Library News, Reviews, and Views
The Free Library of Philadelphia plans to merge with The Rosenbach Museum & Library, which houses a rare book, fine art, and archival materials collection built around the personal library of noted dealers Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach and his brother Philip. The institutions signed a letter of intent following board approval by each of the organizations on April 16, nearly a year after the Rosenbach first approached the Free Library with the idea.
If you are like me, your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator starts with a capital I, not an E, so networking with others does not come naturally. We have to work at it. But building connections with decision-makers, colleagues, and staff are essential to leading, supporting and defending our organizations, and to cementing libraries as vital to community livability.
Library conferences can be great places to pick up new ideas, with roundtables, seminars, and sessions filled with stories of successful projects from peers, vendors, and professionals from other fields. Information from these sessions can help other libraries get started on new initiatives without having to reinvent the wheel.
But all projects involve some degree of risk, and some projects can fall apart as the result of preventable problems. At the recent Code4Lib 2013 event held at the UIC Forum at University of Illinois at Chicago, a group of librarians found during their Fail4Lib pre-conference workshop that discussing failed or problematic projects can be as constructive as discussing success.
(Editor’s Note: LJ’s Lead the Change program will be offered in eighteen additional cities in 2013 and will be in the Rochester, New York area on March 28. The upstate/western New York program is being hosted by the Rochester Public Library and Monroe County Library System and will take place at the Greece Public Library, Greece, [...]
Eight of Maine’s largest libraries, both public and academic, are about halfway through a major and distinctive project for the shared management and archiving of their print collections and the integration of digital editions into a statewide catalog. The drivers of the Maine Shared Collections Strategy (MSCS)—lack of available space, budget cuts, low usage per [...]
Everywhere you turn in the world of libraries these days, you hear people talking about the need for private fundraising. ALA conferences have multiple concurrent sessions on fundraising, articles dealing with fundraising in library publications abound, and listservs everywhere are dissecting the pros and cons of private fundraising.
INFOdocket by Gary Price
