Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Comcast blocking Ann Arbor District Library email

UPDATE: Email problem (aka "comcastrophy") fixed now.

Submitted by eli on Thu, 11/29/2007 - 10:59am.
Attention Comcast Customers: AADL Emails Blocked!

Hello Comcast Email Subscribers! On Wenesday, 11/28, Comcast decided that AADL was spamming their customers and began blocking our emails. We have already applied to be removed from the blocked senders list, but in the meantime, comcast.net addresses cannot receive email from AADL. This means that you may miss a notice that a request is ready to be picked up, or a reminder that an item is due or overdue. Please check your myaccount page to view the current status of your account until we get this resolved. We hope to hear back from Comcast today, and we will keep you posted right here as we continue to work on the problem.

Thanks for your patience, and as always, please contactus or comment on this post if you have any questions.

eli

Technorati Tags: aadl, comcast

Tool libraries (and cake pan libraries) in Michigan

The Detroit Free Press has a story about libraries with unusual collections in Michigan:

Libraries lend out art, tools and more

November 25, 2007

BY CHRISTINA HALL

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Need a wrench? Check out the Grosse Pointe Public Library.

How about some art? Try the Ann Arbor District Library.

Looking for a fishing pole? The St. Clair County Library System can help.

And if you're in the Upper Peninsula and need to borrow a cake pan, well, visit the Manistique School and Public Library.

Libraries aren't just repositories for books and CDs, they house collections that help cardholders do everything from fix their homes to create different shapes of cookies.

It's a nice story - including some sense for the history of these collections and how they have accumulated over the years.

Squirrel Hill branch of the Pittsburgh Library

On our Thanksgiving trip to Pittsburgh we stopped in at the Squirrel Hill branch library. It's constructed in a parking garage, and before it was renovated it was functional but not in the slightest bit lovely. Now it's lovely, really lovely with a well lit glass area in the front overlooking the street to read in, and a nice kids area near the back..

The Pittsburgh area libraries were redesigned by a team from Maya Design. I had seen the presentation of these ideas before and talked to Paul Gould about them. What was fascinating was to see these high design ideals in practice smashed up against the vernacular design of libraries by non-librarians who occupy parts of the space in the library.

Where this was most clear was at the back entrance, where the local Friends of the Library had a book sale. Instead of clear oval signage there was a jumbled box of books, and shelved old books for sale on shelves marked with masking tape. In an ordinary library this would not be anything out of the ordinary, but there had clearly been so much work done to change the signs that it was a quite jarring transition. It's almost as if the space needed to have some transition between the street and the library that could be occupied in a sensible way without it having to be kept shiny and neat.

Tool library at Grosse Pointe Public Library (Michigan)

In a continuing series on tool libraries this from Grosse Pointe MI:

Tools are located at the Central Library and are loaned free with your library card. We are constantly adding new tools. If you don’t find what you are looking for on this list, please contact us.

Provided and maintained by THE GROSSE POINTE ROTARY CLUB
as a continuing memorial to Robert M. Orr, Director, 1949-73.

some examples of tools loaned: in the A's there's ADJUSTABLE WRENCH; AUGER, EARTH; AWL; AXE; the N's have NAIL PULLER, NAIL PUNCH SET, NEEDLES, NIPPLE EXTRACTOR, NUMBERS.

New knitting books at the Ann Arbor District Library!

In the "wall of books" tradition, here's the current list of AADL knitting books, with covers of the last 100 acquired going back about a year. Warning! This page may load slowly.

As always, covers generate ideas for books to check out - in this case I put on hold Julie Jersild Roth's Knitting Nell

Everywhere Nell goes, she works on her knitting, quietly observing life around her, until one day she enters one of her creations in the county fair, and receives rewards beyond her dreams.

The very tiny shell script that generates this turns RSS records into links to AADL books with images stored on the Syndetics site; it would be a small matter of programming to also sync this up with Amazon images or your favorite online bookstore.

MeL Databases - research, newspaper and history databases free to Michigan residents

This slideshare (courtesy of Suzanne Robinson from the Michigan Library Consortium) gives updates and details of databases available for free to all Michigan residents through the MeL databases collection.

The session was given at the MLA annual conference in Lansing - here's the session description:

Thursday, November 8, 8:45am-10:00am
Room: 201
T04: MeL Databases: New Gems and Trusted Standards
Track: Collections Presented by: Library of Michigan
Sponsored by: OCLC in honor of Sandra Yee
Speakers: Sheryl Mase, Director of Statewide Services, Library of Michigan; Suzanne Robinson, Databases Training Coordinator, Michigan Library Consortium
What’s new? How have your favorite databases changed? What cool new features can you show your patrons? This is your chance to get detailed information on new features and enhancements for the new three-year slate of MeL databases. Discover new and innovative ways to use the MeL databases in your academic, public, school, or special library. There will be time for your questions.

| View | Upload your own

Mashups: what happened?

