Superpatron

culinary implement library: cake pan collections

The Chicago Tribune runs an AP wire story on the new-found social trend that it's OK to share expensive, single use objects like wood chippers in your neighborhood - or cake pans.

At the library in Galesburg, Ill., a dozen cake pans shaped like hearts, dinosaurs or footballs sit behind the counter, available for checkout. Karen Marple, the children's librarian, keeps track of the pans, which she buys on sale or at yard sales for library cardholders to share.

"They don't want to spend so much money on a cake pan that they're going to use one time," Marple said. "It's free. It's economics."

they have quite a selection

Need to bake a fun cake for a special event? The library has cake pans available for checkout. The shapes include a book, heart, ghost, Big Bird, teddy bear, truck, rag doll, dinosaur, lamb, cat, train, football, batman and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Pop Goes The Library ran a piece last summer on the Reed Memorial Library Cake Pan Collection in Ravenna, OH

A friend in Ohio informed me recently that her local public library, Reed Memorial in Ravenna, has a collection of cake pans that it loans out to its members. Not only that! They provide OPAC access to them, too. Alf! Playboy Bunny Head! Elmo! Diego! He-Man! NASCAR! R2-D2! The list goes on! You can't place holds online, but there's a friendly note in the record directing interested patrons to the Children's Desk, where you can flip through the book of photos of the pans, and place a hold in person. According to the library's Policies page, cake pans (like DVDs) may be borrowed for 7 days, and the fine for overdues is $1/day.

note that no one, to my knowledge, is doing inter-library cake pan loans.

Digitization of books is great, except for when you skip the maps and get the title wrong

One of my favorite books in my own library is the 1916 Biennial Report of the Director from the Michigan Geological and Biological Survey, in which there is an account of the resurvey of the Michigan - Ohio border.  There is a very careful account and survey of all of the properties that the border crosses, along with as much history of the original marks of the border as can be unearthed, and accounts of where the straight line border deviates from straight to match the actual land use at the time.  (A few people's barns changed states as a result, but not more than were absolutely needed.)

The link above goes to the Google Books copy which is scanned in from the Stanford collection.  It's great that I now have this ready at my fingertips whenever I want to look at it without going up to a high shelf to pull it down, except that a few pages (notably pages following p.37) are missing their maps, and that it was pure happenstance that I found it because the title page reads

By Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (Australia). Division of Chemical Physics, Geological Survey Division

well, no, that's not who published it. 

I reported both of those errors to Google Book Search through the feedback mechanism; it makes me wonder just what the systematic error rate is on geological and biological survey books, since there was an era when all of them had map or plate inserts that folded out and the typical "every page is the same size" style of scanning is going to get this wrong more often than not.

Keep or toss? Public, research libraries struggle to manage collections

Two related stories on the theme of collection development .

One is the plight of the research library with a big acquisitions budget but that's running out of room to store all of its word-hoard from over the years.  The solution: for every 10 new books in the collection, get rid of 6 old ones.  The predictable result: research faculty in opposition.  From the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch:

Holding signs that read "Bricker Hall burns books" and "Don't Gut the Library," the group asked the library director to find more shelf and storage space for the school's growing collection.

The protesters said Ohio State has discarded 275,000 books and other printed materials from 2005 to 2008 and an additional 55,000 in the past four months.

"The 55,000 books are more than what the University of Minnesota system got rid of in all of last year, and the (total) is three times as many books as the University of Michigan has discarded over the same time," said Kevin Boyle, a history professor.

Note the fondness for old materials and for the experience of going through the stacks instead of fetching single works from closed stacks via a catalog or a digital search, and the particular plight of users of rare materials in non-Western languages who are served poorly or not at all by digitization.

The second problem shows what the opposite of getting rid of too many books brings you - library collections that have books in them that are so out of date or so worn out as to be inappropriate for any kind of current circulating library.  As noted by Eli Neiburger at Tech Uncamp, the blog Awful Library Books catalogs the worst of the worst that need to be removed from the shelves to make room for better ones

I Can Learn About Calculators and Computers
Kenyon
1961

This lovely gem from the early 1960’s is still sitting in this library’s youth section.  No one felt that it was necessary to weed in the advent of portable calculators from the late 1970’s or the advent of personal computers in the late 80’s and 90’s.  I can only imagine that perhaps this community the children are stuck in a time warp and waiting for the arrival of radical new technologies like carbon paper, rotary phones and fire.  By the way one of the nice little touches of this book is the flyer glued inside detailing the late return fee of 2 cents per day.

