Do you want to play a game? Tomorrow is the 2nd Annual National Gaming Day.

From the Announcement:

Through a donation from Hasbro, more than 16,700 public libraries in the U.S. will receive a box set of their highly popular card games, Monopoly Deal, Scrabble Slam and Pictureka! Hasbro is the exclusive partner of National Gaming Day 2009. In 2008, more that 14,000 people of all ages participated in National Gaming Day.

ALA’s National Gaming Day focuses on the social and recreational side of gaming. Gaming at the library encourages patrons of all ages to interact with diverse peers, share their expertise and develop new strategies for gaming and learning. At the library, kids can socialize with their friends and play board and video games while surrounded by books, librarians and a real world of knowledge.

More than 900 libraries are participating in this year’s event.

Examples of Activities

The Pima County (Ariz.) Public Library is inviting teens to show off their Wii skills on National Gaming Day. The Beatles RockBand game is expected to be a huge hit with the entire family. Kids and adults will be belting out their favorite fab four tunes.

Anderson (Ind.) Public Library will devote the entire day to gaming activities. In recognition of National Gaming Day, the library will host a nationwide public library Rock Band 2 Tournament (on the Xbox 360) and a Dungeons and Dragons workshop.

See Also: National Gaming Day Web Site/Blog

See Also: The Librarian’s Guide to Gaming: An Online Toolkit for Building Gaming ala @your library

See Also: News Release: Read, learn, play in U.S. libraries

Last year, more than 14,000 people participated in gaming activities in more than 600 libraries across the country on National Gaming Day. After the 2008 celebration, many libraries reported younger kids playing with older kids; families playing together; grandparents playing with grandkids; and kids making friends with the library’s staff. This year’s event promises to be even bigger, with more libraries participating and more games in the mix.

Two Documents Were Released by the Harvard University Provost:

+ Statement on the Report of the Task Force on University Libraries (2 pages; PDF)

+ Report of the Task Force on University Libraries (56 pages; PDF)

Here are a few portions from both documents that help to summarize the report.

Harvard’s library system now includes 73 separate libraries with 1,200 full-time employees, 16.3 million volumes, 12.8 million digital files, over 100,000 serial titles, and millions of manuscripts, photographs, musical recordings, films, and artifacts of all kinds, making it by far the largest university library in the world.

Core Recommendations of the Task Force

1. Establish and implement a shared administrative infrastructure.

2. Rationalize and enhance our information technology systems.

3. Revamp the financial model for the Harvard libraries.

4. Rationalize our system for acquiring, accessing, and developing materials for a “single university” collection.

The Harvard University Library system needs to rationalize the manner in which all parts of the University collect and provide access to materials, and orient its focus more clearly toward ensuring access, as opposed to the current default model of building collections by acquisition.

5. Collaborate more ambitiously with peer libraries and other institutions.

Harvard should enhance its efforts to work with other libraries and cultural institutions to build a sustainable information ecosystem for the 21st century. In some cases, this collaboration will mean building upon existing efforts to work directly with partner institutions, such as MIT. In other instances, this collaboration should include entering
into new or expanded consortial arrangements, such as BorrowDirect.

Much More After the Click
(more…)

A new blog post by Joshua Kim focuses on the importance of audiobooks in the academic library.

Three cheers for the educators at Syracuse and UW Madison for refusing to purchase new Kindle’s until the speech-to-text feature meets accessibility standards. It is beyond stupid that Amazon neglected to provide spoken menu options, therefore making it impossible for sight impaired readers to access the speech to text feature.

[Snip]

When it comes to advocating for audiobooks to be included in academic library collections I’ll admit to some strong vested interests. I’m a huge audiobook fanatic. Too much of my money goes to Amazon to pay for my Audible platinum membership.

We wonder if the author knows that it’s likely he has access to a treasure trove of audiobooks from his public library that he can download from any Internet computer from sources like OverDrive and NetLibrary. According to his brief but very impressive bio, Mr. Kim is senior learning technologist and an adjunct in sociology at Dartmouth which is located in Hanover, NH. The Howe Library (the public library in Hanover) does offer audiobooks by way of a statewide program.

