Superpatron

Mad Men Reading List via NYPL

From the New York Public Library blog, "Mad Men Reading List"

If you follow The Battery Park City Library on Twitter then you've seen our tweets linking to books that have appeared in the hit television show Mad Men. These titles are a great way to gain insight into the episodes and the social and cultural times in which the series is set. Like the set and costume design, the literary choices of the show really add a stamp of authenticity. Dipping into these classics is also a great way to help with withdrawals while waiting for new episodes to air.

[needs photo of bookshelf or display]

ah, the New York Daily News did a feature story on librarian Billy Parrott:

The most in demand: "The Group," the 1963 Mary McCarthy novel about life after Vassar that Betty Draper, ex-wife of central character Don Draper, managed to keep from dropping in the tub.

"That's one that's constantly out. I can't keep it on the shelves," he said.

The Daily Beast in 2009 did some commentary and pulled a few book covers

Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates (1961).

A young married couple moves into a Connecticut bedroom town with a son and daughter in 1955 and then their lives fall apart. Sound familiar? Of course, the story is probably most familiar for moviegoers who saw Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet take star turns in the story last year. Show creator Matthew Weiner told The New York Times recently, “Revolutionary Road was given to me three years after I wrote the pilot.” He said if he had read the book, he probably wouldn’t have tried to write the show. “Yates was there. This is what he was writing about.”

An exercise for the reader: find a movie, assemble the reading list that goes with it. Which other videos inspire building a shelf full of books to go with them?

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.

How do you keep track of your list of books?

this is "collection development", but from a personal point of view...

How do you keep track of a list of books, in some way that it's usable and useful at the library, usable and useful at Amazon, handy with you when you are walking through some interesting independent bookstore or doing research online?

This ends up being complicated enough that it's hard to say that there's one "best" answer, since different people are doing different things with that list. Let's go through a few of them.

At the Ann Arbor District Library, they have a feature that lets my checkouts get saved so that when I check out a book it gets added to a list which I can subsequently browse or download. Handy for retrospectively remembering what I was reading, or for browsing through again for ideas on things to reread, or refinding a book to recommend.

There is of course the Amazon wish list, which in addition to saving books for you to buy later, also helps their recommendation system trigger suggested new purchases for you. For me most of the time these days the recommended book gets pulled over to the library web site to check out or put on hold or suggest if it's a title they don't have.

For keeping lists of books in some social way, I'm using Librarything; the big advantage to that is that you can surf your way through your collection and others collections and find kindred spirits, people who have found that same book printed only 5000 times and interesting enough to make a comment on it. There are other book list sharing systems which I haven't used as much.

Paul Bausch wrote a book list managment application once upon a time that I used to keep my book list in, largely a list of kids books; that was a simple annotated list and a publishing tool very similar to blogger for generating a page full of cover images and links. I liked it, but there wasn't a business in it, but I still liked the model where the hosting site generated a page that you published yourself.

Melissa Kiser alerted me to the book list management service on worldcat.org - which gets you a huge collection to search through and then pick items that you want to save for later. It's handy in that it works across libraries, so that you can search in worldcat and create a list which would be useful to reference to find the closest library that holds a work.

Did I mention paper? Yes, paper. Write down things you want to read on a piece of paper, maybe a lovely little durable book, and work your way through them as you find them.

Similarly, there should be lots and lots of not very high tech ways to use spreadsheets to keep track of reading lists, either an offline list which you dump out from time to time, or an online list in Google Spreadsheets that keeps track. The Google version could even do lookups for you through a function call and tell you something about book status in your library or the cost of a used book (writing said functions an exercise to the reader).

You'd like a mobile phone to be useful in this. It's not absurd to repurpose your mobile's address book to put in author names, and then jog your memory at the book-place of authors you're looking for by browsing that category in your address book. For modern living authors that can actually be a really good idea, since in this day of the net more of them will have their own web pages and more will be accessible in some way.

How do you keep track of books?

(this post missing some links)

The Undigested History of the Nantucket Atheneum

from Common-Place v2 n1 Oct 2001

The Undigested History of the Nantucket Atheneum
Lloyd Presley Pratt

Tearing up floorboards in search of hidden treasure is a bad idea. A messy process, it seldom yields anything of value. As a rule, attics are a better bet. [...]

As construction began, floorboards came up, walls and doors came down. Eventually the building itself was lifted off its foundation as the crawl space was turned into a ground floor. But to my mind, the removal of the floorboards marked the turning point of the renovation. For as it happens, the space beneath them sheltered a collection of over five hundred nineteenth-century pamphlets.

It continues with a wonderful story of the destruction of the original Atheneum in the Great Fire, a call to citizens up and down the East coast to restore the library, and the presumed use of less valuable materials (today's equivalent would be the leftover magazines at the public magazine rack) to block out the drafts from the winter chill.

