If you're like me, you spend all your time wondering “What's it like to be a celebrity in today's day and age with your name splashed all over, not just TV, print and other traditional media, but on literally millions of sites across the Internet, large and small?” Also, “what does George Clooney think of 2Girls1Cup?”
I'm at the SLA conference right now and, inspired by all the great sessions, here's a list of some ideas for wild, outside-the-box ideas that public libraries could do to draw more people and attention in their communities. Some of these are ideas that I came up with, some I found online and some are things I heard about at sessions at the conference:
1. Lend People Instead of Books The human “books” on offer vary from event to event but always include
a healthy cross-section of stereotypes. Last weekend, the small but
richly diverse list included Police Officer, Vegan, Male Nanny and
Lifelong Activist as well as Person with Mental Health Difficulties and
Young Person Excluded from School.
2. Have a Drive-Thru Window For Returns …and check-outs? (“Yes, I'd like a Grisham paperback, a recent copy of Time magazine and a literary western, please.”)
3. Loan Video Games “In the midst of updating their state-mandated strategic plan last fall,
Oti and her staff decided to offer video games for loan after going to
a regional workshop promoting the idea and surveying younger patrons.
Three weeks ago, the staff put up signs announcing a new 50-title
collection comprising games based on sports and animated movies. Within
two hours, all the titles were checked-out, and most now have long
waiting lists.”
Many libraries are off-setting declining book circulation by buying more non-traditional library materials such as DVD's, CD's, graphic novels, and comic books. Video games haven't seen the same adoption rate but likely will increasingly be found in libraries as a way to reach a younger, more visually-orientated audience. (There's actually a “games room” at the conference with a Wii and various other games and platforms available – subliminal message for the assembled librarians?)
4. Stay Open 24-7 This is very common in academic libraries, if only around exam time but public libraries haven't tried this as far as I know. But if grocery stores, coffee shops, drug stores and other retailers can offer round-the-clock hours as a service to their clientele, why not libraries?
5. Don't Charge Overdue Fines “It takes an incredible amount of staff time to collect 50 cents, to
monitor it, and send out notices. We weighed the actual costs of
collecting fines against the revenue brought in and decided it was kind
of a wash.”
I'm sure you've heard that JK Rowling is suing an encylopedic fan site dedicated to her novels for daring to publish a 10 000 print run book based on the site's original-but-based-on-the-novels content.
The following is one of the tamer passages from Scott Card's article:
At the risk of turning this blog into Cute Overload, here's another Pace-related clip.
There's an indoor playground in Regina called “It's A Blast” (think a typical McDonald's playground but, uh, super-sized) that's apparently the largest of its kind in western Canada. We'd known about it for awhile but thought he'd be too small for it. Nope, turns out that not only does he enjoy the toddler area (see below), he also *loves* the giant structure for bigger kids (as long as mommy and daddy are with him which we are since adults are allowed on the thing too! Or at least nobody told us to get off.) Shea's got the day's adventure fully documented (plus lots of other recent photos) on Flickr.
Oh, and the best part? Their pricing structure starts at 1 year olds. So Pace, who is 11 1/2 months got in for free! (Parents don't have to pay either so we got to use their business for free all afternoon. What do they think they are – a library? )
And not the gardening kind either (although we are in spring cleaning mode at our city home (ie. Regina) since I took a few days off before the SLA conference later this week. Take a look at the program and see if you can spot two of my former colleagues who are presenting. Hints: one is also a former Spirit of Librarianship award winner who was also my student mentor and one is a published author who I think I had given his first public reading as part of the “Lunch Bucket Speaker Series” to a rapturous crowd of, oh, about four.)
Anyhow, back to the subject at hand…
I've done a bit of weeding here and there during the past year but a couple weeks ago, I had my first opportunity to do some more involved weeding in (of course) my hometown branch.
(I should note that I'm really trying hard to temper my natural biases, working in my home region and having family and friends in so many of the 48 communities I serve including having grown up in one that I seem to end up spending a lot of time at. But Indian Head just happened to be the first of about four (so far) branches that have asked for me to come help with weeding this summer – honest!)
Here are some random thoughts and impressions… – one of the hardest things you have to learn as a librarian (and presumably a book lover) is to be ruthless when weeding. The book is tattered? Gone. Hasn't been checked out in five years or more? Gone. Has outdated information? Gone. Has less than one use per year in the last few years? Gone.
– the weeded
books get a chance at second life in the library's book sale but I
suspect many of them end up in that big book sale in the sky after that
brief reprieve.
