Daily Thoughts 9/6/2011

Spannende Lektüre, signiert Walter Firle, Öl auf Leinwand, 66,5 x 50 cm

Daily Thoughts 9/6/2011

I read a bit of A Dance With Dragons on the train to work.  It is very enjoyable reading.

This morning I checked the displays and updated the Twitter and Facebook accounts with some announcements.  We are having a training session tomorrow for E-readers.

I spent some time getting the supplies for the Ereaders event.  I also spent half an hour on Lynda.com learning a bit more about Indesign CS5 and watched the introduction part about Flash CS5.

I am putting together a book display for Banned Books Week. http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/free_downloads/2011banned.pdf

Daily Thoughts 10/1/2009

Hemingway's Desk From Key West

Daily Thoughts October 1, 2009

Today is another quiet smooth day. I handed in my monthly report today, did a little weeding, and made sure the displays were updated.

My colleagues also redid most of the displays today with banned books week book displays. I was not part of this set of planning. There was a display on censorship, a display on teen banned books, and a display of adult banned books in the front entranceway. It was very thematic.

I am still reading The Cost of Bad Behavior. The book is describing the cost of incivility to customer service right now. It describes how incivility can drive away customers and even affect stock prices in companies. A rude conference call with stock analysts does not lead to good corporate performance.

There is a very interesting article on Book Industry Standard and Classification versus Dewey classification for libraries. I have never seen BISAC in a library, but I have visited many bookstores with this classification scheme. It is far better for browsability, but it can fail when looking for very specific books. Dewey is much more granular than BISAC. I really liked the idea of partial categories for books using BISAC and individual dewey labels for specificity.

I am a big fan of merchandising for the purpose of increasing circulation. The issue with breaking the collection into smaller categories is that there are many more places to look for a book. Also there is a lot more work in processing materials. At the same time, it creates very nice browsable categories and increases circulation. We merchandise our displays; pulling displays for career books, graphic novels, and other categories. Also our "new arrivals" section is merchandised into romance, science fiction, mystery, audiobooks, dvds, and fiction books.

Building separate special collections is a big task. We do have separate sections for African American fiction, mystery, audiobooks, job information center books, short stories, and romance paperbacks. There is also a separate Local History room, law collection, multicultural reference collection, reference collection, and periodicals collection.

I enjoyed reading the article quite a bit. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6698264.html

Afternoon Thoughts

Afternoon Thoughts

This morning I filled our display for Banned Books Week 9/23/2008-9/28/2008. Most of the books had been taken out by patrons. We make it a point to allow patrons to take out books in our display if they ask for them. One of the major points of displaying books is to increase the amount of books being used. Two of the books were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple. I believe banning books lessens freedom and reduces democracy in many cases. I can see red sometimes over the causes which people want things banned for.

I've taken a little bit of time to also prepare for the poetry open microphone this afternoon. I've printed out some of my poems and am ready to read some of them. I also have picked out some poetry books to display. Right now, they are on a cart in the back office. I usually pick out a mix of popular poets; Nikki Giovanni, Allen Ginsberg, Daniel Berrigan, Diane Wakoski and anthologies; From Totems to Hip Hop and others. I also try to include some poetry from France, China, Arabia, and different places around the world.

The juice and cookies are in the refrigerator next to the community room. I am hoping that they have the new microphone for the reading. They promised they would buy it today, but they are having some payment issues right now.... It is a minor frustration. The layout is ready.

I also picked out two books from the new books section to look at. I don't read everything that I pick out. The first book is Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. John Scalzi writes in the Old Man's War universe. This book is military science fiction. The other book which I am looking at is Sinner A Paradise Novel by Ted Dekker.

I did my short program. Not many people came. I find this very frustrating. Programming is not my strong point, nor is outreach. It is not something which I like doing. No one else is willing. It is very frustrating. I would much rather be working with the books and reference. I am also very good with doing displays, ordering, and materials.

I worked out my frustration a bit by sorting through the donations. I've found five books which are new and acceptable, all of them are 2007 titles by popular authors which should be added to the collection. I'll probably be going through the donations tomorrow. I really like doing this. It helps me release tension. It also reminds me of when I used to go through garage sales and flea markets to find old and valuable books. It is a kind of meditation exercise for me. I can concentrate completely on sorting through books and evaluating them for currency, condition, and relevance to our collection. The first thing I look for is condition.

Morning Thoughts

La Censure by George Lafosse c 1874

Morning Thoughts

I am not happy with the publisher Chelsea Green's decision to limit sales of the book Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency to Amazon.com for the first week of the release. This shows a disregard for openness in competition in the book industry. It also restricts people's choices of where to purchase books. In some ways, I am not a fan of Amazon's practices in selling books. I think it was a bad decision on the part of the publisher.

http://news.bookweb.org/6245.html

In a similar vein, September 27- October 4, 2008 is banned book week. There is a site up for booksellers and libraries http://bannedbooksweek.org/ . It shows one of my favorite books on the site, Maurcice Sendak In The Night Kitchen.

We have six of the ten Most Banned Books of 2007. Most are young adult titles or classics. I don't know why they want to ban teenage books so much. I put up a small display of the six books. I am going to try and get the other four as we go forward this month.

I am up to page 200 of Wikinomics. It is getting even more complicated. Wikinomics is writing about mashups, combining two or more sites to create a third sites. For example, you might combine google maps with the location of vacation rentals to create a new kind of information-- maps to vacation rentals.

I also took a break again and started reading Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. I especially like Pepper, the main character who has been in all the novels. Pepper is the essence of being beat down and still going. I also like the new enemy, space zombies. They are a lot of fun to read about. I also like the continuity of setting. The Azteca even though they lose their alien masters, still remain a coherent culture in the novels. They proclaim that the aliens were false gods and become a democracy led by a council.

Today, I plan on doing some weeding of the business books. I still have quite a bit more to do with this.