Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Ann Arbor District Library is hiring / foreign language, ESL, language learning

as posted on MICHLIB-L

The Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) is accepting applications for a Librarian, job #08-353.

Applications postmarked or received at one of our locations by 9:00pm on Friday, July 25, 2008 will be eligible for consideration.

The job description is available at each of our locations and on our website http://www.aadl.org/aboutus/employment.

Hiring range: $41,743 - $54,163

Contractual position with medical, dental and vision insurance available; paid vacation and sick leave; retirement plan.

One of the notable pieces of the job description is:

Selects, catalogs, and maintains the foreign language collection, the English as a Second Language (ESL) collection and the language learning materials.

The HR contact is Jennifer Brown for any questions - I am not the hiring manager or anything, just an occasion user of the foreign language collection.

Traverwood Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library grand opening (preview, with waterfall)

Grand opening party tonight!

Here's Eric Klooster's preview video of what it looks like from the inside when it rains.

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

twitter at your library - what should or could it do?

Ryan Eby just invited me to join the Ann Arbor District Library twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/aadl

He promises event notifications and other newsworthy stuff.

Once upon a time I built a "superpatronbot" that searched the AADL catalog via a Jabber bot - quite reasonably you could build one of these upon Twitter's direct message listings. Useful? Perhaps, especially if I could link a Twitter account to my library card and then be able to twitter

d aadl reserve anatomy of a murder dvd

and have it do a hold on it for me (or return some disambiguator if there were multiple choices).

(Reminder - Library Camp 2008 at the AADL, March 20 2008.)

Technorati Tags: aadl, twitter

Ann Arbor District Library elections, May 6, 2008

The election for the upcoming Ann Arbor District Library board has the following candidates. Note that there is one candidate for one two-year position, and four candidates for four four-year positions; that is, these positions are uncontested.

Original from the site of the Washtenaw County Clerk and Register of Deeds - that page has email addresses and phone numbers listed, and I'm copying them in here too. The candidate links are all to Arborwiki, which will in the due course of time fill in details.

Ann Arbor District Library - Trustee

One 2-Year Term
Name Address Phone E-mail
Edward Surovell 1000 Forest Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48105 734-761-6330 esurovell@aol.com

Four 4-Year Terms
Name Address Phone E-mail
Rebecca Head 910 Edgewood Place
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 734-668-9638 r_head@sbcglobal.net
Jean Ledwith King 424 Little Lake Dr., #38
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 734-662-4819 jking@ic.net
Margaret A. Leary 1056 Newport Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 734-663-7324 mleary@umich.edu
Prue Rosenthal 2105 Devonshire Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104 734-665-0941 pruer@aol.com

Vote early, vote often.

Technorati Tags: library, trustee, election, annarbor, aadl, vote

Library Camp 2008 at Ann Arbor District Library, March 20 2008

I met with Eli and the team at the AADL about the 2008 Library Camp to be held March 20 in Ann Arbor. (NOTE THE DATE - GOT IT WRONG THE FIRST TIME).

Continuing the tradition from 2006, there are some small amounts of conflicts with religious holidays - March 20 is Maundy Thursday, it's the Thursday before Easter and the Friday before Purim. I'm hoping that won't cause undue hardship for people who have break around that time, but with all of the other travel and new branch schedules that's what worked out.

The 2006 Library Camp had people coming mostly from within about 100 miles; given normal travel and time budgets I'm hoping we'll get a slightly wider draw, at least enough to make sure that someone can come from the Chicago area, someone makes it in from Indiana and Ohio and Ontario, and the odd person who might go further afield.

A history of other library camps (or similar) that have been done before:
- February 2006 - code4lib 2006, Corvallis OR
- April 2006 - Library Camp in Ann Arbor, MI
- September 2006 - Library Camp East in Darien, CT
- February 2007 - code4lib 2007, Athens GA
- March 2007 - L2 Unconference, Australia
- August 2007 - Library Camp NYC, Baruch College
- August 2007 - Library2.0 on the Loose, Australia
- February 2008 - code4lib 2008, Portland OR
- March 2008 - Library Camp 2008 in Ann Arbor, MI

There is of course a checklist of things to do, links to add, a wiki to find or co-opt for our purposes, local arrangements to arrange, assembling the right mix of librarians and non-librarians to make the day interesting etc.

We have space for about 100 people, up from the 40 or so that squeezed into the first Library Camp.

More details as they appear, looking forward to seeing you there!

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.

