Books Read in 2011

End of the calendar year is often a time for reflection. This year it seems like I read less than usual (and I can't quite put my finger on why.) I have also listened to more radio and fewer books. A part of that my be related to the rearrangement of the collection at MPOW from an accession number arrangement to Dewey. Here is the list. (It is in reverse chronological order, since I just cut and pasted from the side bar where I keep track.) Note that this is a full year list, not a half year like some prior lists.

Books Read (paper)

1. The Chalk Girl by Carol O'Connell ARC
2. The Invisible Ones: A Novel by Stef Penney ARC
3. Grimus: a novel by Salman Rushdie
4. If Jack's in Love: A Novel by Stephen Wetta ARC
5. Lionheart by Sharon Kay Penman ARC
6. Too Far by Rich Shapero ARC
7. Broken Pieces: A Library Life, 1941-1978 by Michael Gorman
8. Delirious New Orleans: Maifesto for an Extraordinary American City by Stephen Verderber
9. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
10. The Weird Sisters: a novel by Eleanor Brown
11. The girls from Ames: a story of women and a forty-year friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow
12. Doing social media so it matters: a librarian's guide by Laura Solomon
13. Saving CeeCee Honeycutt: A Novel by Beth Hoffman
14. Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin
15. Room: A novel by Emma Donoghue
16. The Glory Wind by Valerie Sherrard a review copy
17. The Rievers by William Faulkner

I had been planing to read Water for elephants by Sara Gruen in paper, but I wound up listening to it.

Read on the Nook

1. Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares
2. A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio by Bob Edwards
3. Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956 by Wayne Wiegand
   Advance PDF copy for review in Public Libraries
   

Recorded books/Listening

Lots of NPR on both WWNO and WRKF
Neither station covers my whole trip. I also sometimes listen to NPR Now on Sirius XM

1. All the king's men by Robert Penn Warren, read by Michael Emerson
2. Play Dirty by Sandra Brown, read by Victor Slezak
3. Cream Puff Murder by Joanne Fluke, read by Suzanne Toren
4. Lies and the lying liars who tell them: [a fair and balanced look at the right] by Al Franken, read by the author
5. Car talk: doesn't anyone screen these calls?: calls about animals and cars
6. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, read by Robert Whitfield
7. Various speaker disks to select a speaker for an upcoming even
8. 'Tis by Frank McCourt, read by the author
9. Islam : a short history by Karen Armstrong read by Richard M. Davidson
10. Water for elephants: a novel by Sara Gruen, read by David LeDoux and John Randolph Jones
11. Remarkable creatures by Tracy Chevalier, read by Charlotte Parry and Susan Lyons
12. The necklace: thirteen women and the experiment that formed their lives by Cheryl Jarvis, read by Pam Ward
13. Attack poodles and other media mutants: the looting of the news in a time of terror by James Wolcott read by Dennis Boutsikaris
14. Executive privilege by Phillip Margolin, read by Jonathan Davis
15. My year of meats by Ruth L. Ozeki, read by Anna Fields
16. Stonehenge: [a novel of 2000 BC] by Bernard Cornwell, read by Sean Barrett
17. My life as a fake by Peter Carey, read by Susan Lyons
18. Smoke by John Ed Bradley, read by Christopher Hurt

Hiatus?

If anyone still reads this, you may have noticed that my posting frequency has declined quite a bit. Only 37 posts in the first ten months of the year. Of those, 4 were vacation notes in July, 3 were "Library Day in the Life" posts (2 for round 6, one for round 7), and 7 were related to ALA (midwinter, annual, and the LITA "kerfluffle").

While one of the recent uses has been for me to track some interesting blog posts from others (by including links here), I am considering a hiatus. Most of the posts during this calendar year (12 of 20) were collections of links. That is an average of "only" one per week for the non-special topics.

So, maybe I no longer have much to say. Or maybe I don't have the time and burning desire to say it. How long long will the hiatus last? I don't know.

Permanent death? Maybe, we will see.

