Month: March 2009

ms. crossett goes to washington

Tomorrow morning, at an hour far earlier than I even want to contemplate right now, I’ll be getting on the first of three airplanes on my way to Computers in Libraries (which is actually in Arlington/Crystal City, VA, not DC, but close enough), where I’ll once again be talking about how I built a library website for $16 in chocolate.

This will likely be the last big conference I go to for some time — while Wyoming is doing quite well compared to the rest of the country, these times are still tough, and I’ve gotten to do a lot of traveling in the past year. I’d like to thank, once again, Information Today, Inc., the Salt Lake City Public Library, my own library system, and my good friends for making that possible.

If your library is, like most other libraries in the country, facing severe budget shortfalls, you may well be in despair that you will never get to go to a conference and hang out with all the cool kids. While I don’t want to diminish the fun that is and the contacts it gives you, I’d like to point out as well that while I now go to library conference to talk about our website, I built it almost entirely based on virtual contacts. The Park County Library website wouldn’t exist in its current form without Twitter and the LSW Meebo Room (and, nowadays, the LSW FriendFeed Room. I’m grateful to all the support I’ve gotten from those people, many of whom are now friends, and quite a few of whom I have still never met.

I guess what I want to say is this: if you’re reading this and thinking, “I’ll never get to go to a conference. I’ll never get to know any of those people,” don’t despair. We librarians are lucky to belong to a profession that employs the most pathologically helpful people on earth. That doesn’t mean that emailing me or posting something to the WordPress for Libraries group will automatically solve all your problems. We all have to spend a certain amount of time beating things with rocks. But if you’re willing to pick up a rock, you’ll be amazed at how many other people you can find out there banging away with you.

If I don’t know you and you’re reading this and you’ll be at Computers in Libraries, please come say hi. I’m presenting on Monday afternoon and can easily be found lobbyconning with many of my fellow Library Society of the World members for much of the rest of the time.

at your fingertips

If you’re reading this, you are sitting in front of a computer screen (or, perhaps, some kind of mobile screen — or, I suppose, you are reading a printout, but at some point you, or someone, got it from online). I’d like you to think for a moment about that time you spend sitting in front of a computer. I myself spend most of my day that way.

If I’m listening to a story on the radio, and I hear them say, “to see an interactive map of thus and such and hear more of whatever, go to npr.org,” I can quite easily stroll over to my laptop (if I don’t have it open already) and check it out. If I want to try again to order some black boots for my extremely long narrow feet (this is, I think, a fruitless quest, but I keep trying), I can spend all the time I want clicking around on Zappos and reading customer reviews. I can work on my taxes online and call my mom to ask a question about them at the same time. If you are reading this, chances are that you are able to do these sorts of things too, and that you do them without much thought.

Now I’d like you to imagine that you don’t have a computer with internet access.

I’d like you to imagine, in other words, that you are like a lot of the people who walk in to the average public library.

How much time does the average public library patron usually get to spend on a computer? 30 minutes to an hour is fairly typical, and that’s 30 minutes to an hour only once a day in a lot of places.

Think about all the things you did on a computer yesterday. Imagine that you had to do them all in one hour, on a computer that does not have all your favorite Firefox extensions, that quite possibly is missing the latest update of Flash, that probably won’t let you burn a CD.

I love the internet. I love that libraries are one of the few places in the world that provide free internet access. But when we talk about electronic resources and the wonders of the web and putting the world at people’s fingertips, I think it’s good to remember that for a significant number of people, we’re giving them an hour of that world at a time, quite probably on Internet Explorer 6.

as promised, shovers and makers — and more

Shovers and Makers 2009: I’m a winner! (So are you.) shoversandmakers.net

I’m there, and so are a lot of other people you probably know — and, perhaps more importantly, people you probably don’t know but might like to meet.

I’ve said before that the Library Society of the World was a happy accident born of frustration and social software, and I stick by that. The LSW has been taking trivial things seriously and serious things trivially since its inception. As the Nerdboys put it, Shovers & Makers is a joke, but it’s a serious joke. Look at the site. Look at some of the things these people have done, and the things they plan to do, and the things they hope to do.

Have you ever had a reference question you couldn’t stop answering? One where you kept finding more and better resources, more things you felt you had to take to the patron? That’s how the LSW in general and the S&M in particular make me feel about libraryland. There are more great things out there. There are more great people out there. There are more great ideas out there. Won’t you share them with us?

moving, shaking, shoving, making

It is customary at this time each year to write a blog post congratulating the people who have been named as this year’s Library Journal Movers & Shakers. And if you move in the circles I do, it’s also customary to note and link to all the M&S you are friends with or whose blogs you read or who you saw give a presentation once.

I’d like to do all of those things, and so I congratulate the winners, with shouts out to Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, whose writing and thinking I’ve admired for years; Jason Griffey; Karen Coombs, who once reassured me that yes, the OPAC did indeed suck; my gracious session presenting partner from Internet Librarian 2008, Sarah Houghton-Jan; Michael Porter; fellow Rad Refista and excellent silkscreener (and apparently pie baker) Lia Friedman; LSW Meebo Room denizen and whacky perl script generator Dave Pattern; Lauren Pressley; Lori Reed; Jamie Markus, who is here at our very own Wyoming State Library and who ran the Get on the Bus program; and Dorothea Salo.

Some of these people I’ve met; others I just know from online, and I’m kind of bowled over that I know so many in this great group of people — and I’m particularly pleased that my nomination (with able seconding from Steve Lawson) of Dorothea Salo got her on this year’s list. (I hadn’t quite thought through the implications of the my mythological allusion when I wrote up the nomination, and I fervently hope that neither Dorothea nor open access meet such an end.)

Librarianship is a small world, and some days I feel it’s all just a circle of people all boosting each others’ PageRanks and otherwise virtually scratching each others’ backs. That is not necessarily a bad thing — I’ve certainly benefited from it. But I’m also happy to read about the work of Movers & Shakers I don’t know. Lisa Harris runs literacy programs for people in prison and for their children. I remember emailing my mom about Women’s Health News when I ran across a link to it some years ago. I didn’t realize until now that its author, Rachel Walden , was the whistleblower on “abortion” being made a stop-word in the POPLINE health database. Ingrid Kalchthaler started libraries in homeless shelters. It sounds like J. Drusilla Carter turned a whole library system around by working with the community to develop teen activities, literacy programs, prison libraries, and a Spanish language collection. And the list goes on. . . .

Last Monday, word of the Library Society of the World Shovers and Makers started to trickle into the feed of the LSW Friendfeed Room. As my good friend Iris has noted, there’s already quite a bit of overlap between the current crop of M&S and the LSW membership (insofar as the LSW has a membership). I know there are all kinds of awesome librarians out there whom we haven’t heard about. I hope we’ll learn more about some of them soon.

another job (sort of) near me

If you live in Wyoming, you’ll soon come to think of 60 miles as nearby. Anyway, the Powell Branch Library in lovely Powell, Wyoming, is looking for a new branch manager. The Powell Branch is part of the same county library as my branch, and Powell is a great little town (it’s even mentioned in Bill McKibben’s book Deep Economy).

If you think you’d like doing my job in a somewhat larger town an hour northeast of where I am, you might just want to apply.