Tax Form Season

From a post on PUBLIB, I picked up this blog posting in Closed Stacks (a group blog and this post in unsigned).

First of all, the title is great! Tax Season: Who Needs It?

The leading paragraph drives home a critical and growing issue: government agencies unilaterally deciding to end provision of paper forms without considering the impact on either the end user or the library.

In an increasingly paperless world, it seems as though people have decided tax forms, along with birth certificates, death certificates, and wills, are better off in paper form. Unfortunately, the government does not share the same sentiment. For the past few years, they have cut the amount of forms and information they send to libraries, and tell us, “It’s all on our website!”.

The library I currently work in serves all state agency employees, supports the state's public libraries, as well as any one who calls, contacts us, or walks in.

We have a huge collection of tax forms. We are seeing large numbers of people also come in for state tax forms. State forms are being made available in paper, almost exclusively, through public libraries.

In Louisiana only 42.9% of households have Internet access, compared to 50.8% at the national level. Where do various government and business entities think that the unconnected are going to get the forms, or submit the data asked for (e.g. job applications)? They are going to come to the public library.

January links - part 2

LibLime purchase what does it mean? Go to Hellman has an interesting take.

EBSCO exclusive contract comments the great Open Access advocate Dorothea Salvo has a great set of thoughts about the implications of the EBSCO contract

Getting older? An interesting post

A great post on Twitter and ALA is Everything I Needed to Know about Twitter I Learned at Midwinter on the YALSA blog

Heidi Blanton has an interesting post on managing conference information.

The Learning Commons is one of the hot topics in academia. I have a close personal friend who "coordinates" the Learning Commons for a Louisiana private university, so I hear a lot about it. Kim Leeder has an early January post on In the Library with the Lead Pipe (a great blog title, I think) with a very broad vision of what LC is all about. Read it here.

The New York Times is back-sliding! In the beginning of the web, their web site was free. Then they went to a pay site. Folks stopped reading it, and did not pay, so they went free. Now, they are going back to pay or at least "partial pay." Ars Technica has a good overview.

Facebook's privacy changes caught attention. Here is some of what I picked up:
Violating contract with users
Facebook developer says privacy is over
And then a comment about why the new policy is wrong

What the Internet and filters can do. A respected Canadian magazine has to change its name. Here is the story.

Will Manley is blogging at a new location. Here is his new blog. Even though we worked in Arizona at the same time, I never met him until he spoke at the Connecticut Library Association back in the late 80s or early 90s.

One of my nieces is working at the Olympics as part of an internship. She is blogging, and it should be interesting to read her experiences.

Agnostic, Maybe [Andy, in New Jersey]has a couple of interesting posts, the first is on the future of libraries, and the second is a reaction to another author's post called "Nothing is the future."

ALA 101 Summary

I thought that I had done this before, but my search does not find it.

So, and because I want to share with the NMRT folks, here it is:

It appears in eight parts:

1. Introduction
   
2. Overview
3. Divisions
4. Round Tables
5. Offices
6. Committees
7. Buildings and Finances
8. Overall ALA Structure and Governance

Enjoy! While they are almost 4 years old (yikes!) they are almost all still true! CLENE (a round table) has changed its name to LEARN. I would note that there is some good stuff in the comments.

"Library Rockstars" and the "Great/Radical Middle"

Walt Crawford does the wonderful Cites and Insights on a regular basis (monthly with occasional special additional issues).

Among the things I appreciate about Cites and Insights is that Walt actually cares about how it looks on the page. This past year he changed typefaces, and in various places there were discussions about that. I found when I started a job which including newsletter production, that I care about how things look on a page. The Adobe PDF format is great for that, because the creator gets to really determine how it will look, and the user can't change it.

Before ALA Midwinter 2010, Walt produced a special issue ("Cites ON a Plane 2010"). I am sad that he will be taking it down, now that Midwinter is over, but do understand why. After all, it is a collection of items which have previously appeared in Cites and Insights. However, either I missed some of the issues (and I generally print out each issue and share it with colleagues), or I am now reading and reacting to them through a different lens. One of my insights in this compilation is how true Walt is to his word when he calls himself (in Walt at Random) "The library voice of the radical middle."

The "rockstar" article is from the June 2008 issue (pp. 13 - 20) [it is in html here].

Indeed, I started composing this before getting to the end of the Cites on a Plane issue, and find that the "On the Middle" article is equally engaging. Appropriately enough, this article is from the December 2007 issue (pp. 16-22) [it is in html here]. (Isn't December usually a time for reflecting back on the year? This article certainly has some cogent reflections which are still true two years later.)

ALA Midwinter 2010 - Thoughts and Regrets

This is long overdue. It was a very interesting conference which included moving hotels suddenly, and therefore being further away from the Convention Center than I would have liked.

On the plus side, we had a chance to meet up with some of our non-library friends who live in and near the city. One upside of the hotel move, was that it was only about a 15 minute walk to the apartment of one set of friends. (And it is a spectacular apartment.)

My regrets -- I was not at OCLC Blog Salon, and therefore missed having a chance to chat with my library friends as much as I would have liked.

It was cold, it was snowy. It felt good to get home!