Article from a Canadian paper outlining the decline of literacy with age. People need to continue to read full length books and be able to comprehend and discuss them to increase one's quality of life.
SNIP
Halifax, The Daily News: News | Literacy skills decline with age: (from Margaret Eaton, president of the ABC Canada Literacy Foundation) "She notes that people think of literacy as simply the ability to read words, but it's about a broader ability to read a document and understand its complexity, vocabulary and significance.
'In a global economy, Canada needs to be able to compete and its workforce needs to be able to compete at a high level,' Eaton says. 'Literacy can become a trade advantage.'
On an individual level, there's a connection between literacy skills and standard of living, community involvement, health and workplace safety, she says."
END SNIP
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Doing it without Dewey: A Perry Branch Library Tour
The Back Story
The Perry branch library of the Maricopa County Library District, is a joint-use facility with the Chandler Unified School District and is located in the Town of Gilbert. This arrangement alone, for joint-use libraries, is a first to have three different government entities run one library.
The library has its grand opening on Tuesday July 10, 2007, but has been open since June 7th. It received a great deal of attention from the Arizona Republic article on May 30th that highlighted the change. Library Journal followed up with an article providing more detail, as well as School Library Journal. NPR followed up with an interview with Marshall Shore, adult services coordinator for the Maricopa County Library District. It began a maelstrom of comments from bloggers and on publib.
Some Stats
Hours
The library is open 10am to 8pm Monday through Thursday, and 10-5 on Friday and Saturday. They are open to the school from 7am to 10am only.
Hours
The library is open 10am to 8pm Monday through Thursday, and 10-5 on Friday and Saturday. They are open to the school from 7am to 10am only.
Maricopa County Library District uses Polaris ILS and PAMS Computer Time Management Software from 3M.
Joint-use library explanation
This is the second joint-use library in the Maricopa County Library District, the first being the North Valley Regional Library in Anthem.
Public Libraries are increasingly using this technique in order to keep up with demand. There is no mandate for a county or city to build a new library because they have reached a certain population threshold, a school does. A public library can be built faster and cheaper using this model using an IGA(Intergovernmental Agreement).
The IGA dictates how everyone gets along and who does what. It also determines what happens if the joint-use is dissolved. Who gets what books? who gets the computers? Sort of what happens in a divorce and the IGA is the prenuptial agreement. The school often builds the library and costs are split 50/50 with the library agency. Operations are performed entirely by public library staff with often a school liaison that ensures school rules are enforced on library property.
Joint-use library explanation
This is the second joint-use library in the Maricopa County Library District, the first being the North Valley Regional Library in Anthem.
Public Libraries are increasingly using this technique in order to keep up with demand. There is no mandate for a county or city to build a new library because they have reached a certain population threshold, a school does. A public library can be built faster and cheaper using this model using an IGA(Intergovernmental Agreement).
The IGA dictates how everyone gets along and who does what. It also determines what happens if the joint-use is dissolved. Who gets what books? who gets the computers? Sort of what happens in a divorce and the IGA is the prenuptial agreement. The school often builds the library and costs are split 50/50 with the library agency. Operations are performed entirely by public library staff with often a school liaison that ensures school rules are enforced on library property.
Often the crux of the issue with this relationship is one of responsibility. The school acts as the parent while the child is in school, the library has no such responsibility. This is where policies collide since one needs to restrict and one wants to provide access.
