20,000 librarians will gather in Chicago this week, and many of them work in the go-to place for homework questions, trivia and computer help. But the desk of old has evolved with the times.
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| (Antonio Perez, Chicago Tribune) |
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Tour of the Nolen Library at Metropolitan Museum
Librarian
Naomi Niles described the Nolen library as a “jewel box”. The library
is certainly small and beautiful. The rooms are wonderfully open with
large glass windows on two sides. The bannisters and shelving gleam with
light gold wood. It even smells new.
The
open form of the library space reflects the openness of the library’s
policies. The Nolen Library is the only one of the Met’s many department libraries which has open stacks. Anyone can come in and use the wi-fi,
books, scanners and study space, even without paying admission to the
Metropolitan Museum. The Thomas J. Watson library is open to any adult
patron, but the books have to be paged, and children are discouraged.
Nolen has a children’s space with picture books and storytime events.
Computer terminals at a child’s height, give access to whitelisted sites
such as National Geographic.
The
subjects collected by the library are equally wide, stretching from
gardening to history. Naomi Niles says the library collects anything
that would help a patron understanding of art, which, of course,
includes many topics. A large collection of art documentary tapes and
DVDs cover the walls of a meeting space at the back of the library, and
Nolen even has a small, but beautiful graphic novels section.
The
library is staffed by a group of fifteen librarians who rotate between
Watson and Nolen with occasional stops at the department libraries. Ms.
Niles herself, started as an intern 20 years ago. She said at first she
could not imagine living in New York City for more than a few years, but
here she still is and she loves the Met.
Ms.
Niles encouraged librarians to use the Metropolitan Museum’s online
research materials, including teachers resources, and images. Metmedia is
a great collection of interactive, audio and video resources about the
collections. The Met is also scanning all of its publications from
around 1900 to the present.
If
you feel like dropping by, the Nolen library is located in the Ruth and
Harold D. Uris Education Center on the ground floor of the Metropolitan
Museum. The ground floor is one floor down from the lobby. You can
enter the Education Center from an entrance at 81st street, or you can
take an elevator down from the Greek and Roman wing. Nolen library is
open 9:30-5pm Tuesday through Friday and 10-5pm on the weekends.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
The Future of Libraries: Short on Books, Long on Tech | Mobiledia
The Future of Libraries: Short on Books, Long on Tech
Where's the books?
This isn't your childhood library. The Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is beautiful. The main floor looks more like a sleek Apple showroom than a stuffy library. And instead of a Genius Bar, there's an Ask Me alcove, where you can get help on everything from laptops to flash drives.
Rather than the Dewey system, color-coded walls, stairs and elevators help you find not just books and research papers, but also media rooms, video game collections and even a 3-D printing lab to create plastic models. But the best part? Built with state funds and private donations, it's open to the public.Welcome to the library of the future.
"There's a lot of talk about how libraries should change, but very few ideas of how they should be shaped," said Vaughn Tan, a member of the Harvard's University Library project. "Every library should figure out what they want to be and just do that." Read more...
Monday, June 10, 2013
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Richard Stallman on cloud computing: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." Photograph: www.stallman.org
Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.
But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.
"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian. Read more...
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
ALA, It’s Time to Step Up for School Libraries | Editorial | School Library Journal
ALA, It’s Time to Step Up for School Libraries | Editorial
By on June 4, 2013 5 Comments
As the end of the school year approached, the library listserv LM_Net considered several distressing strands: How do you close a library for the summer when it may never reopen; how do you hand off library duties to a nonlibrarian; and how can we transform library service to serve more students with fewer staff? Situations like these result from administrative decision making based on short-term gains—with long-term losses for our kids. Wouldn’t it be nice if these local problems had been countered by a professional association actively engaged in stopping these cuts by providing solid data on the value of school librarians at the highest state and national levels?
As I travel to the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Chicago later this month, I will inevitably carry the baggage of an unresolved disconnect. Those of us inside Libraryland know what our K–12 peers deliver, yet that value is clearly not understood by administrators, who are cutting school librarian positions nationwide. I can’t help but think that a key resource is being squandered out of sheer ignorance. Read more....
Monday, June 3, 2013
World's Tiniest Library Pops Up In New York City - John Metcalfe - The Atlantic Cities
But such is the cost of cuteness, which this teeniest of media centers has in spades. The adorable object, which sits outside St. Patrick's Old Cathedral School at 32 Prince Street, looks like a big doughnut on stilts or, if you imagine it with a few flourishes, a peevish robot: Read the whole article.
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