Thanks to Dan Drake for identifying the bit of Ann Arbor to Nantucket serendipity that led me to this.

Technorati Tags: nantucket, archives, history

Sort your home library by ISBN

In the "there's too many books in boxes to find them all, time to sort" mode:

I'm starting to rearrange our home library by ISBN instead of by topic or call number. This has a couple of interesting side effects, which seem to be useful. Pictures to follow at some point once it's stable.

When you do an ISBN sort, effectively you're sorting by publisher, and within the publishers you're sorting by size and longevity. This puts the McGraw-Hills and the Penguins at the front of the shelf, the MIT Press and U of Michigan Press in the middle, and someone who figured out how to get an ISBN number to print your own books dead last.

Actually shelving books is starting to look super easy. For big presses, just throw the book somewhere near others that have the same logo on it; for little presses, throw it on the right shelf. At some point you'll want to reorganize to make things make more sense, but remember for now some books are in boxes and you're just trying to unearth them. In part, you want to make it dead easy to put books into the right box without thinking too hard and to still find the book on the first try.

Some things pop out fast. Any book pre a certain vintage doesn't have an ISBN, which makes it an antique in some way. Bound galleys don't have ISBNs, and some (but not all) magazines are missing individual ISBNs for each issue. The journals that you wrote don't have ISBNs (yet!), and all of those annual reports are missing these numbers.

It's remarkably nice to have all the books from the same press next to each other, because it suggests another path to more books, as well as a path to people (editors, publicists, designers) who are part of the process of book marketing. Some presses regularly print all kinds of related stuff and by seeing what you have collected together you can guess there may be more of the same to look for. The little presses are all at the end, so you have a jumble there (but a fun jumble).

The biggest usefulness of this quite frankly is that it doesn't take any time at all to decide where a book goes once you have settled on the shelf sizes, and you can safely box things away and find things using ISBNs as you external markings on boxes.

Other people have considered this, notably this post on Hackito Ergo Sum: The Library Problem:

The problem with the ISBN number is that it isn't a very good number to use to catalog the books. Sorting by ISBN number would create a list which didn't have anything to do with the author or the subject of the book. This would create an effectively random order of books and make it very difficult to find what you are looking for.

To the extent that one McGraw Hill book is pretty much the same as the other, this might be true; but there's a distinctive style from a lot of smaller presses that I seem to collect books from, and with the smaller presses you start to get a lot closer to contact with individuals.

This classification does also show up one thing about the typical library binding; the standard place for the call number is on the spot on the book where the typical publisher's logo is. Someone somewhere has an opportunity to preserve the logo and put a call number on it at the same time for additional ease in findability on the shelf.

Now - just - to get the first block of my very own ISBN numbers financed. There's a big perceived difference in quality between books in the 8xxxx series and the 9xxxxx series - the ever so slightly bigger publishers seem to have a lot more chance of producing a book that looks real.

A subsequent task, naturally, is to register as an official library, one that can send and receive inter-library loan requests; I have a sneaking suspicion that if I compose a properly ordinary looking ALA form that this is something that might just work.

"Publishers International Isbn Directory" (Gale Group)

Technorati Tags: bookshelf, isbn, classification, consequences

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.

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

Help me write superpatron!

I'm always on the lookout for story ideas. Please use del.icio.us and tag your posts with superpatron - I'll use that article stream as inspiration.

Technorati Tags: delicious, superpatron

GuruLib, an organizing tool for home libraries

Found in the inbox:

Hello Mr. Edward Vielmetti,

My wife and I developed a free mashup webservice called GuruLib (www.gurulib.com) to help organize home libraries. Using a book shelf metaphor, GuruLib catalogs books, movies, music, games and software online. You can keep your virtual book shelfs private and hence visible only to the owner or make it public and share the catalog with your friends. In addition, GuruLib helps keep track of borrowed items. All essential cataloging information like author, synopsis, genre, front cover etc. are automatically fetched from either Amazon database or from 530 public and university libraries around the world. Our home libary is cataloged under www.gurulib.com/coolabcgirl

I would like you to take a look at the webservice and if found interesting please review that in your blog.

Thanks and Regards
Christina & Rana Basheer
8002 Halsey Street,
Lenexa, KS 66215

Technorati Tags: library, homelibrary, gurulib

Books by genre (Rebecca Blood on the Waterboro Public Library)

As seen in What's in Rebecca's Pocket?

Waterboro Public Library (Waterboro, ME) has added new list to their excellent list of books by genre: Reservoir Noir—Mysteries and other fiction with a featured element of intentional submerging, inundating, and flooding of towns, villages, cities, and other places.

Also on this list is Handyman Fiction (Sarah E. Brown, Fiction-L), which will be of some use to the users of the aforementioned tool library.

Technorati Tags: flood, fiction-l, reservoir, genre