Early September Links, volume 2

Well, here is the second part, and my list of unread posts in Google Reader is finally back to zero! Now to tackle the work email in-box, where I keep getting automatically generated "mailbox full" notes!

Iris Jastram always writes thoughtful pieces. (Often they are based in her real-life experiences.) She recently posted about her philosophy of librarianship. It is well worth reading, it notes the important role of librarian (especially reference librarian) as generalist. In fact, it makes me think that once upon a time when I was part of a team doing book selection, we made it a point to include one of the support staff who worked the circulation desk (and handled ILL). She brought some of that real-world grounding to our work.

One of the library humor blogs on my list is obnoxious librarian from hades. Its subtitle is : a satirical look at life in a large bureaucracy. One of the more recent posts, while posted as a satire, really pegs the state of e-books and libraries today.

I mentioned here that Abigail Goden is doing a series of "Data Friday" posts which continue this week. The most recent post talks about a book published in the UK (and soon to be published here) about access to web data.

Letters to a Young Librarian has a recent post by a law firm librarian talking about professional development. (This is also falls into my category of "continuous education.") Here is a key "take-away" quote:

It is true that you get out of professional development what you put into it. Anything that you can use to further your career, enhance your skills, or support learning and progress in librarianship counts as professional development.

There were a couple of posts about mobile apps and libraries. First from Bill Drew who casts his headline as either/or between mobile apps and mobile web sites. It turns out that he refers to two separate articles in Computers in Libraries each of which tackles one of the two topics. Based on his comments, the web sites will be easier to produce in the short run. I wonder how long the "apps" portion will be relevant.

Aaron Tay has a fairly long post about mobile friendly databases being offered by libraries. He notes both of the trends talked about by Bill, but focuses on database access as provided by our vendors (i.e. not library created). Because he is a librarian in Singapore, he takes a (literally) more global view than do many other bloggers I read.

Librarians are on strike at the University of Western Ontario. The author (Mita) blogs library issues at New Jack Librarian. She has an interesting philosophical take on information, copyright, the library's role, and how the university should be treating its librarians. (I will confess, while I have heard about the strike, I am not very well informed on the issues...)

Rory Litwin is continuing Library Juice and Library Juice press, but he has returned to school for a PhD, and has started a new blog, Non-Robots and Their World. One of his recent posts is about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and has the great title
Feeling and not feeling.

Finally, there are a series of four posts from Eric Hellman (I have mentioned him before). I am going to list them and comment in the order of chronological appearance:

1. The first is on the value of a book. The post includes graphs and some sophisticated economic analysis. I'll probably have to read it a couple more times to really understand it.
2. The second is about his new venture which is the process of raising money to make creative-commons licensed ebook editions of the books ... so that everyone, everywhere can read them.
3. The third reflects on the sense of smell. I have often heard that it is the most powerful of the senses in memory recall. I have certainly experienced that in my life, times when just an odor brings back a very strong, vivid memory. One of my favorite quotes is: "When we smell a book all of these feelings resonate across time and they comfort us."
4. Finally, Eric posted about orphan works and finding the true copyright holder. He noted that the Hathi Trust had proposed posting some orphan works. The Authors Guild then sued them. As part of their prep, the Authors Guild used its membership (and blog readership) to identify many of the authors not found by Hathi Trust. Eric's post is full of links.
   

Unintended Consequences/Emergency Preparations

I had an "A-HA!" moment recently.

I was at a mandatory training at MPOW where we were going over the procedures for evacuating the building. Always important to do this, and October is Fire Safety Month (or something like that) when a lot of fire drills take place.

One of the unintended consequences of loosing staff, is that there are fewer people in the building, and there may be parts of the building which used to have staff present, but no longer do. That happened at MPOW, so some of the evacuation plans have now been tweaked to make sure that we do get everyone safely out of the building.

Early September Links, volume 1

I started this post thinking it would be a short one with a few links...it is now turning into a two-part post. Here is "volume one."

First some humor. While most librarians know about Unshelved (along with its computer programing cousin/half-brother Not Invented Here), one of my favorite library humor sources is Shelf Check. It has not been as frequent of late, but the latest is a great one.