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.

Things I want to write more about here - categories A-G

Every so often I run into corners of the world that I want to explore. Here's some list of the things I'd like to write more about, even if I don't have a full blog-length posting for any of them written right now. I'm keying off the categories I've set up.

This is part 1: Amazon through Google Book Search.

Sorry no links yet....will hyperlink as I have time to edit, but I thought I'd get this out into the world.

Amazon - about the book cover and album cover art database they have; how to set up an affiliate bookstore that actually works; on using Amazon to do wish lists that are then fulfilled through your library (via Jon Udell); on using Amazon as a book finding system and then using Book Burro or similar to connect back to your library; much more I'm sure.

Ann Arbor - plans for a new library downtown; reviews of all of the branches; reviews of other Washtenaw County libraries; special libraries in town like the Ford Presidential Library

Archives - an interview with the folks who run the Labadie Collection; an interview with the Prelingers; an interview with Brewster Kahle; some discussion of the peculiar nature of archives in the digital age

Archival Television - Jeff Ubois blog of the same name; the loss of the video record; clearing and securing rights; bootlegs on Youtube; museums of the broadcast industry

Beyond big vendors - this was the title of a talk I gave; an exploration of consolidation in the integrated library systems space, and some understanding of new alternatives

Book Burro - at least an annual post on what it is (repetition is the soul of the net); a screencast showing how I use it; documentation for online book finding system developers to get them to have Book Burro pop up on their book screens; a discussion of how tools like this can be funded by affiliate revenues

Book covers - as finding aids; variations between editions; in online book finding and book inventory systems; search by contents of the cover, not contents of the book

Book trading - more reviews of any book trading systems I find; some stories about book swap clubs that meet in person; children's birthday parties where everyone brings a book and everyone gets a book

Bookins - how they advertise new inventory on Twitter; comparison with other book swap sites; integration with LibraryThing

Books - more book reviews, lots of book reviews would be welcomed; the book publishing industry as a whole; old books; smelly books; pretty much anything is fair game.

Books sorted by color - more discussion of cover art, illustrations, other metadata about the book captured in the cover art but not indexed by typical book finding systems; the book illustration business; how covers are designed; history of binding systems; algorithms to determine which color a book is; art and photographic illustrations of installations where books have been sorted by color

Bookshelves - compact shelving, buying shelves for personal libraries, reviews of bookcases, shelving for libraries, innovations in book shelving, reviews of books about bookshelves, how to build your own, built in shelving, what to do when yours fill up

Code - more code! software that does interesting things with book and library data; mashups, data extraction, search algorithms, recommender systems, page layout, interactive design, home grown alternative views of the library

Collection development - impact of patrons on collections; controversial materials and how they are added to the collection and perhaps subtracted from the collection; metrics used for weeding and deaccessions; building your personal library from another library's discards; libraries as endangering printed materials

Electronic collections - library originated book and non-book collections; hardware, software, and systems for managing and cataloging same; preservation of digital relics; copyright, fair use and international implications of same; the proper provenance of enthusiast collectors

Events and exhibits - individual events and exhibits, and also ways by which libraries can improve their ability to bring people through the door by hosting book-themed events. Compare libraries to bookstores and see how they stack up; facilities building and planning with events in mind.

Film - libraries for film; collecting video and film; archival television (via Jeff Ubois); rights, copyrights, and the like; stock footage libraries; impact of digital distribution on the circulation patterns in public libraries that have big DVD collections

Friends Bookshop - relationships between Friends groups and libraries; examples of particularly fun bookshops; self service bookshops; using friends book inventory to do outreach; purposes of friends bookshops - to entertain people who want to run a bookstore, or to raise money, or both

Friends of the library - about national and local organizations; demographics of friends groups; "Friends of the Library, for the net"; library advocacy; when friends groups turn into haters groups

Games - games in the library; word games; something more about Eli@AADL; Wii at the library. Games in the kids room - ice cream truck. Learning from games.

Google Book Search - contracts, restrictions on use of data, inaccuracies within, quality of scanning, quality of metadata, shout out to Ben Bunnell, aftermarket greasemonkey hacks to fix issues with, comparison with Microsoft et al, comparison with Open Library, Distributed Proofreaders

Google Scholar - library use and access to, Andrew Odlyzko on open publishing, relative frequency of citation of non-internet publications, Math 40 yr history of increased collaboration via Patrick Ion, quality of data, quality of metadata, use by scholars as replacement for vita