Friday, January 29, 2016

Talk20 Rocked!

This was our 5th Talk20 at the Hutchinson Public Library. Through the hard work of Kari Mallioux and Patsy Terrell, we have been lucky enough to provide a forum for 50 Hutchinson / Reno County residents to tell their interesting, funny, sometimes poignant and almost always surprising stories. Talk20 is a forum for introducing people to their fellow Hutchinsonians (Hutchinsonites?) to each other through sharing. It's amazing the conversations 6 minutes and forty seconds will spark!

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Obsolete?

Cool! I think this is probably an indication that librarians are NOT obsolete:

newsworks article

Is it the same job Ida Day had when she was here at HPL in the 1940s and 1950s? Nope. And thank goodness!

As that article states, Google hasn't made us obsolete so much as it has off-loaded some of the more routine questions (what we used to call "ready reference") and allowed us to focus on the more in depth questions. We can help match people with tools that will get them straight down their research paths rather than possibly wandering around on a digital snipe hunt.

I have high hopes for the future of my younger colleagues. I may be one of the old, stodgy library administrator crowd now, but I haven't lost (I hope!) my inquisitiveness, my love of the hunt for the next cool thing, or my ability to recognize a good idea when I or one of our staff sees one.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Where are ebooks headed?

I don't think anyone really knows what's happening in the ebook world. The sales of ebooks plateaued in 2015 and no one really knows if that was a pause or the peak. My thought is that with about 1/4 of the total book sales, ebooks probably haven't reached their peak yet. I do think that the future for them is very uncertain, as is the future of ebooks in libraries.

I say this because the big, mainstream of the ebook publishing world seem to be satisfied with selling ebooks as if their potential to be something more than their paper counterparts isn't worth pursuing. Think about what you could do with ebooks. At the very minimum, like digital versions of movies, you could have added features, interviews with the author, etc. Things that are not possible in paper.

Libraries need to figure out ways around the stranglehold ebook publishers have on them. After all, history has shown that libraries are one of the main places for people to try out, with very low or no risk, new authors, new media, etc. I maintain that publishers are shooting themselves in the foot and driving the growth in the the independent and self-published ebook explosion by making library acquisition of ebooks so clunky and restricted.

Libraries could be the biggest and cheapest sales force a publisher could want. Librarians like reading, we like sharing, and we promote by word-of-mouth the good stuff, the new stuff, the overlooked stuff. It's like having an army of volunteer sales people. Because readers buy the books they like. If they find a new author in a library and they come to love that author, they'll start buying that author's new material rather than wait to borrow. It happened years before ebooks were even remotely a thing.

What got me ranting about this old topic again? This article, which is a pretty good article from American Libraries magazine with the opinions of four experts in the field. I'd recommend a read.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Talk20 time!

It's coming soon - January 22nd here at the Hutchinson Public Library. We'll close the library to regular business at 6pm and then re-open at 6:30pm.

Read all about Talk20 on their website. We love having this event here at HPL even though sometimes we run out of seats and people have to stand!

Thank you Patsy and Kari for all the hard work! And thank you to the presenters who are putting their stories out there and sharing with their community. 6 minutes and 40 seconds goes by so quickly, but the preparation time doesn't, I'm sure!

Friday, January 15, 2016

It's the same all over

Only in some places the scale of the problem seems massive relative to one's own issues. Take for example the City of Birmingham's (UK) problem with overdue books. They currently have 145,671 overdues! Now, of course Birmingham is a large city and the library system there holds well over 1.9 million items. Just in raw numbers though, that's a huge bunch of books. But my reading of the article linked below makes it sound like that 145k number is a snapshot; in other words a total from a specific day but looking back over a ten-year period.

You can read about their predicament in this BBC report.

To put it in perspective, the Hutchinson Public Library holds a total of about 260,000 physical items. We currently average (this is a guesstimate based on number of notices we send out per day) about 300 items overdue. Also, we consider items that are "overdue" for a long time, say a year, not "overdue" but "lost".

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Another Interesting Circulating Item

Four Pennsylvania libraries will be circulating ukuleles! This is the start of a project created by a group of ukulele enthusiasts that has a goal of reaching 32 libraries.

Apparently, the ukuleles even come with some training for staff in the basics of ukulele playing. I imagine the staff thinking the same things about this that they do when any new service or tool is introduced at their library - "People are going to ask me how it works!" So I think it is fantastic that the ukulele afficinados responsible for the project are thinking big picture and making sure they have advocates in the libraries.

