Just a little Library Humor to get over Hump day

The Downfall of Atlas Shrugged

I love the book (the part of it that I read).

I have only gotten a few hundred pages into it when I saw the book entitled "Honky" by Dalton Conley.

Since I do not like to read two books at the same time, I am taking a break from AS to read Honky.

Sometimes,,,,Its just not worth it

Friday afternoon was a total waste of library work.

The copier was down, one of our employee's parent's passed a way and many attender her funeral, no one returned my calls and surprisingly, everyone who came into the library needed their research completed "right away".

Only a month to go.

Urban Hang-Out vs Traditional Library

Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle’s Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City’s shop-lined education mall. Without some dramatic changes, The Extinction Timeline predicts libraries will R.I.P. in 2019.”

Public Health Libraries Go National

On Friday’s Talk of the Nation, Harold Varmus was interviewed on the new policy requiring that NIH funded research be deposited in PubMed Central within a year.

Listen to it (22 minutes) at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89562597

The Deed Is Done

Last night, over about 4 hours of toil, I sent the email to my immediate and secondary supervisors telling them that I will not be employed here at May 30, 2008.

What a load off my shoulders.

I have a few prospects under my belt though. I have listed them in order of which I would like the most.

1. I have applied to manage a university Law Library here in town.

2. I have applied to take a temporary position as an inter library loan technician. If I get this position, I will work there until school starts in the Fall and then become a full-time student.

3. i have applied to be a circulation clerk at my old place of employment. The money would be horrible, but at least I would be happy.

I have finally decided

After taking a sick day off work and being blamed for causing a gap service (despite the fact that I followed established procedure), I have made the decision to terminate my current employment at the library which I am working.

That WILL NOT stop me from keepin gthis blog current.

I still very much love library science and will hoefully find anoth position in the same field.

I just feel that my current working environment is dis-jointed and very inward thinking, if that makes any sense.

The people whom I work with are not bad in the least, but there is nothing too exciting about them, they are just kind of there.

I am looking for a working environment that invigorates me, and beckons me to get up in the morning. I know that may be a lot to ask, but all of my former positions did this for me, even when I was in the military.

So I will be handing in my resignation on Monday.

Wish me luck.

What do my bosses do all day?

I know that most of you are asking the same question.

It does not help when the one who is writing your appraisals are on the other end of the country, as the situation with mine.

For the first time in a year, I met my approving supervisor when they came to visit our library this past week.

You would think that there was an agenda...

Fat chance.

It seems that they just came to hang out.

You would think that they would make the most of this visit. I guess that's what you can do when you are in charge of people around the country.

Innovations in Library Science

A few years ago, I presented to a State conference on the way the Academic Libraries are changing to accommodate the advances in library science.

I came a cross this seminar which will held at my former place of employment later this month. I think I am going to check it out.

McGill Library Announces Global Health Resource Wiki

*The McGill Library Global Health Resource Wiki*
*wikisites.mcgill.ca/GlobalHealthGuide*

The McGill Library has created a Global Health Resource Guide to promote collaboration and to share and organize knowledge about resources within the McGill community and beyond.

This resource guide was created as a wiki using MediaWiki software so that as many people as possible would be encouraged to both use the guide and add resources to it.

All members of the McGill community - students, faculty, clinicians, researchers and staff - can add resources to the guide by logging in with their McGill user ID.

Anyone in the international community with an interest in global health is welcome to use the guide for finding global health information and resources.

If you are from an academic community outside of McGill, they encourage you to participate and contribute to the wiki. Contact them for a user ID if you would like to contribute resources or information to the guide.

To obtain more information, to comment or pass on suggestions for content, or to request a User ID to add resources and content, please contact one of these McGill librarians:

Eamon Duffy Government Information Service eamon.duffy@mcgill.ca
Louisa Piatti Nahum Gelber Law Library louisa.piatti@mcgill.ca
Jim Henderson Life Sciences Library jim.henderson@mcgill.ca
Deborah Meert Macdonald Campus Library deborah.meert@mcgill.ca

wikisites.mcgill.ca/GlobalHealthGuide

EPA Libraies: An Update

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) effort to reorganize its library system was seriously flawed and mired in agency management and oversight problems, said a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

GAO looked at how well the agency handled its library reorganization in the wake of a $2 million budget cut in 2006. The report, released March 13, documented numerous problems with the way EPA handled the closing of four libraries. For example, the agency failed to obtain appropriate input from staff or relevant experts to accommodate library users before closing facilities. Also, GAO said, EPA still lacks a strategy to ensure continuity of library services and does not know whether its actions have impaired access to environmental information.
Other shortcomings GAO found include:

EPA did not conduct a cost-benefit analysis for closing the libraries. The agency failed to track costs associated with closing the libraries and did not evaluate the cost of losing library services.
EPA did not conduct analyses mandated by the Office of Management and Budget. The agency failed to comply with federal law concerning the disposal of federal property. EPA did not implement an agency-wide communications strategy notifying stakeholders of the closures. GAO recommended-and EPA agreed-that EPA should continue its moratorium on further changes until it takes suggested corrective actions. Four closed libraries have not reopened.