I’ve long thought that the academic librarian worry about Google’s book digitization effort is misplaced, and the real worry should be about the dominance that Amazon has in the digital book world. It is great that Amazon is finally getting some competition in the e-reader business, but I worry that their control of the audiobook market through Amazon will stifle the kind of innovations and partnership with libraries that I’m suggesting.

NetLibrary offers eAudiobook services to academic libraries. They have several thousand audio titles and from what I can tell the company does work with academic libraries. For example, The McDonald Library at Xavier Unversity has a page explaining how to download audio from NetLibrary (http://www.xavier.edu/library/help/netLibrary.cfm) and UNC-Greensboro has about 1100 audio titles from NetLibrary.

Does OverDrive have an academic library program? From what we can tell, they don’t but we plan to call OverDrive find out for sure. If they don’t have one perhaps they have one in the works. Last week OverDrive announced a program for K-12 libraries named AudioBook Classroom.

If Amazon does not provide this generation with the opportunity to fall in love with books through audio then they may loose the next generation of readers and book buyers. Providing audiobooks for check-out is an example where, by working together, Amazon and academic libraries can both increase overall reading and make their collections accessible to all learners.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

See Also: Regarding eReading devices, don’t forget the Ray Kurzweil in collaboration with the National Federation for the Blind is launching an eReader later this month. The software will be free and work on Mac’s, PC’s, iPhones and other devices. Revenue will come from content that will be for sale. Bakery & Taylor is a partner. The software will and will also have audio capabilities. More in this post.

Quite the uproar in Syracuse.

From the Article:

The Syracuse University Library system is facing the classic book-lover’s dilemma: too many volumes, not enough shelves. The stacks in the flagship Ernest S. Bird Library are at 98 percent capacity, the on-campus archives are totally full and dozens — if not hundreds — of new volumes flood in each day.

Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries, thought she had a solution. Her plan was to ship rarely used or redundant texts 250 miles southeast of campus, to a storage facility in Patterson, N.Y. Readers and researchers would’ve been able to request books before 2 p.m. one business day and receive them the next. Space in Bird would be freed up for new acquisitions, study halls and classrooms.

Thorin framed faculty and student concerns as being about wanting to be able to browse the collection and have easy access to books they know they need or might stumble upon in the stacks.

Wow! Browsing and serendipity in the same sentence. It’s good to know some people still browse and “stumble.”

But that plan went awry Wednesday night when more than 200 faculty and students flocked to first public airing of the issue, a University Senate meeting.

[Snip]

Lori Goetsch, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries and dean of libraries at Kansas State University, said Syracuse’s is “not an uncommon story among large academic libraries.” For decades, major libraries have been developing off-site, high density warehouses where books and other materials can be stored efficiently but delivered quickly to readers who need them.

[Snip]

Much More About the “Syracuse Situation” in Complete Article

Source: Inside Higher Ed

In August we posted an item titled, “The Books Know One Wants to Borrow,” and reported about two Detroit area librarians (Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner) and how they find “interesting” (understatement) material as they weed their collections. For example, a recent post, Groovy, Baby Yeah featured a 1983 book with people wearing some hip and groovy clothing of the period. Mary and Holly remain on the lookout for this type of material and post their findings on the Awful Library Books Blog.

Now, move your calendar ahead three months and Mary and Holly are appearing on national television. That’s right, national tv, The Jimmy Kimmel Show.

From the WXYZ Story:

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner are finding old books on library shelves in Plymouth, and in the process are enjoying their 15 minutes of fame. Mary and Holly flew west Wednesday to Hollywood, and they can hardly believe their instant notoriety.

“I am still trying to figure out how it’s caught anybody’s fancy,” Kelly laughed.

“It’s just something I never thought would happen in my life,” said Hibner. “National TV catches the attention of some little hobby you do, and there you are.”