I saw this and was thinking that this is what really might be the biggest problem for the "Library of Things" post I made about the Sacramento Public Library a few weeks back. I wonder how they deal with patrons who come in and want to check out, say, a sewing machine and then want to have a staff member show them how to load the bobbin? If you had a library of things, you would want to have a library of experts, or at least knowledgeable staff, I would think. Although, I suppose you could just adopt the position that the library of things is there for patrons who already know how to use the "thing" they are checking out, rather than a hands-on learning collection.

Friday, January 8, 2016

Science Fiction Book Discussion 1/7/16

This month, our SF dicussion group read Nancy Kress's 2013 Nebula winner, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall. We had a good discussion about it, I think, but I feel a little guilty.

I have never read anything by Nancy Kress, so I went into the book with a good deal of anticipation. I really enjoyed her writing style, it moved the story quickly. Kress really uses language well. I am a sucker for the inter-weaving timeline gimmick too.

However, I finished it and had nothing but questions. This is where the guilty part comes in. I really had a fit in the discussion (jokingly, of course) but I was pretty emphatic about the lack of resolution. What, where, and when were answered pretty much but for me at least, no answers came for who and why. So I kind of felt like I hit on those things too heavily and maybe stifled some other opinions. I hope I didn't, because our group has had pretty strong opinions about almost everything we have read.

I think the consensus was that we might need to read something else of Kress's fairly well-decorated body of work to know what ways After the Fall... is representative of the whole.

Personally, I would recommend it for the writing style, but not the overall tale.

I am fully prepared to admit however, that maybe I just didn't "get it" if someone can answer the "who" and "why" questions I have about how the story played out.

For next month's discussion we are reading Richard Matheson's I Am Legend

Affordable broadband Internet?

This is an article from techdirt, an online technology magazine. The article is from their if-you-build-it-they-will-come department:

After A Decade Of Waiting For Verizon, Town Builds Itself Gigabit Fiber For $75 Per Month

I'm interested - Gigabit fiber for $75 per month? But how did they do it? The municipalities that were being ignored by the big Internet service providers got together and built it themselves.

After the $50 per month charge to offset the building cost, the actual subscription costs $25 per month...for Gigabit bandwidth. That's TEN times faster than the "up to" speed advertised by my local cable provider and their price (with TV of course) is $120 per month.

Reliable, inexpensive REAL broadband is a selling point for communities in today's growing work-from-anywhere job pool. I cannot understand why more small municipalities who want to attract people wouldn't want to consider this sort of public utility approach to Internet service. After all, it is just another connection like water and sewer.

I have nothing against commercial Internet, telephone, and TV providers. I just think there should be healthy competition, you know, like we talk about all the time. Competition is supposed to be the name of the capitalist game, right? That competition isn't going to happen when there are maybe two, or only one, or even zero viable providers in your area. There is no incentive to expand, no incentive to increase speed and capacity, and no innovation.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Building Improvements

Plans are shaping up for making some much needed improvements and refurbishment to our building!

Using funds saved back in our Capital Improvement fund, in 2016 we will be working on both entrances, the children's library restrooms, and the children's story time room.

The west entrance will be first up this spring. We will be changing the HVAC systems in that area to try to improve the comfort level. This phase of the project shouldn't be too disruptive, but there will be times when the entrance will have to be closed for safety reasons.

Once the West entrance has been finished up, we will make a fairly major change to the Main Street entrance. That side will get a larger foyer area, better HVAC and new doors. We will add some seating for people waiting for rides and more.

Tied to the Main Street entrance refurbishment will be a renovation of the old computer lab area on the second floor (directly above the Main entrance). This area will get some windows, comfortable seating, and the AV collection. This will make for a nice quiet reading and study area with a view of Main Street.

Once that area is finished, we should be past the 2016 Summer Reading Program and the refurbishment process will move back over to the Children's Department. The restrooms in that area will be totally redone from the plumbing up. During this time, the story time room will also receive a much-needed face lift that will include new flooring, paint, storage and craft time clean-up facilities.

These projects will be done with funds the library has set aside over a few years by being frugal with our tax dollars. The capital improvement fund was created specifically to help entities like the library save up for needed repairs and improvements to our building. This means that no new taxes are needed nor will any debt be incurred for these projects!