The breakup of the old library, Part 1

In my last post, I described the characteristics of libraries during the century before 1975. During that century, libraries faced no fundamental changes and were fully in control of how they presented themselves to patrons. That stability and control have now been shattered. Why?
The first crack came with the automation of library card catalogs in [...]

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The old library

Until recently the online catalog continued to contain records only for items physically held by the library system. As libraries have entered into cooperative relationships, this principle of telling “what the library has” has eroded. In union catalogs that contain records from libraries of more than one institution, the concept was expanded to “what at [...]

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How other people organize libraries

[W]e have all kinds of tools that are organized to aid in the process of finding information that we need: telephone books, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, indexes, catalogs, museum registers, archival finding aids, and databases, among others.
– Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 2.
 Before reading this passage, [...]

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Why we organize

We organize because we need to retrieve.
– Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 1.
 Leaving aside the folks who organize because of OCD…
Is there a good study out there about the range of ways that library patrons use to retrieve? Librarians organize for patrons, yet it seems to [...]

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How libraries reinvented knowledge

Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton note how the development by the Greeks of libraries, as storehouses of the written word, changed the possibilities of knowledge from what they had been in a purely oral society:
Every library comfortably contains writings and juxtaposes ideas that, if they were represented by their proponents in the flesh, might [...]

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Does online research lead to superficiality?

James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, writes about his research into the costs of having more research materials available online.
The benefits of having the materials online are obvious: Ease of finding, ease of searching, ease of printing.
Evans wondered whether there were costs along with those benefits. He found that the ease of [...]

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The good old ALA

On July 20, I renewed my membership in the American Library Association online, and had that renewal confirmed by e-mail.
On August 11, I got a letter and a renewal form from the ALA, urging me to renew my membership soon. The letter asks me to “renew online…and save the stamp”.

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Ways of knowing

A paraphrase of something I wrote in 1997:
Human societies have two ways of storing knowledge: Written down in libraries, archives, etc.; and memorized in people’s minds.
The amount of knowledge that is written down is ever-increasing, but the amount that an individual can memorize is biologically limited.
Managing that growing disparity will require better searching and cataloging [...]

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“Bookhunter” interview

My friend and co-worker Laural Winter interviews Jason Shiga, the author of Bookhunter, my favorite graphic novel.
Bookhunter is the story of how the Oakland Public Library’s detective squad and SWAT team cracked a 1973 book theft case. If you find the idea of a public library having a detective squad and a SWAT team intriguing, [...]

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Demonstrating commitment

A point often made in defense of the requirement that librarians get a master’s degree in library science and the recommendation that they remain current members of the American Library Association is that these two acts “demonstrate commitment” to the profession.
If demonstrating commitment is the important thing, then permit me to make this modest proposal: [...]

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