The Anythink Library system in Adams County Colorado made waves after a major shift over the last decade where pretty much every aspect of the library – from classification (no Dewey) to fines (they have none) to job titles (Wouldn’t you rather be a “wrangler” than a clerk?) was changed. As someone who’s very interested […]
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WikiLeaks: Free Speech, Cyberwar 1.0 and Corporate Control of the Cloud
WikiLeaks (which is down as I write this for reasons I’ll get to) is a site that’s been around since 2006 and first got a mention on this blog just over a year ago for a library-related story. Since then, the site has released two fairly large dumps of information obtained from a single army […]
“The librarian checking out a stack of books, may be for many of us, the equivalent of the first person we’ve told a secret to.”
“As Others See Us: An Author on Why She Loves Librarians“, an article from one of my favourite book/library blogs, EarlyWord. It’s a fun read (as any overly complimentary article about your chosen profession tends to be!) But one thing jumped out – the concept of the secrets patrons so willingly share with library staff: […]
Friends of RPL Reading
Like many public libraries, Regina has a “Friends of the Library” group. But unlike most libraries, ours sprung up in response to threatened closures of three branches plus our art gallery and our Prairie History Room in 2003. The Friends group played a big role in keeping the threatened locations alive, managing to get […]
The Library’s Role in Supporting Wikipedia
Wikipedia is having its annual fundraising drive and that got me thinking about a recent conversation I had with a fellow librarian. The discussion started as one of those “is reference dead?” chats (I don’t think it is by the way – though it’s definitely taken a pretty big hit with the rise of the […]
10 Things I Think About (Nearly) Every Day at Work
Outside of thinking about things like my current projects or what’s in the pipeline for the near future, e-mails that need to be sent or answered and generic everyday stuff like that, there are some things that occupy my thoughts for at least a brief amount of time pretty much every single day that I’m […]
(Yet Another) Technological Threat To Libraries
OuiBox (warning: music autoplays) is not only an online word processor and a way to connect to various social media sites but it claims to have the ability to help you fill in facts as you write! We’re not there yet but the fact that this was posted to Reddit with a subject line of […]
What Is the Defining Quality of Desirable Employees?
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what single quality, if any, would be the thing you should look for in hiring new employees. There are a few things that made me think of this – obviously working in the HR Unit at RPL has me thinking about these things, especially when I consider the […]
Jessamyn West at the RPL Staff Conference
I’m pretty excited about our staff conference on Friday (although the last minute details and fire fighting gave me a bastard of a headache today so that I ended up coming home and crashing for two hours.) But I think we’ve got a great line-up – including having not one but two sessions by the […]
Ten Things Every Librarian Should Know
Sure, when you get your MLIS degree, you learn some skills that are supposedly important – how to catalogue, how to answer a reference question, that Meville Dewey preferred to spell his name “Dui”. But there are some other skills and abilities that you don’t necessarily learn in library school that are possibly even more […]