The best articles on Joint-use Libraries are available here:
ALA's site
And the Wisconsin Check-list
Library Staff
Librarians (MLS)
1 branch manager
1 youth librarian
1 teen librarian (acts as school liaison and school librarian)
1 Adult Reference Librarian
Librarians (Non-MLS)
1 circulation supervisor
1 librarian
Library Support Staff
2 Library Assistants
5 library Pages
13 library staff in all (I may have made errors, but I believe I have this information correct)
The New Classification System
The library will categorize all of its materials like a bookstore, using the BISAC system (Book Industry Study Group) Subject headings. There are 50 different categories, of which, each is broken down into several different sub-categories:
ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES
ARCHITECTURE
ART
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BODY, MIND & SPIRIT
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS
COMPUTERS
COOKING
CRAFTS & HOBBIES
DRAMA
EDUCATION
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
FICTION
FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY
GAMES
GARDENING
HEALTH & FITNESS
HISTORY
HOUSE & HOME
HUMOR
JUVENILE FICTION
JUVENILE NONFICTION
LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES
LAW
LITERARY COLLECTIONS
LITERARY CRITICISM
MATHEMATICS
MEDICAL
MUSIC
NATURE
PERFORMING ARTS
PETS
PHILOSOPHY
PHOTOGRAPHY
POETRY
POLITICAL SCIENCE
PSYCHOLOGY
REFERENCE
RELIGION
SCIENCE
SELF-HELP
SOCIAL SCIENCE
SPORTS & RECREATION
STUDY AIDS
TECHNOLOGY
TRANSPORTATION
TRAVEL
TRUE CRIME
Each subject area has almost 100 sub-genres each. This system, in a sense, can provide just as much detail as the Dewey Decimal System with the full book industry making decisions on how books are categorized rather than a librarian system. Also, all the non-fiction is interfiled so Young Adult and Juvenile are with the general non-fiction. Young Adult is indicated by a big Y on the spine label and Juvenile is indicated by a big J on the spine label.
Our Tour guides
Jennifer Miele, the branch manager, was kind enough to provide a tour for myself and my library staff. We appreciated her taking the time to visit with us in lieu of her very busy schedule. School starts up in Chandler on July 23rd. We also were fortunate enough to meet with Marshall Shore himself, who was there checking on how things were going.
The Tour
The first thing we noticed in the tour was how open the library was. The Perry branch has the exact layout of the Basha Branch of the Chandler Public Library System.
Service Spaces
Five 3M self-check stations, the service desk sits equidistant from the public entrance and the school entrance, near the school entrance sits a row of 40 computers for access)
Five 3M self-check stations, the service desk sits equidistant from the public entrance and the school entrance, near the school entrance sits a row of 40 computers for access)
(the far left picture shows how open the section is, most of the shelving is on wheels, the top row of all shelves have books that face out, all the DVDs face out)
The shelves state the Book Industry subject on the side, my understanding is that the signs will be on the top of each shelf. You can see the big FICTION sign all the way across the building.
You can see from one end of the library to the other from any part of the library. Center picture shows children's section and 100 person community room through the double doors. Self-check units being used on the right.
You can see from one end of the library to the other from any part of the library. Center picture shows children's section and 100 person community room through the double doors. Self-check units being used on the right.
Cool Tech Toys
A tablet PC provided by Polaris. It's called the inventory manager and has the full Polaris ILS on it. You can check-out, check-in, and check inventory. The far right picture shows the self-check-in station, again a 3m product. Set-back here is that you can only return one book at a time. The book is placed on the conveyer belt, checked-in, and pushed to the "Willy Wonka" machine.
A table displays best-sellers and new books. A plasma tv screen displays library news and program updates.
On the left, the periodical room with four study rooms on the far left. They won't have many periodicals until January because Ebsco only cycles the magazines January to December. New subscriptions are not sent out until January. The middle pictures shows the large bank of computers. The far right shows the service desk. (almost hidden)
The Teen room, six computers, comfy chairs, and a very cool (but didn't appear to be too functional) bookshelf.
How books are shelved
This is the fun part. All the spine labels for non-fiction only indicate the subject area that they go in. So if it is a Psychology book, the spine says Psychology. The books are then shelved by title order. So a page would take the book, go to the psychology section and shelve the book where the title is.
The money shot
(if you want to see all of the pictures, click here)
Analysis: What works and doesn't work for this system
Analysis: What works and doesn't work for this system
What works
The 50 subject headings work for a small popular collection library. The Perry library houses 27,000 items and their capacity is 30,000. Therefore, they are not planning to get any bigger. Furthermore, the non-fiction collection is also relatively small. As Marshall Shore states in his interview, on a small scale this works, for a bigger collection, it requires more fine tuning. That fine tuning would be housed in the many sub-genres provided by the BISAC (as stated there are about 100 for each category, leaving a possible 5,000 possible categories). The emphasis at this library was to keep the big 50 and to not touch it. I can tell from the tour that many of the librarians were itching to sub-genre, but were instructed not to. This is a smart move as I think the patron reaction to it is very critical to the success of this plan. The point of it is to make it intuitive, History is History not 979, no system is required of patrons. The best line during our visit came from a grandmother there with her grandson:
Grandmother: "What's Dewey?"
Staff Member: "It is the category system most libraries use to organize their books."