Tattered, worn out copies of popular materials are easily as bad for these collections as stale, dusty anachronisms always on the shelves, and it takes different management techniques to snag and replace or remove each.

What's funny (or amusing or sad or interesting or puzzling) is that the same work can be completely inappropriate for a circulating library collection and very reasonable to keep for a research collection; if you were doing work on the history of technology, that 1961 gem is an artifact, not something to be used for current instruction.

Card Catalog Card Blinds

Card Catalog Card Blinds
Originally uploaded by Habeas Brulee

A set of blinds made from reused library catalog cards, as done by Flickr user Habeas Brulee. Photo used with permission.

Local journalism meets local libraries: Everyblock Charlotte listing of new books

Everyblock Charlotte is a so-called "hyperlocal" news service for Charlotte, NC, reporting on news and collecting public records from news sources through the area.  One of the feeds they show is the new additions to the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

I've seen new book listings in the local newspaper before - it's easiest in towns where there is a relatively small library - and it's nice to see municipal data being reused cleverly online, complete with book cover images.

Thanks to Matt Hampel for bringing this to my attention.

ludotheques, or toy libraries, let kids borrow toys to play with

Toy libraries are places where people can check out or use toys from a shared collection.  There is an international association, ITLA:

The INTERNATIONAL TOY LIBRARY ASSOCIATION (ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONALE DES LUDOTHEQUES) was created in 1990 in Torino during the 5th international conference of toy libraries. It has been found necessary to get a permanent link structure. The decision to form ITLA was taken on May 28th 1987 at the 4th International Conference of Toy Libraries in Toronto.

and a French national affiliate, ALF

L'Association des Ludothèques Françaises est une association nationale de jeunesse et d'éducation populaire, agréée par le ministère de la jeunesse, des sports et de la vie associative.

A local example Ann Arbor is Fiona's Toy Library, as featured on the Lucy Ann Lance Show:

Fiona approached Community Action Network, the umbrella organization for the City of Ann Arbor’s four community centers, and soon Fiona’s Toy Library opened at Bryant Community Center.  Open every Thursday from 1:00 PM-3:30 PM, children from 0 to 6 years old can check-out toys for free.  All families are welcome, and there is no time limit as to when you return the toys.  Break a toy?  Not to worry; they know it happens, and there is no charge for broken or lost toys.

nice to see this happen!

new blog "US IMPACT" on the impact of public access computing on libraries

A new blog US IMPACT is hosted at the University of Washington:

The purpose of this blog is to share information and begin a dialog about the impact of free access to computers and the internet on librarians, libraries, users and communities, as part of a cooperative project between the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of Washington’s Information School to conduct a national study of the impact of Public Access Computers on communities.

The public access systems I have used in my days on the net started out with collections of computers or terminals set up for computer science or math departments and only sometimes grudgingly shared with liberal arts majors; that progressed towards free dialup access in systems like the Cleveland Freenet which in turn begat low cost commercial dialup access.

Libraries as public computing centers puts them one step closer to the role of public production libraries, an early 1990s era vintage vision of what happens when the means of production of media is in the hands of the people and not the commerical world:  From the Immediast International's Seizing the Media:

Public production libraries will be built in sisterhood with the public libraries that now exist. Within each production library will be the facilities to produce print, audio, visual, and database material. "Librarians" will serve as technicians, maintainance, and repair people. Production libraries will give people a larynx through which to speak. The media seized, corporations silenced, and the State under relentless scrutiny, we will reconect and celebrate who we are.

Did it work out this way?  Not quite, not that you'd really expect it to - there's so much to consume via a computer that it's hard to get quiet time to produce.  It's still worthwhile thinking what the role of the library is for people creating their own media and not just using it as a public access point to media that's already there for the viewing.