"EPA should return to making decisions that are based upon reasonably obtainable economic and technical information," said Charles Orzehoskie of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of EPA, Local 238. "Initiating these changes now would improve EPA staff morale," said Orzehoskie in testimony before a House on Science and Technology subcommittee investigating the library closings.

The GAO report came in response to a request by Reps. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology, Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

To see more, go to: < http://www.afge.org/Index.cfm?Page=PressReleases&PressReleaseID=832 > or the GAO report at: < http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d08304high.pdf >.

Access vs. Ownership

One of the most talked about issues in Library Science is the controversy over the benefits of ownership of databases/information versus the access to databases/information. Because of the amount of literature on the subject, coupled with my interest, I wanted to gain more information about the severity of the subject. In doing so, I would like to look at a few examples of the extent that database usage/acquisition to information and provide some economic reasoning for this phenomenon.

Due to globalization, access to information has become easier. Entities that manipulate information have been able to profit the most from this trend. At a conference organized by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Association for Research Libraries presented the 'Scholarly Communication and Technology Project'. This delineates the fact that even though the entities that control information will continue to profit from globalization, they also squelch out that those profits will be made on the backs of the consumer. In doing so, the project also gives economic reasoning for the escalating rate of profitability to be had by owners of information. In a nutshell, the project relays that fact that globalization and technological advancements have reduced the need of materials to be 'physical', similar to the traditional journal. This, combined with the ever-changing rules of the process of transactions of acquiring information in the electronic arena, is both reasons why information owners (i.e. publishers of scholarly journals and libraries) could profit greatly.

Annual reports are written for every major corporation in the world. This is the place for a company to state is accomplishments over the previous year. Another function of an annual report is to speculate about the progress that they foresee. Each one of the companies on Forbes' Fortune 500 list has an annual report. This concept of reporting financial prowess and speculated growth is not lost in the library community. In review of two libraries annual reports, we find that the present trend in acquisitions of journals/information and other media is to move towards access to them instead of ownership of them.

This trend of moving towards access to information as opposed to ownership was present as far back as twelve years ago. In reading The University of Wisconsin's Murphy Library's 1994 annual report, we find that the preparer mentions that its library's access to GPO, which offers online access to the Congressional Record and the Code of Federal Regulations, was one of their accomplishments in the previous fiscal year. They also state that their Inter-Library loan department was increasing their efforts in obtaining access to materials currently not owned by Murphy Library. The annual report goes on to convey the fact that OCLC FirstSearch, an online service that gives library professionals and end users access to a rich collection of reference databases, continues to have heavy usage, numerating over 3,000 searches, stating that the increase searches have not cost the library more money because the cost per search has decreased from $.70 per search to $.50. Murphy Library also planned to continue its evaluation and comparison of print and electronic material in efforts for continued analysis in the upcoming fiscal year.

In Victoria College's 2003-2004 Annual Report, they give example of Murphy Library's prediction of moving towards access to information rather than ownership of it. In this report, the following is reported:-CD ROM networks are 'dead' technology.-They provide off campus access to over 80 electronic databases and over 35,000 electronic books.-1/2 of library database usage comes from off campus locations-Electronic databases give users access to over 22,000 magazine journals.

This annual report goes on to relay the message that they not only provide access to many different resources, they also allow access of the material that they own. Jon Dahlstrom, Director of Libraries at Victoria College and University of Houston-Victoria states, "...wealth of online full-text resources that have become available over the past ten years, we have truly made a shift from owning journals to providing access to them through online subscriptions.

Publishers of journals (information) also benefit from libraries' purchases of their wares via electronic medium. We take a look at John Franks' Impact of Electronic Publication of Scholarly Journals, where he begins by stating that electronic publishing will first come to research conducted in a scholarly manner before it makes its way into any other type of publication. He gives reasoning for this by saying that scholars are much more connected to electronic resources (the internet) than other sects of the population and gives light to the fact that libraries are always in search of new ways to save money due to their extreme financial pressure.

As stated above, one of the most talked about issues in Library Science is the controversy over the benefits ownership of databases/information versus the access of databases/information. We have seen evidence that the ever striating economic balance of access to information and ownership of information will not end anytime soon without specified rules of practice. If this continues, the haves will continue to have more will the have not's will continue to have none.


Sources:

Franks, John. "The Impact of Electronic Publication." Cause/Effect 17

Meyer, Richard. "Consortial Access Versus Ownership." Scholarly Communication and Technology. Atlanta, GA. 04/24/1997.

Murphy Library , "Annual Report 1994." University of Wisconsin. 22 Aug 2006

University of Houston at Victoria, "Annual Report 2003-2004." 22 Aug 2006

The Search For An MLS Degree

With the virtual world no upon us, options for education have opened up.

I have begun my search for an ALA accredited MLA program, but my small Midwestern town does not offer it, despite that it has several first class universities. The three closest programs are all 100 miles away, in thee separate directions.

There is one satellite program that I could take near by, but that got me to ask the question, is closer better?

I have started to delve into online MLA courses and here is what I have found so far:

http://www.becomealibrarian.org/DistanceEdComparison.htm