The Krafty Librarian, a medical librarian in Ohio, asks what happened to library mashups

I recently read where the Journal of Biomedical Informatics recently had a call for papers for their special issue on Semantic Biomedical Mashups. I look forward to reading it when it comes out. However, this has me thinking. Where are all the library mashups? Talis had the Mashing up the Library competition last year, but I haven't seen any information on it for this year. The Talis Mashing of the Library competition boards are silent. The last post was made by David Rothman over 27 weeks ago. The Second OCLC Research Software Contest ran from July 1, 2006 through September 2006, however I haven't heard anything about it this year.

Here's some possible answers, but by no means all of them.

People building book finding systems started building in things into their tools rather than having to wait for users to mash things together. LibraryThing has scooped up a bunch of good ideas, and Book Burro continues to make almost all of my earlier fussing around with Greasemonkey unnecessary. When software developers listen to the feedback loop from their customers, it's not so necessary for those folks to write code to get their ideas in play.

Library systems are woeful in general for being easily reachable by ordinary mortals, in part because the book finding systems in them are designed primarily as hermetically sealed units with proprietary and inward-facing programming interfaces. So there aren't a lot of hooks to hook in on.

People are lazy, and when they've suitably scratched the mashup itch to solve the problems they see around them, they go off to the next thing (twitter, facebook, etc).

(hm, is there a super-easy twitter library mashup just waiting to happen? rss feed of something + twitterfeed? can't do every new book, but perhaps some subset...cookery? knitting? hmm)

Mostly, though, these sort of things are just happening (and much more so than in 2005 or 2006), and it's not notable that it happens to be a mashup - the notable part is that library directors are blogging, library patrons are writing book reviews, and the like. Perhaps the next steps are micro-steps, things like storytime hours being a one-click add to your calendar using a tool like IBM's Operator plugin for Firefox.

Rebuilding the Georgetown Public Library

The Georgetown Public Library in DC burned on April 30, 2007. Since then there has been work towards recovering, restoring, and rebuilding the building and the collection, but there's a lot still to do.

Some notable activities:

Benefit CD:

Fire devastated the Georgetown Public Library on April 30th, 2007. That loss made us think about the fragile state of our neighborhood public libraries. This project is the product of a group of individuals who have a hopeful vision for building better, stronger libraries throughout the city. The artists contributed their work, Gypsy Eyes Records and The Federal Reserve Collective contributed use of the works, and Proper Topper contributed production costs. All proceeds from sales of this CD go directly to the DCPL Foundation. (order details)

DC Public Library Foundation fundraising and restoration:

The Georgetown Library sits surrounded in scaffold, the windows covered in plywood, a temporary roof in place. Steel supports help secure the roof and the paint has been removed as part of the drying process. Inside, the debris has been cleared away and the space is eerily clean and empty.

Now the hard work of damage assessment is underway: structure, collections, furnishings, and historic restorations needed for the Peabody Room. While about 90% of Peabody Room items were pulled from the fire, they have now been vacuum dried and the DCPL Foundation, thanks to your contributions, sent two librarians to the drying facility in Texas to triage the collection. As a result, the collection will return to Washington and enter the restoration phase sooner.

Ongoing fire-fighting woes in DC (Bloomberg News):

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Washington firefighters had to string together a mile of hose, run it over a bridge and connect directly with water mains in the next neighborhood to put out a blaze engulfing an apartment building.

They couldn't get adequate water pressure from nearby hydrants. So after reaching the fire in a minute and 48 seconds, firefighters took more than seven hours to control the inferno last month in the Adams Morgan district, a center of nightlife in the U.S. capital.

The predicament underscored the crumbling infrastructure in Washington, where the transit authority proposes to raise prices to pay for maintenance to the aging rail system. The Adams Morgan fire sparked a public fight between the new fire chief and the independent water authority, prompting Mayor Adrian Fenty to threaten to take over the water agency, as he has the failing school system.

It wasn't the water system's first failure. On a single day in April, fires ravaged both the historic public library in Georgetown and the 134-year-old Eastern Market, a Capitol Hill landmark. Two hydrants by the library didn't provide any water at all.

Technorati Tags: dc, fire, library, georgetown, wasa, superpatron

Ben Bunnell on Google Book Search

from their Google@School series:

Technorati Tags: google, googlebooks, search, ben-bunnell, goog

Duke University's Library Hacks blog

Duke University has a (new? new to me) blog called Library Hacks

Library Hacks is a place to find out about tools, resources, services, and ideas that can help make the library more efficient for you. It’s written mostly by librarians, but we’ll also have occasional student and faculty guest bloggers.

Our inspirations are blogs like LifeHacker, LifeHack, and ParentHacks, and book series like O’Reilly’s Hacks Series.

Recent articles include links to their podcasts page as a source of primary sources for audio materials for research, details on how to view Census data updates via RSS, a review of the citation generator Zotero, and a review of Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries.

Not all of these materials are available in every public library, but the descriptions are clear and useful, and if you have an academic or research library that has a ton of special purpose data resources you would do well to surface them from time to time through this blog format to give people a heads up on how and when to get to them.

Technorati Tags: library, blog, duke, durham, north-carolina, hacks