Last week brought some excitement to the Detroit Public Library when, according to the Detroit Free Press, “FBI agents raided the Detroit Public Library system and the home of its chief administrative officer on Tuesday, removing financial records from the agency that's been beset by controversy.” Allegedly, the chief administrative officer did some dirty deeds, and the Free Press had already exposed “allegations of misspending, mismanagement and nepotism.” One offense that pops up is buying “20 lounge chairs for $1,100 apiece at a time it was cutting staff,” when it probably would have been far cheaper to just keep the staff and let library patrons lounge on them instead. You can read a fuller account at Infodocket, where you can also find out about the other administrative troubles at the DPL. What I find slightly astounding about this, if one can be only slightly astounded, isn’t the corruption involved. Government corruption, like the poor, will ...
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It looks like the “Big Six” trade publishers might soon be the “Big Four.” Could that be a good thing for libraries? Random House and Penguin are merging to create Random Penguin, and it looks like the owner of HarperCollins now wants to buy Simon & Schuster, presumably to create HarperCollinsSimonSchuster. Normally, I’d say that publishers merging can’t be that good for anything but the publisher’s bottom line. Cutting the number of major publishers by a third over the course of a year is a third less competition. The publishers think it will be a way of “combining forces can allow publishers to gain more heft in negotiating terms with retailers.” That’s probably true. But retailers are those people who sell us things, so combining forces against them is also combining forces against us. That’s why we have laws against monopolies. Not that these combinations will create a monopoly. Even if all the former Big Six publishers combined, they ...
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I haven’t been following the Little Free Libraries movement, because like the OWS’s so-called “People’s Library” they’re not really libraries in the sense librarians mean, and unlike the “People’s Library” no one is saying anything pretentious about them. People put them up, neighbors exchange books, everyone’s happy. Except apparently not everyone is happy. If there something library-related that you might think would be scandal free, it would be little free libraries. But no. From the frightening place known as suburban Milwaukee, bad things are afoot with little free libraries! First, there’s the town that flat-out banned little free libraries, someplace called Whitefish Bay. That would be the Whitefish Bay in Milwaukee County, not the one in Door County, so don’t get them confused. According to its Wikipedia entry, notable people from Whitefish Bay include probably nobody you would have heard of, but then again it’s small. And being ...
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Do you know what annoys me more than librarian stereotypes? Librarians doing things they claim are breaking those stereotypes. That's the biggest librarian stereotype of all. The most popular way to do that seems to be by producing a calendar with pictures of librarians supposedly breaking stereotypes. Last year it was the men in the stacks calendar. That one shocked the national media by showing that some librarians are men. What the national media didn't realize was that there really are only 12 male librarians in the entire country, and they all posed for that calendar. This year, it’s yet another tattooed librarian calendar. That’s right, I said another, because in 2009 we had the tattooed ladies of the TLA. That would be the Texas Library Association for those of you not in the know. And in 2010, we had the tattooed librarians of the pacific northwest. Disproving the received wisdom that Massachusetts and Texas don’t have much in common, we now get the ...
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A kind reader sent in this piece from American Libraries. Amazingly enough, it contains a bit of actual news rather than the usual library cheering section. It might be best just to quote from the email quoted in full in the article: I’m over-the-Empire-State-Building excited to announce that effective today Penguin Group (USA) has agreed to expand its pilot with 3M beyond the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library and license access of its ebooks to all of our library systems. Titles are available for purchase immediately in the Library Admin Tool. That’s from the Collection Development Manager at the 3M Cloud Library. “Over-the-Empire-State-Building excited” sounds pretty darn excited, and why wouldn’t she be? She’s giving librarians another clear opportunity to show what dupes they can be about ebooks. And why dupes? Well, the terms of the 3M agreement aren’t exactly good deals for libraries. The terms that 3M originally brokered ...
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You might think with the MLS being the worst master’s degree for jobs and all that there wouldn’t be many books recommending librarianship as a career, but you’d be wrong. There are plenty. I counted 10 different books published between 2002 and 2009 showing you how to start a career in librarianship. For those of you still interested, let’s take a little survey, shall we? First, there’s Jump Start Your Career in Library and Information Science, from Scarecrow Press in 2002. That might be the first librarian career guide of the new millennium, or at least the first I found. Jump start that career! The future is yours! If Scarecrow does something, the other publishers better jump on the bandwagon as well. And they did, so we got Straight from the Stacks: A Firsthand Guide to Careers in Library and Information Science, from ALA Editions in 2003. And that’s a firsthand guide, implying all others might be secondhand guides. Scarecrow, I’m assuming, wasn’t ...
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