This came up a wee bit a few weeks ago when I suggested that making children work off overdue fines wasn’t the best way to make them want to use the library. Apparently the Free Library of Philadelphia also thinks fines can be a problem, because they want to make sure fines don’t keep children from being able to get books. Under a new policy, “the library would no longer prohibit children who have outstanding fines from borrowing materials so long as they do not have any overdue books or other materials.” A spokesperson said “the change was being introduced to get more children to visit libraries in the summer, noting the 'learning loss' among children during summer break. He said another goal was to have every public and charter school student in the city get a library card.” Those seem like worthwhile goals for a library. However, there’s some resistance from three City Council members and one disc jockey, and that kind of massed power might put the kibosh on the ...
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With all the bad news in the world, it’s good to know that one problem of concern to some librarians is solved. At least I assume it’s a problem of concern to librarians, because I found the article announcing the solution at LIS News. The good news? The digital divide is no more. According to this article, smartphones have bridged that divide. We can now breathe easy about the whole digital divide problem. The reasoning of the article is impeccable. For example: “While personal computers were disproportionally [sic] used by the rich, the white and the male, smartphones are more likely to be used by Blacks and Hispanics than Whites, and by girls as equally as boys.” So because Whites (42%) trail Blacks (47%)  and Hispanics (49%) by single digit percentages, the digital divide has been bridged. Somehow I can’t help but notice that none of those figures is over 50%, which means more than half of each race/ethnicity doesn’t have a smartphone. If PCs are the domain of ...
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Every once in a while, people complain that library school is too easy, and that because it’s too easy, just about everyone who gets in gets through. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway. Combine this with the likelihood that just about everyone who wants to go to library school could manage to get in somewhere. Because of this, the standards for library school graduates are pretty low on average. If everyone who wants to can manage to get into a library school somewhere and graduate, then it couldn’t be otherwise. You might think the market being swamped would make it easier for good people to get jobs. It probably does, but it also means they'll get paid less because libraries usually prefer the cheap to the good if they have to make a choice. Occasionally, librarians suggest that library school should be reformed, to make it more difficult, to make it harder to get into. That’s unlikely to succeed, because a lot of library schools are cash cows for their universities that have ...
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A Kind Reader sent me this blog post from the Huffington Post entitled “What’s a Library?” Like Pontius Pilate, he didn’t stay for an answer. Normally I find the Huffington Post painful to read, since it seems to be aimed at an audience of the insecure and the mentally challenged. “Is this normal? Sex questions couples are too embarrassed to ask” vies for space with “Sylvia Browne's Failed Amanda Berry Prediction Returns To Haunt Her.” There’s less ranting about the human race around my abode when I don’t encounter headlines like that. Nevertheless, I soldiered on, ever grateful for Kind Readers. I wasn’t disappointed. It was just as stupid as I assume the article about the psychic is. The writer’s bio says he’s a video producer, and maybe he should stick to that instead of writing. The opening is about some library near him is closing, and he doesn’t care. This bit is priceless: Frankly, I will not miss the library.... Even though I lived right ...
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We all know that distance education is the future because people in the business of distance education tell us so. I just wish that had been an option when I was younger, because I would have loved to get an entire degree interacting with nothing other than my computer and my cat. Not everyone thinks so highly of them, though. In my post on Alaskan hijinks, I quoted one of the people working in the library: You have to do it by correspondence — people don’t look well on correspondence degrees — or you have to leave the state. That’s the kind of comment that people with correspondence degrees definitely won’t like. For example, this person: Someone needs to tell those bozos that these days it’s called “distance education”. I got my MLIS from the University of Illinois via their LEEP program (aka “distance education”). Given the UIUC is has been the top library school in the country for a number of years now, I can assure you that my “correspondence ...
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If you want to be on the cutting edge of librarianship circa 2008, then the ALA has some good things in store for you! A Kind Reader forwarded me last week’s American Libraries Direct, which has helpful links to three online workshops the ALA is offering. Pretty trendy stuff, too. One is on LinkedIn, and is arguably the least dated one. One of my business friends told me LinkedIn is like Facebook for business people, but do librarians ever get hired through LinkedIn contacts? I’d be curious to know about that. I’ve always worked in academic libraries, where the hiring process is based on looking through a pile of CVs and then waiting until each new moon to have the next search committee meeting, with the hope that in a few months someone will be hired before all the candidates drop out. LinkedIn has never played a role, but I guess having a good profile there is like a cup of tea during a hurricane. It might not help, but it can’t hurt. For $55  and 90 minutes of my time I ...
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