Dave McKane at HPL

Our friend Dave McKane opened his exhibit of photographs last night in the HPL auditorium.  We had a nice crowd and it was a great evening!  Mr. McKane is quite an engaging speaker and the background information he shared surrounding the "Ghost Houses of the Prairies" lent great depth to the photos now on display.

I urge you to stop by the library auditorium and take a look.  Much patience and care was taken to capture the essence of these forgotten homes.  Mr. McKane's exhibit will be here through May and then it will move on to the west - heading to Dodge City, I believe.  Catch it while it is here.

Mr. McKane's Institute of Photography in Dublin, Ireland.

A New Kindle Twist

Here we go with yet another twist in the continuing evolution of ebooks, ereaders, and libraries.  Apparently, Amazon is launching a "Kindle Library" service that will allow loans of Kindle books through a library that subscribes.  You can read the Amazon press release here.  The down side I see here is that they are working with OverDrive to provide this service.  My feelings about OverDrive are ambivalent at best.  This is a "library service" company that rarely seems to have library service in mind.  The talk a big game about how they create virtual library services for libraries to use, but they do not seem to make a tremendous effort to make the process of actually using the services easy for library patrons.  Amazon, on the other hand has made a great success of easy downloads of not only books, but music too.

"The Cloud" - Will it free us?

This is what I have been fretting over for quite some time now - the death of content ownership.  I will reiterate this:  I love technology and gadgetry.  I do.  I get "gadget-envy" every time I see someone walking about using the latest [fill in the blank].  But like the author of that article, I am unconvinced that a subscription service is the best model for the intellectual accumulation of our race.  Perhaps you think that is a bit overwrought.  Maybe it is.  True, I am becoming more of a curmudgeon.

A counter to this twist in intellectual property control is presented in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Thank you Sandra for the link to this editorial piece by Harvard professor and librarian Robert Darnton.  This is a much better presentation of the idea I talk about a lot with patrons:  That the proliferation of formats and "forms of communication" simply divides a library's resources and makes the librarian's job more difficult but it doesn't mean that libraries are outmoded.  In fact, Professor Darnton is surely correct in saying that:

Librarians are responding to the needs of their patrons in many new ways, notably by guiding them through the wilderness of cyberspace to relevant and reliable digital material. Libraries never were warehouses of books. While continuing to provide books in the future, they will function as nerve centers for communicating digitized information at the neighborhood level as well as on college campuses.

 Perhaps I'll relax a bit about content ownership and worry more about how we (library workers) will keep up.  It is our job, after all, to help people navigate the vastness of the information universe now available to anyone at the local public library.

Continuing Education

I've just returned from attending the annual conference of the Kansas Library Association.  This is an opportunity to get some new ideas and keep abreast of what is happening in the profession.  Perhaps the most valuable part of the experience is the opportunity to meet face-to-face with colleagues to trade stories and advice.  In fact, I know this is the most important part part of the experience.

One of the most interesting sessions was the keynote address by Jamie LaRue, the head of the Douglas County (CO) Libraries.  He has developed an advocacy program aimed at changing mid-sets.  The impetus for the creation of this program was a pair of defeats for library bond issues.  Despite thorough and successful awareness and use campaigns for the Douglas County Libraries, Mr. LaRue found that library use DOES NOT equal library support.  In fact, a study by OCLC and the Gates Foundation showed the same thing.  Based on this study, Mr. LaRue's approach was to create a script and recruit passionate library supporters who were NOT library staff or board members to deliver the speech to groups each of those people are involved with.  The main goal is to change the mindset from "tax burden requires tax relief" to value of services for money spent.  Show the value of libraries with real-world stories.  It's really great and I'm already thinking about who I might approach to try this in Hutchinson.

Why libraries? This...

This editorial from the Houston Chronicle pretty much sums up what libraries are good for (should anyone ask you).  These are words of wisdom here:

Librarians make it possible to navigate [the infoverse] wilderness. They do the brute-force work of organization: bar-coding new acquisitions; putting books back on the right shelves; scanning and digitizing paper holdings; entering items into databases, where a search can reveal them. Handed a difficult question, a good librarian happily hacks through the data jungle, sorting the good info from the bad, and procuring exactly the answer you wanted. But great librarians do something even better: They help you ask a sharper question, then find the answer you didn't know you needed.

Sadly, these days there are fewer and fewer people considering library work.  Like teaching, it is a graying  profession afforded less respect than it deserves.  I tend often toward skepticism with a bent toward pessimism.  Occasionally people around me have to warn me when I stray too far across the line into cynicism.  This is probably one of those areas.  As a society, we have become too detached from what made us great and what allowed us to build a great nation.  Plain and simple education and access to the accumulated wisdom of billions of people who came before us.  [Grump, grump, grouse, stomps back to troll cave.]

Dave McKane at HPL

In a couple of weeks, Dave McKane will be here for the opening of an exhibit of his photography!  His new collection "Ghost Houses of the Prairies" will open with a reception April 26 at 5:30pm in the Hutchinson Public Library auditorium.  Mr. McKane is a great photographer and a kind soul who has given generously of his time.  He has provided several introductory digital photography programs here over the past couple of years.  These programs have had great attendance and wonderful reviews.  I hope that as many people as possible will be here to support Mr. McKane's show.  I think this one is my favorite.