Grandmother (looking puzzled): "Oh, why do they do that?"
For a patron, they just want to find a book, in a small collection, the 50 subject headings work. However, if you need the exact book, you need to know the title to find it. In the back room, there is a possible lightening of the load as the dewey decimal number is removed, instead, the book industry decides where it goes and it is displayed on the spine label and in the MARC record. MARC accuracy needs to be maintained, but with bigger subject headings, less definition is required. The bigger the collection, the more sub-genres, the more complicated things become.
What doesn't work
Some set-backs would be the collection size. For a smaller collection, 50 subject headings work, but a library would have to break it down if they decided to change course and provide a strength in a particular collection, or if they became bigger.
For instance, if I wanted to find the book The Civil War by Geffrey C. Ward I would look in History and look for titles beginning with C. What if I wanted to find all the books on the Civil War library had? I would have to go over to the catalog, search for Civil War books, then scan the entire History section to find three or four books. If I wanted Civil War books in a Dewey Library, I could find all of them in 973.7. If I wanted to find them in a BISAC library, I would go over to history then search by title.
By contrast, Brady's Civil War , A new birth of freedom : Abraham Lincoln and the coming of the Civil War, The whirlwind of war : voices of the storm, 1861-1865, and April 1865 : the month that saved America, would all be in 973.7, the same section. In a BISAC library, I would have to walk over the entire length of the section to retrieve the books. Furthermore, serendipity is lost since the same books are not in the same section. This patron may not find Lincoln's men : how President Lincoln became father to an army and a nation, when looking for the books. In a dewey library, they would see it right away.
However, a patron who doesn't know Dewey, wouldn't be able to find the dewey section. They would have to learn the system first, then they could go right over. Often I will take a patron to a section of Dewey if they are looking for books in general on the topic to the section since I know Dewey.
Furthermore, if the BISAC library had that section sub-genred, they would find Civil War books in the Civil War section. I don't know a bookstore that doesn't have it sub-genred. So a BISAC library would have to unfurl the sub-genred section after a certain threshold. How many books are too many to scan in one section? That is what Perry Library will find out.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
How to pick book winner? Ask the experts, the readers!
From the New Yorker, the experiment of Simon and Schuster of picking the next big book, ask the public.
They are planning to shop the manuscript around and have the readers vote on what books should be published. Will this lead to better books? Or will it further homogenize our reading culture? Libraries depend highly on publishers to get good books their public wants to read and publishers are often failing to produce good books. The article even states that book production can be losing venture.
SNIP
"Yet even the idea’s critics recognized that it was a response to a real problem: most books today are not economically successful, which means that much of the time and money that publishers invest in projects is wasted."
END SNIP
I remember when James Patterson's Big Bad Wolf came out. We expected to have multiple holds for it, however, once they came in, they didn't move. Furthermore, we received more donations of that book than any book we have ever had. All the signs that no one liked the book.
The Science of Success: Financial Page: The New Yorker:
"The collective intelligence of consumers isn’t perfect—it’s just better than other forecasting tools. The catch is that to get good answers from consumers you need to ask the right kinds of questions; asking the market to predict how many copies a book will sell, which requires predicting how a wide readership will behave, is better than asking the market to predict which manuscript will get a book deal, which requires predicting the decisions of a small number of editors. (The Simon & Schuster experiment with MediaPredict, unfortunately, focuses more on the latter.) And you need a critical mass of people to participate. It’ll take a while to work out the kinks, but in the long run these markets are tools that few media companies can afford to ignore. Nobody knows anything. But everybody, it turns out, may know something."
Library patrons are often the best critics of the latest books. I wonder if libraries could use their patron base to make an idea like this work?
They are planning to shop the manuscript around and have the readers vote on what books should be published. Will this lead to better books? Or will it further homogenize our reading culture? Libraries depend highly on publishers to get good books their public wants to read and publishers are often failing to produce good books. The article even states that book production can be losing venture.
SNIP
"Yet even the idea’s critics recognized that it was a response to a real problem: most books today are not economically successful, which means that much of the time and money that publishers invest in projects is wasted."
END SNIP
I remember when James Patterson's Big Bad Wolf came out. We expected to have multiple holds for it, however, once they came in, they didn't move. Furthermore, we received more donations of that book than any book we have ever had. All the signs that no one liked the book.
