Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Chicagoland MG Club's tool lending library

I got a search hit for "tool lending library Chicago", and didn't know of one. Here's some results of a bit of research.

The Chicagoland MG Club is a membership organization for owners and restorers of MG cars. In addition to keeping a library of books and videos for their members, they manage a tool lending library with items like an air-acetylene torch, an engine hoist, an exhaust gas analyzer, and an MG-specific panel nut wrench.

Their guidelines for which tools they share (and which they don't) are instructive for anyone thinking about putting together a similar program:

The Club is also open to suggestions for additional tools to add to the Program. Keep in mind the standard philosophy, moderately expensive, to be used only occasionally by any one person for very short term, easy enough to be used by an average shade tree mechanic, portable, and requiring no special adaptations for power supply, exhaust connections, and so on.

Public relations in the Library - May 22, 2008, Canton MI

from MICHLIB-L:

The Michigan PR group will be having our second meeting on Thursday, May 22nd at 10:00am at the Canton Public Library. Anyone interested in marketing and promotions is welcome to join. Please RSVP to kireland@sfldlib.org.

We will have an informal meeting style. Our agenda will be:
Introductions
Main discussion: Word of mouth marketing and ways to involve all staff in marketing.
Sharing success stories.
Setting next meeting.

Also don't forget about our wiki at http://michiganprgroup.wetpaint.com

Thanks,
Kelly

Kelly Ireland
Outreach Librarian
Southfield Public Library
26300 Evergreen Rd.
Southfield, MI 48076

(248) 796-4367
kireland@sfldlib.org
www.sfldlib.org

how to structure a URL for every page of every book

My colleague Bill Tozier has been doing a bunch of digitization work for Distributed Proofreaders, and as a part of that we had some discussions of how you might create some infrastructure to let you build hyperlinks to individual scans of individual pages in particular books.

The observed problem is that if you have a book, and have scanned in a page of that book, there is no easy way to predict what the URL would be to link to that page. Every system (Amazon, Google Books, etc) has its own way of doing things, and none of them have any sort of predictable REST style URL structure for deep linking.

I can imagine a system which would have page names like

http://everybookeverypage.com/isbn/0123456789/page/6.html
http://everybookeverypage.com/issn/01234567/volume/6/number/3/page/12.xml
http://everybookeverypage.com/librarything/work/3097331/book/5320426/page/12.json
http://everybookeverypage.com/aadl/record/1243670/page/12.jpg

e.g. with a URL parser that referenced a naming system, and within that system had a regular structure for naming the elements, and the system itself allowed either for unique copies (like librarything) or possibly non-unique copies (ISBNs). The name would also encapsulate the format which the item would be returned in, either as an image or as a data structure which would have pointers to (something).

This system wouldn't need to have any data in it - it could just resolve or look things up (as best it could).

Ann Arbor District Library survey on parking and library improvements

Dear Library Patron,

One year ago, the Library conducted focus groups with over 100 persons
in our district to discuss the future of the Downtown Library. We
learned a great deal about what people love about the Downtown library
and what they feel can be improved. This year, the Library has hired
Luckenbach|Ziegleman Architects and Skanska to work with us to develop
two programs: one for a renovated and expanded Library and the other for
a new Downtown Library, both to be located at Fifth and William. At the
same time, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority is moving
forward with a site plan to build a large underground parking structure
on the "library lot". The convergence of these two activities led us to
develop a joint survey asking for feedback on both the library and
parking.

Please take this opportunity to contribute to the important decisions
that will need to be made by the AADL, the City of Ann Arbor, and the
DDA.

You do not need to be a library user or a resident of Ann Arbor to fill
out the survey, which can be found here:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/survey-intro.zgi?p=WEB227QYHKFE6J

All feedback is appreciated.

In addition, you are invited to attend any of the following Public
Meetings at the Downtown Library to review our work and add your
thoughts to the discussion:

Monday, June 2nd 7:00 - 9pm
Wednesday, June 4th 10:00 - noon
Sunday, June 8th 3:00 - 5 pm

Thank you very much for your time, and thanks for using the library!

Josie Parker
Director, Ann Arbor District Library

erudite cat

erudite cat
Originally uploaded by broterham

sitting with a case of books sorted by color!

Copyright: Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Genericfrom broterham on Flickr.

More pictures of colorful covers in my books sorted by color collection.

more book covers (as art and inspiration)

Smashing Magazine has a piece on Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks.  They write

Book covers are hard to design and nice to look at. An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page. However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way. That’s not that different from Web where it’s important to build a sound information architecture upon a rather restricted design layout.

The reward is a collection of 61 covers as an example of the art - and not just tiny little versions of them, but nice big scans and photos of actual books, imperfections and creases and price tags and all.

Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library 2008 book sale schedule

The Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library now have their own website - faadl.org - and info on book shop hours are available on that site. Here is the info from that site:

Bookshop Schedule: The shop will be open Saturdays 10am-4pm and Sundays 1pm-4pm. The shop opens the weekend of September 15-16, 2007 and closes after the Summer Sale, June 21-22, 2008. Preview Night (for members and volunteers only) is scheduled annually in September before the shop's fall opening.