– this is a point of contention for some librarians (yes, we get worked up about this stuff) but there are different views on what constitutes a “perfect shelf.” Some like to see the shelf fully stocked so that you can barely squeeze a finger in and all the books in your collection are available to the patron. Others like to have their shelves 80-90% full to make re-shelfing easier. Others go even lower – maybe 60- 75% – which aids reshelfing and also gives the advantage of allowing to place more books face out and… (warning: Jason actually endorses a retail marketing concept ahead ) …increasing the chances that the book will be picked up by a customer. (Ooops, Jason goes too far! )
I know one library that did an aggressive weed taking out 10% of their books. You'd suspect that their circulation would fall by 10%. Instead, it went up by 25% because they could do face-out shelfing and because the books that were left simply looked nicer and/or newer which made patrons more likely to take them out.
– even worse than killing the books is seeing all the work of somebody who came long before, back in the day's when a cataloging record wasn't a mouse click away but each entry had to be manually typed and labourously inserted into the book. I guess that's the nature of the beast and it happens in all fields but it's still tough to think of that work disappearing with the rip of the barcoded page.
– being in my hometown library, it was a bit eerie to see familiar titles including at least one series of sports tips for youngsters books I am positive I checked out in my younger days. (GONE!)
– further to that last point, I know all of the security and privacy issues around it but I still regret that libraries don't at least give us the option of keeping a permanent record of our borrowing. It's too late for me, having grown up in the analog age of date due stamps and handwritten library card numbers on the date due slip but wouldn't it be amazing if Pace could look back on his entire reading history when he turned 25 or 40 or 80?
– What happened in the early 2000's that kids simply stopped reading juvenile non-fiction? It's a bit early for the Internet so it must've been something else. CD-ROM's? So many of the books I looked at had good, regular usage and then 2000-2002 hits and they just stop circulating. [Edit: I'm an idiot. The Internet came into popular consciousness in the mid to late 1990's which coincides perfectly with this drop-off in reading of juvenile non-fiction, especially if you assume it took a bit longer for the Net to grab hold in rural areas. I first got online myself in 1995 so why I thought the Internet didn't exist in the early 2000's, I have no idea.]
– The date due slips aren't just a history of which patron # took the book out and when but also, like marginalia that you often find in library books, a bit of insight into the history of the book itself. Notes from the librarian about the book: “Called M. Smith re: overdue. Said she'll check again.” and from one librarian to another (“I enjoyed this one so thought you might too.”). Card numbers are used instead of names but occasionally (usually when teachers borrowed a group of books or for non-local fulfillment), the full name and community of the borrower is written in instead. So I get to see that one of our current branch librarians (who I'll be weeding with in the next few weeks) was borrowing books for her children long before she began working for us. Or that one of my elementary school teachers regularly used public library books to supplement her lessons at school.
– when you go to delete the records of the books you've weeded, you should always ask someone who knows the system better than you do if you're doing it right. Otherwise, you could end up doing twice as much work. Or so I've heard…
In roughly a decade or so, we've gone from the Internet just entering the general public's consciousness to being ubiquitous and something most of us pretty much take for granted.
We expect wireless Internet connections for our laptops every where we go, we post to Twitter and receive Facebook updates on our mobile phones, we order everything online from airline tickets to “new to us” goods on E-bay to prints of our digital photos. The Internet has finally caused time and space to have no meaning in terms of how we communicate in a way that no other previous communication media could.
But, although it seems incredibly unlikely right now, the Internet isn't necessarily as secure nor as stable as we may think.
This story about Web 4.0 (I don't know about you but I'm still trying to get my head around Web 2.0!) reminded me of a hilariously prescient Onion article titled “Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades!”
Here's the TechCrunch reference to Web 4.0 that got the linked author all lathered up (there, I tied the two themes together!) For those keeping score: Web 1.0 – The Information Web Web 2.0 – The Social Web Web 3.0 – The Semantic Web Web 4.0 – The Intelligent Web (in ~20 years according to the poster linked above)
And while I'm at it, I think I've already figured out Web 5.0:
Book beer pairings sees authors suggesting brews that are best enjoyed with their work. What brews go with your favourite books – a very important question for the ages.
In semi-related news, the next “Books to Beers and Stacks to Snacks” social gathering will happen following the final day of the SLA conference, Saturday May 3 at 5pm at the Cathedral Village Free House in Regina. Endnote speaker, Jessamyn West, is planning to attend so why not drop by if you're already taking in the conference and/or a MetaFilter member?
) …increasing the chances that the book will be picked up by a customer. (Ooops, Jason goes too far! 
) 
