical precedent, too, but I'm less okay with that due a strong "if it doesn't belong to you, you don't get to permanently change it" ethic.

Amongst librarians, there are far more folks in the "books are just paper" camp than you'd think. I'm certainly not an outlier there. Not everyone is as enthusiastic about it as I am, but most of us have to recognize that fact for the very practical reason that we cannot house all of the books in the world forever. Libraries are not warehouses and not all libraries are even archives or research collections. Each individual title that comes onto our shelves gets chosen for its relevance and usefulness to our patrons. Periodically, we review the evidence of that continued relevance and usefulness - number of total check-outs, most recent check-out, date of publication, wear and tear - and when it's become obvious that something's no longer useful, it needs to go, to make room for something that is. Even archivists don't keep everything (ask my friend at the Congregational Library Archive); librarians of all stripes use their best judgment to determine what stays and what goes as a collection changes over time.

When librarians choose to get rid of an item, we do try and see if it can be useful to someone else somewhere, either by relocating the item to another location or by selling it. Then, when it's falling apart beyond repair, or when mold or bugs or water or scratches have damaged it beyond use, the item gets recycled or trashed. Like any other object in our lives, books and DVDs and CDs can carry more negative weight than positive weight; when that happens, it's time for them to go in the most environmentally sound way possible.

All that said, it's occasionally fun for me to watch patrons squirm when I suggest that the paperbacks they've carefully stored in a New England fieldstone basement for the past 30 years are best off destined for the recycling box or trash barrel. Sure, some collector somewhere might want them and they might have some historical value....but they could also give everyone who touches them an upper respiratory illness or contact dermititis. People are more important than books, always. Not necessarily ideas (V for Vendetta and Farenheit 451), but always more important than the physical paper object.

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After writing all this, I found a deeply practical (if occasionally defensive) article on What Books You Could Live Without in the NY Times. Read through it all, and the comments below, for some specific criteria in what might stay and what might go as you weed your own collections.

My Home Institution in the News

It's lovely to walk into work on an unseasonably warm day and be greeted by excellent front-page coverage of my place of work:

Boston Public Library (and other libraries) move with the times. A focus on "new" programming initiatives to keep libraries relevant. Nothing genuinely new, but some good front-page publicity at any rate.

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web is a misleading title, because what they're "shunning" is the commercial deals. BPL and other libraries are choosing to go with Open Content Alliance over Google and Microsoft.

Mail Call!

And, while writing up the above, I received my complimentary T-shirt for registering as a presenter with PBWiki. That is neat in and of itself, but the T-shirt "was imprinted at Rebuild Resources, a place where men and women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction come to change their lives through work, hope, and courage." (from the hang tag)

Promoting a 2.0 resource and supporting socially responsible companies. Twice as much awesome and double the fun!

Playaways?

Reactive vs. proactive. And as the rate of change gets faster, we're pushed further and further into reactive modes.

What am I blathering on about? I just had a patron call asking about Playaways, a not-so-new digital audiobook format. She wanted to know if my library carried them; I'd never even heard of them before.

A little searching online made me feel only slightly better. Playaways have been out since 2005, and Illinois was the first library system to pilot the format (second paragraph from the bottom). OHIONET has a comprehensive FAQ about them for its member libraries, while the Rocky River (OH) Public Libraries and the Larchmont (NY) Public Library are offering them to patrons.

I'll cut myself some slack: I've only really been closely following tech trends since late last fall, so I would have missed much of the brouhaha about Playaways. And yet, if I can miss a new technology such as this, how many other less-savvy librarians out there have missed this and more?

Yes, professional development is much on my mind, for personally professional as well as generally professional reasons. I just gave that presentation that stressed that we need to be "...aware of as much of the rest as we can." So now, I live true to my own words.

So....Playaways. Very neat, very tidy, no moving parts and easy to circulate. Easy also to lose and break in a transit bag, but that's no reason not to have them for the same reasons that we have books on CD and even still on cassette. If you haven't already checked them out, give one a whirl and see if it'll fly at your library.

A new vision of a book website

There's been a neat trend running around the 'nets recently -- low-tech presentations disseminated electronically. I've seen Post-Its TM, whiteboards, scribbled-on bits of paper and other real-world communication tools, captured by digital camera and incorporated into the design of a site.

Here's one promoting a new collection of short stories:

No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July. [link courtesy of my friend John]

I won't try to explain it...just go there and work your way through it. It only takes a few minutes, and what's most fun about it is the seamless way she includes Flickr-style hotlinking into the imagery. Fun, easy and so effective.

It's also compelling, because it embodies the 'Naked Conversation' envisioned by Scoble and Israel (from their book by the same title). This is a real person, showing us a bit of her real life in celebration and promotion of her newest work. There's no PR firm, no marketing push behind it. Just someone telling us about something she's done.

Of course, the next obvious question is: Where does this sort of thing fit in to library work? Is there anything beyond simply using it as a low-threshold entry into doing Flickr- or YouTube-based training? What else might this work towards?

Off the New Books shelf

As I pull items off the New Books shelf and relegate them to the dark abyss of the stacks, there are titles that cry out for continued special treatment. I haven't read them necessarily, but they catch my eye. I may throw up a Shelfari account for these soon, but here's a book log:

Fair Use, Free Use and Use By Permission: How to handle copyrights in all media
Lee Wilson; Allworth Press, 2005 (okay, it was new to our building)

Niche Envy: Marketing discrimination in the digital age
Joseph Turow; MIT Press, 2006

Idealized Design: Creating an organization's future
Russell L Ackoff, Jason Magidson, Herbert J Addison; Wharton School Publishing, 2006
Reverse engineering as long-range planning device: figure out the ideal result for your organization and then work backwards on how to get there. Fascinating, but I don't have time to read it right now.

[By the way, my original thought for this blog was to share profound, in-depth considerations of librarianship both digital and physical. Which means I'm posted bi-weekly. So, time for the filler to start, with this post.]