There will be some version of a bag sale at the Summer Sale, to clear out old inventory and make ready for new.

Thanks to Tim Grimes from the AADL and Sally Allen from the FAADL for this info.

The Everywhere Girl, PixID, and identifying common book cover elements

The Everywhere Girl is a woman who was in a stock photography shoot whose image started showing up everywhere that someone needed a college student. One of these places is book covers. (Another was the home pages of both Dell and HP, simultaneously, much to their dismay.

The folks at Idée have trained their PixID image recognition software on a set of book covers and come up with a great post showing everywhere the Everywhere Girl has appeared on a book cover. It's a nice walk through book cover design, showing how many layers of imagery go onto the front of the book.

coverflow and interactive visual displays of images representing texts

On Tame the Web, Kyle has written a good roundup of library user interfaces based on Apple's "coverflow" style image browser. As always, the key observation is that book designers and publishers put a lot of effort into making the cover of a book be something to make you understand what's inside the book, and browsing displays that take advantage of that can be super effective in helping you sift through new materials quickly.

One thing I observed in looking at the coverflow based interfaces compared to the other page by page book browsing tools e.g. Google Books is the difference in direction and orientation that the systems have. With many online text tools, the assumption is that you are reading from an infinite scroll top to bottom, and that the page extends forever down. The coverflow world gives you that same sense of infinite possibility left to right. Somehow that change in orientation makes it that much more familiar to grasp, and I'm not sure why.

Towns weigh privatizing libraries (Boston Globe)

from a March 20, 2008 Boston Globe; quoted in full. I'll go back and hyperlink later, but I wanted to capture this.

(note to self needs new category)

1)Published on Thursday, March 20, 2008 by The Boston Globe

2 Towns Weigh Privatizing Libraries

by Connie Paige

Already, some towns across Massachusetts are charging for school
sports, cutting school bus service, and imploring voters to raise
property taxes. But now, in an unprecedented move in the state, two
communities are considering proposals to privatize their libraries.

The separate privatization proposals in Tewksbury and Dartmouth are
still in the early stages, but the idea is nonetheless stunning
advocates in a state where towns often put the word free in the name
of their library.

The general approach would be to turn over the library’s day-to-day
operations to private companies. The idea, which would need approval
by the towns in each case, could also put the libraries at risk of
losing state funding.

Celeste Bruno - a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Board of Library
Commissioners, which certifies public libraries - said Tewksbury and
Dartmouth would be the first communities in Massachusetts to
privatize their libraries. She said the library commissioners would
oppose any such move.

“There is a huge difference between a private, for-profit company and
a library which essentially belongs to the community and answers to
every resident in the Commonwealth,” Bruno said.

Privatized libraries are not unheard of in other states. A Maryland-
based company, Library Systems and Services LLC, called LSSI, runs 65
library branches in four states: Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, and
California, according to Dean McCausland, LSSI president.

In a telephone interview, he said LSSI relies on taxes and grants,
but not fees, to run the libraries and turn a profit for the company.
LSSI generally does not hire unionized employees, helping it to save
on benefits packages.

Both Tewksbury, northwest of Boston, and Dartmouth, in the
southeastern part of the state, have been struggling to keep up with
the rising costs of municipal government while keeping taxes
relatively low. Both towns are facing possible property tax overrides.

In Tewksbury, officials have told voters they will face deep
municipal budget cuts this year unless they pass a series of tax
overrides, including one for about $5.3 million. A date for the
override has not been set, said Town Manager David Cressman.

Budget-balancing proposals include imposing user fees to fund all
high school athletics, senior center services, and trash collection,
as well as library privatization.

“They’re all lousy ideas, but so is going broke,” said Jay Kelley,
chairman of Tewksbury’s Financial Planning Task Force.

Kelley said task force members unanimously approved investigating
library privatization after a resident suggested the idea.

Dartmouth is also investigating whether to draw up a contract with
LSSI, said Denise Medeiros, the town’s library director.

Medeiros said that a subcommittee of the town’s Finance Committee is
exploring privatization of other services as well, including the
Department of Public Works.

Medeiros said she does not see privatization as an answer to the
town’s budget problems, because the library would still rely on local
tax dollars to operate.

Finances have been so shaky that the town has already closed one of
its three library branches permanently and another branch
temporarily, Medeiros said.

On April 1, the town’s voters will consider six tax override questions.

One of those measures, raising $250,000, would help cover the library
budget, which is $878,196 this year.

Robert Ferrari of Tewksbury said he believes that private companies
are held to stricter standards.

“I’m pro-privatizing as much of government as possible,” said
Ferrari, who runs a local blog about issues in Tewksbury.

“The government cannot run anything that a business couldn’t do better.”

At the two-story brick library, built in 1999, patrons voiced their
concern about privatization.

Shannon O’Neil, 19, on spring break from the University of
Massachusetts in Amherst, said she has no Internet access at her home
in Tewksbury and needed the library to study for a biology course.
Said O’Neil: “The library’s public, so everyone can use it.”

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