Welcome to Superpatron, and an introduction.

Welcome to Superpatron! This is a new weblog (and with it also several other new things to come) to discuss the role that library patrons have in shaping the libraries of the present and the future.

I've been a patron of the Ann Arbor District Library since moving to Ann Arbor for school in the early 1980s. One day last winter I sent in a note to the suggestion box at the library asking if they had RSS feeds in the works for the catalog. I got a reply about their future catalog plans which had the postscript

P.S. We love your blog.

Of course I blogged that reply, got some response from the library blog community about it, and ended up on the AADL's technology advisory board to look at what they had in progress. Since then I've gotten more involved in the technology of hosting a library catalog, though fortunately I don't have to do the work, just be enthusiastic about it and provide suggestions and snippets of code.

I like libraries and support them wholeheartedly. We have so many books at home that our shelves are full, and it's great to be able to get new ones and bring them back when we're done with them. Our library is a super place to spent time at, has a kids room that my two boys enjoy and provided space for my 41st birthday party with a books theme.

I've been a library patron for a long time. In elementary school, when we got three copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Christmas, one of them got donated to the Birchview Elementary School library. As an unruly middle schooler I read a lot in the Graveraet Middle School library, and then in high school I spent a lot of time after school at Northern Michigan University's Olson Library .

At college at the University of Michigan I did student work at the dorm libraries at Bursley and Alice Lloyd halls checking out books, and studied and wrote papers in the UGLI, Grad, and Chemistry libraries. (I was kicked out of the Law Library once while trying to study there, I guess my undergraduate attire was too clearly not that of a law student.) After a bunch of false starts I finally graduated by writing a long paper based on research at the Bentley Historical Library. I worked for a summer at the Grad at the Humanities Text Initiative, a piece of the Digital Library Production Service that led to the Google Book Search scanning efforts at Michigan.

This goes to say mostly that I love my library, and I'm looking for ways that librarians and libraries and friends of the library can do things to get more people to think the same way.

Welcome! Comments are open. I'm still working out a few details before I go super-public with this, but here's a start.

Comments

[Patricia Uttaro]

What a fabulous thing you have begun! I very much hope that there are more folks like you out there who will lend your enthusiasm and expertise to our libraries. I just sent your url to my own "SuperPatron" in Spencerport NY. She is a member of the library board for the Ogden Farmers' Library and is also our technical guru. I hope she visits! I've added you to my bloglines feeds, so I'm looking forward to some good conversation and sharing.

[Dorothea]

What a wonderful idea this is! I hope you'll consider expanding it to message boards or the like -- a group of SuperPatrons would be an invaluable resource for librarians and library sysadmins.

[eli]

Ed, this is great.

Plus, I think I coined a phrase!

[Erin]

Hi! I found your blog through the shifted librarian ... I love it!

I'm on a committee for my university's library (I'm an alumna, not a current student) and will be sending this to some folks there, too.

[Edward Vielmetti]

* Patricia - thanks for your comments. Do introduce me to your superpatron - I'm starting up a little moderated mailing list to go with this blog for the sorts of interactive discussions that aren't really blog fodder.

* Dorothea - I'm hoping that getting a patrons group together will be a big plus for libraries. I think if I do it right it will be a catalyst for sharing innovations.

* Eli, yup, it was your phrase. Of the 500+ uses of the word on Google I was able to find, most are in French, with one exception, this quote from CIO Magazine from 2001:

IF ANYONE IS A SUPERPATRON of that giant library called the Internet, it's me. What heaven! A global library that never closes!

* Erin: Welcome!