When late-night host Jimmy Kimmel heard about the librarians’ hobby of taking outdated books out of circulation and blogging about them, he immediately saw the comedic possibilities.

You can watch segment online. Look for the video viewer on the right side of this page.

Source: WXYZ

It just doesn’t make sense. Many public libraries are seeing large increases in users, circulation, etc. Yet the funding organizations still want to cut the dollars they give to libraries. The disconnect between the value librarians and many members of the public (users) place on library services (both inside and outside the building) versus how those who allocate funding think of library services seems to be increasing at an alarming rate. Most of the time increased demand (people want and find the service(s) useful) would bring more funding for more services. These days the opposite appears to be true. Why is this happening? Perhaps it once again comes down to marketing Both how we “sell our services” now and how we sold our services” three, five, and ten years ago. Add to that how we, the info pro, demonstrate(d) our value now and in the past. It just doesn’t make sense.

From the Article:

Librarians and patrons say they fear free access to interlibrary loans and powerful computer databases will become the latest casualties of cuts the Legislature made to subsidies flowing to more than 3,000 public libraries.

She [M. Clare Zales, deputy secretary for libraries] noted that $11 million earmarked for free interlibrary loans and database access in 2008-09 was slashed to about $3 million for 2009-10.

[Snip]

Some library boards are weighing whether to charge patrons to cover the cost of mailing or trucking materials, said Maria Joseph, director of Moon Township Public Library.

“A lot of us don’t want to do that,” said Joseph, whose library handles hundreds of interlibrary trades a week. “The whole point of the library is to be free.”

[Snip]

Carol Sepesky, a 20-year reference librarian and Monessen’s assistant director, said losing access to the POWER Library collection of periodicals, scholarly papers, out-of-print classic books and accredited databases would be devastating to library users…”I had a woman here yesterday that was looking for peer-reviewed articles on teaching mathematics to children, and she found the full text of over 200 articles,” Sepesky said. “A lot of libraries have cut a lot of subscriptions to magazines, and so they rely on POWER Library. Without it, we would not have anything.”

[Snip]

Of the 501 school districts in Pennsylvania, 421 rely on POWER Library exclusively in their libraries, said Glenn R. Miller, executive director of the Pennsylvania Library Association in Mechanicsburg.

“That means they buy no other resources and offer no other databases to students,” he said.

Miller said demand for libraries is rising, growing 30 percent since 2000. Circulation in Pennsylvania increased 5 percent from 66,444,431 items in 2007 to 69,653,240 in 2008, which he called “an historic high.”

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

This paper was written by John Carlo Bertot, Paul T. Jaeger, Charles R. McClure, Carla B. Wright, Elise Jensen.

From the Abstract:

This paper presents an overview of methods, findings, issues, and implications from the 2008 Public Libraries and the Internet national survey, including comparisons to data from previous studies. Since 1994, these surveys have chronicled the expansion of the Internet as a primary library service. {Our emphasis] The 2008 survey includes key data about the many facets of public libraries as community Internet access, training, and service centers, from the number of workstations and connection speeds available to the most common Internet services and training. The findings from the 2008 survey reveal impacts of the global recession on public libraries and their ability to meet the needs and expectations of patrons, communities, and all levels of government.

Access the Complete Paper

Source: First Monday

Document: Access Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto Report (PDF; 2 pages)

From the Document:

The enticing opportunities in digital research and scholarship are coupled with new challenges for the research community. Researchers are drowning in a deluge of raw data and published information and face a bewildering array of options for disseminating and sharing their work. The choices these researchers make have implications on intellectual ownership, potential audience, ways of measuring impact, potential re-use, and long-term preservation.

As budgets across higher education are shrinking, some in the academy are questioning the continued value of large academic libraries. At the same time, many academic libraries are providing vital and innovative services and resources in support of emerging forms of research, publishing, and information management. While some would argue that academic libraries are playing an increasingly important role in scholarly research, others fear that they are on the brink of extinction and must change radically to survive. It’s time to rise above the debate, and take a fresh look at the role of academic libraries in supporting research.

