Daily Thoughts 6/12/2009

P. G. Wodehouse

Daily Thoughts 6/12/2009

This morning I spent time weeding the oversize books. I still have quite a bit more to do in the oversize section. I am weeding the 700s. This is a difficult section to deaccession because so much of the material does not date, especially the material on master architects, painters, sculptors, and artists.

The person who does young adult programming reminded me about the New York Anime Festival which is free for librarians with a professional pass. It should be a lot of fun to go to. The program is on September 25-27 at the Jacob Javits Center. http://www.newyorkanimefestival.com/

During the afternoon we added some more display shelves to the new books area. It is starting to look quite nice. I think we will also be displaying dvds and audio books as well soon.

On the way home, I read some of Fundamentals of Technical Services Management by Sheila S. Intner with Peggy Johnson. It has given me a few ideas about weeding, mending, and preservation which I had not thought of before. I rather like the idea of creating a separation between processing books and preservation of books.

I also spent some time discussing Books In Print as an online service and thinking about Baker and Taylor's Titlesource 3. I have to spend some more time evaluating the service.

I have been a member of the American Library Association for a very long time. I am really not sure what it has done for me. It is a union card. I am also a member of RUSA which is the Reference and User Services Association. I enjoy reading the RUSA magazine, I have even ordered a few reference books which they recommended in their magazine. Right now, I am looking at joining ALCTS (Association of Library Collections and Technical Services). I am hoping that it has something useful to offer that I will be interested in. I think I might actually look at joining a committee. I never really considered joining any of the American Library Association committees. Collections is much more interesting to me than reference.

Some Light Thoughts, Palin and ALA (American Library Association)

Some Light Thoughts

Yay, there is a link from the Space Vulture book site to my review.
http://www.spacevulture.com/reviews.html

Life cannot be too serious.

Palin and ALA

The American Library Association made a statement that they were not allowed to politically discuss Sarah Palin's librarian issue.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6593850.html

Interesting. I wonder who threatened them about their 501c3 status. Apparently, they may lose their status as a nonprofit organization if they discuss political issues. Now, I really know where my bread is buttered.

Thoughts for the Day

The Last Whale blog http://thelastwhale.blogspot.com/ asked me to read a book on his subject, so I put a book on hold called Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolin. It should be interesting.

Today has been pretty slow, more weeding of reference and producing bookmarks for distributing to other libraries. Nothing particularly exciting.

I've been looking over the RUSA-- Reference and User Services Association guidelines for libraries. It might not be that interesting to most people. We have been asked to make long term plans so I am looking at the guidelines so I can get a better sense of where we might be going. This is pretty thick stuff. It says a lot without saying anything at all. I have been looking at the New York State library guidelines as well. There isn't much there. But, there is a subtext about expectations in libraries.

http://www.ala.org/ala/rusa/protools/referenceguide/guidelinesinformation.cfm

I am a member of the American Library Association, my professional association as well as RUSA. I have found RUSA to be much more useful for me than ALA. I do a lot more work with Reference than anything else.