The Science of Success: Financial Page: The New Yorker:
"The collective intelligence of consumers isn’t perfect—it’s just better than other forecasting tools. The catch is that to get good answers from consumers you need to ask the right kinds of questions; asking the market to predict how many copies a book will sell, which requires predicting how a wide readership will behave, is better than asking the market to predict which manuscript will get a book deal, which requires predicting the decisions of a small number of editors. (The Simon & Schuster experiment with MediaPredict, unfortunately, focuses more on the latter.) And you need a critical mass of people to participate. It’ll take a while to work out the kinks, but in the long run these markets are tools that few media companies can afford to ignore. Nobody knows anything. But everybody, it turns out, may know something."
Library patrons are often the best critics of the latest books. I wonder if libraries could use their patron base to make an idea like this work?
Friday, July 06, 2007
A Technology Pledge
A great discussion is ongoing in the blogging world regarding technology competencies for librarians. Fortunately, much of this information on what library staff should or shouldn't know is available through resources such as TechAtlas, Webjunction, and other sites.
What I didn't like about the discussion was the "beat you over the head approach" to anyone who is not technology savvy. I commented on a few blogs stating that we need to be patient with the non-techie people so that they will learn. Furthermore, library staff will not remember any training unless they are using it in their day to day jobs. They can be trained and require a competency, but if it is not something that comes up regularly, that information will not be retained. We need to be more patient and more clear in our training and how we provide assistance. Otherwise, many technology experts can look like some IT jerk who thinks everyone is stupid unless they know what they know. What is basic to someone that is familiar with technology is definitely not basic to everyone. Therefore, I make a plege:
"I pledge that I will help those who do not possess the knowledge of our changing world, and help them navigate it in the way that they are comfortable with. I pledge to remember times, in which, I did not know how to do something, yet someone took the time to teach me. I understand that everyone is different and each person's learning style requires something different of me. It is my responsibility to teach them and if a student does not learn that I take responsibility for that."
A library should have a technology plan in place to deal with new technology, staff training, and sustainability. TechAtlas has full host of services for free so that libraries can do this. Send out surveys to staff and develop a training schedule accordingly. Training staff on technology that they will actually use and that the library will implement is very key. If they don't use it, they will lose it.
Here are some sample questions with the results from my staff. It covers familiarity with Word, HTML, tech plans, Public Access Computers, and sustainability.
(Don't worry, it's anonymous) Keep in mind that I run a rural library that serves a population of 38,000 people.
Red means basic, not a great indication depending on who you are asking. I included everyone from librarians to pages in the survey. When I train staff on technology, it is only the technology that is necessary for their jobs. I am introducing new concepts that are more advanced, but only to those who have an interest in the exploration. Staff cannot be forced if it is not necessary.
Here's our six month plan based on information from the survey and recommendations from TechAtlas:
Enhance Training Resources
· Provide all employees with email accounts
· Develop a staff technology-training plan
· Document and maintain a staff technology-training plan
· Create simple, non-technical computer troubleshooting procedures
· Develop anti-phishing materials for training of library staff
· Increase staff awareness and command of computer anti-virus skills and resources
· Create a centralized collection of documentation for the most frequently used library software applications (POLARIS)
· Provide all employees with email accounts
· Develop a staff technology-training plan
· Document and maintain a staff technology-training plan
· Create simple, non-technical computer troubleshooting procedures
· Develop anti-phishing materials for training of library staff
· Increase staff awareness and command of computer anti-virus skills and resources
· Create a centralized collection of documentation for the most frequently used library software applications (POLARIS)
Formalize the Training Program
· Make the library a learning organization by supporting on-going and peer learning
· Design and communicate a clear procedure for training requests
· Identify training needs via staff technology skill assessment
· Maintain up-to-date records of library staff technology skillsets
· Develop competencies and learning goals based on each staff member's role
· Proactively market training opportunities to the library staff
· Develop a procedure for evaluating the success of training.
Emphasize Continuous Learning
· Plan for the design and delivery of training
· Support library staff in self-assessing their learning styles
· Support multiple learning styles to increase staff learning success.
· Allow library staff to participate in training events 'on the clock'
· Provide recognition for library staff members who achieve learning goals.
We need to convince libraries to implement technology plans to ensure technology is created and sustainable and that staff are trained appropriately. Without that, all this talk goes nowhere. For some good ways to convince your boss, the Librarian in Black provides some excellent suggestions.
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