LISnews alerted me some time ago to the wonderful book based paper sculptures which are popping up (literally) in libraries around Scotland. It started in March, and the most recent (that I have learned about) appeared at the end of August. Here is a blog post which has photos and descriptions of all the items which have been reported so far. In the comments there is speculation as to who the creator is.

There is a longer web version (and shorter print version) about pricing of database packages from academic publishers (mostly). Commonly it is referred to as "the Big Deal." Richard Poynderhas a good explanation and history. In a lot of ways the sub-title says it all: Not Price But Cost.

I don't remember where I picked this up, and I have always had a good relationship with IT folks, but I love the headline: Why IT pros should be more like librarians. One of the points that the article makes is about the ability to communicate clearly about what is happening. I'll say that in my present place of work (MPOW), the folks in IT respond quickly to requests, and do keep us informed about what is happening.

Stephen Abram has been blogging for just about as long as I have. [He started his blog, two days after I started this one! He is much more consistent and prolific, though.] Stephen picks up stuff all over, and shares it willingly. Two recent posts struck me:

1. The first concerns the use of location based services. Stephen is a huge fan, I am not as sure about that. However, it does have implications for library services and as he notes: "libraries have branches and multiple locations because geography is important for face-to-face service, community and learning. That’s one reason why I track location based services so much." And later he says: "I believe that geo-based web services and products will be essential to library strategies in the future." Both of those are statements with which I agree.
2. The second post covers an important topic and has an insightful title: Preparation for Living in a Public World. He wrote the post for the AASL Banned Sites project. As you might expect, he is against schools blocking specific technologies, and suggests that students would be better served if schools taught appropriate sharing behavior. I encourage you to read his post.

To follow up on the first of the two items immediately above, smartphones and e-books have been a continuing topic of interest. My friend Michelle Boule writing for ALA Techsource talked about what the growth in smartphone use means for libraries, including library web sites. A good article if you missed it.

This post reminds me of why we gather statistics. And the title says it all "Assessment isn’t about the data, it’s about the results." I think, for me, there is another important aspect of assessment which is buried in Jenica's post, and that is the value of anecdotal evidence.

David Lee King has a great recent post about the importance of relationship building for libraries (as institutions). It is a great concept, one which I always tried to implement (including in the days before social networking technology). It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings: You can never have too many friends!

Abigail Goden who used to work for my friend Rochelle in LaCrosse has started a series in her blog Hedgehog Librarian, called "Data Tidbits." It has been appearing regularly on Fridays. The first one was August 12, and as the name suggests, it is a mish-mash of items. (In this one she suggests following data "queen" Dorothea Salvo on Twitter....I loved reading her blogs, I guess I am going to have to go back to Twitter.) Both the first and the second ones include data jobs as part of the post. Both the third and the fourth ones continue in the same vein. Well worth following.

"I quite like using the word 'assets' with reference to library collections." This is the introductory sentence of a post by Lorcan Dempsey. I guess it is my MBA education and activity in the business part of the library that I have always thought of them as assets in the accounting sense. However, Lorcan goes on to say "We tend to think of assets in positive terms, as things that are valuable." I think that may be the more important part of his message.

I am not sure where I first picked up on Jennifer Meyer's blog. She is a (the?) librarian at a for-profit college. Her blog is called careercollegelibrary. She posted in a series about some of the perspective from that kind of institution. I was put off a little bit because in the first one, she uses "perspective" when she means "prospective." She does focus on the library's potential role in recruiting students. In her second post, she focuses on retention. This is especially important as higher ed institutions are being judged on graduation rates, and retention is what is needed to keep that rate high. Her third post focuses on the final phase of higher ed, critically important to for-profit institutions and one where they have been most criticized, placement. It is a slightly different take on the world, and I think a blog worth following.

Also in the nitty-gritty of the library world, Michelle McLean (Connecting Librarian) talks recently about some of the mechanics of information flow. It is certainly worth a read as you try to manage organizational blogging, tweeting, and other social networking activities.