The document continues with a “Call to Action” listing 10 things academic libraries must do “to continue to play a central role in support of scholarly research and publishing.”

See Also: Research Information Management Roadmap Activity

Source: RLG Research Information Management Roadmap Working Group/OCLC Research

From time to time we’ll post info about a special event on ResourceShelf and this is one of those times. This sounds like one interesting day of presentations and discussion. We’re working to find out if the the event will be webcast live and/or available as an archived event online.

On Tuesday, December 08, 2009, NEASIS&T (New England Chapter of the American Society for Information Science) is sponsoring and all day program (9:00 AM – 4:00 PM (ET)) about libraries in the 21st Century. The event will take place at the MIT Media Lab – Bartos Theater in Cambridge, MA.

From a Blog Post:

Library closures, slashed budgets, user apathy – everything’s online, right? It’s a story many of us have heard too often or experienced ourselves, especially with the recent downturn in the economy. But many libraries are re-inventing themselves, offering new services and transforming into very different entities while still at heart performing the same role they always have – helping communities connect with information.

Come to this NEASIS&T program to hear:

+ How changes in publishing are driving changes in libraries. How can we radically change an ancient institution that evolved from providing shared print copies into one that effectively provides online content (that we often don’t even own). It’s time to get past the kludges in our processes and organizational structures and embrace our future.

+ What it takes to be a librarian these days. What skills and interests are necessary? In 10 years will we be librarians or technologists?

+ Success stories from libraries that have radically changed their roles and services.

+ How to design your library around user expectations and keep your organization relevant.

Speakers Include:

+ John Palfrey, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School & Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

+ Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian for Research & Instructional Services at Temple University’s Paley Library

+ Shana Kimball, Publications Manger at the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library

+ Marguerite Avery, Senior Acquisitions Editor at The MIT Press

+ Cyril Oberlander, Associate Director of Milne Library at the SUNY College at Geneseo

Info about ticket prices and ticket ordering info info is available here. A ticket for the general public costs $75. However, special rates are available for SLA members, NEASIST members, students, and retirees.

Source: NEASIS&T

From the Article:

Authorities threw the book at 12 people Tuesday, accusing them of checking out pricey textbooks from a public library system outside Washington to sell for quick cash.

The Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland lost $87,000 worth of material from thefts between November 2008 and July 2009, county prosecutors said.

Textbooks and other works were quickly sold to used book stores at a fraction of their original value, investigators said.

Prince George’s County authorities said the suspects, at least some of whom were related, withdrew close to the limit of 75 books from 12 of the library system’s 18 locations. Each is charged with theft over $500 and faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.

Authorities said all 12 charged Tuesday are Maryland residents. They range in age from 20 to 51.

Access the Complete Article
It includes a quote from ALA’s Immediate Past President, Jim Rettig.

Source: AP (via Newsday)

In a new post on the SLA Blog, SLA member and Alignment Ambassador, Jill Strand, provides a number of stats and facts about who was surveyed and by what method, during the alignment process.

The blog post opens with this paragraph:

Would you do your job without trying to understand the views of your clients, students, faculty, engineers, patrons or information end-users? Of course not and neither would SLA. In trying to learn how best to position information professionals, the Association and the profession, SLA sought to understand the needs and perceptions of both info pros (us) and our clients / patrons.

Sections of the post include:

+ What the Alignment Project Set out to Learn

+ Key Finding: Corporate executives acknowledge the value and importance of good information.

+ Phase I – Define (Reviewing Existing Literature)

+ An International Online Survey Designed by Outsell and Fleishman-Hillard in collaboration with SLA
Statistics are given about the make-up of those who answered the survey

+ Phase II – Translate:
This included international language analysis and international dial testing

+ You’ll also see the geography and function of the people participating in testing sessions and study groups.

Finally, you’ll read the perspective of a person in academia, David Shumaker from Catholic University in Washington, DC.

Source: SLA Blog