Finding Answers IV – This or That

Keeping Things Found

Why is it we always find what we are looking for in the last place we look?

Finding Answers – Unexpected Reference Sources

The issue of Lapham’s Quarterly that I saw on my friend’s table was about music and it is a treasure trove of information for general readers and researchers alike.

Bento Box Searching

So it seems libraries, at least a few academic libraries and public libraries, have caught up with this single search process, known also as federated search, (rather than searching fields in the library catalog,) as a way to introduce the researcher to articles, books, and resources valued enough to show up in the search.

Stories Need to be Told

I’m reminded of stories for many reasons, not just because libraries hold mountains of story books, both true and fiction, but because I run into stories every day with people I meet, which need to be told.

Useful Apps for Your Library

We now have, by virtue of the Internet, enough links about apps to keep us searching for what we need for a very long time. Searching for “Librarian’s note-taking app” gives a result of 3,400,000 items. I don’t think there’s time to look and try out all of those. Of course, each of us have different needs for which some apps might be useful, but our particular way of working doesn’t fit the way the app wants us to work. So is it trial and error that we use apps? Do we get friends to suggest a good app for us?

Toiling in Obscurity

The phrase “toiling in obscurity” is an interesting adage used by authors and writers. It is probably in the minds of many librarians—that they are engaged but obscured. Whether you are a new librarian or have been in the system for years and years, preparing books for the public in the back rooms or even at the top as directors and department heads, I suspect every one of you have had days of wondering, “Is this all there is?”

Information Pulls a Disappearing Act

Several have sounded the alarm that information is disappearing. We’ve known for a long time that some of our oldest materials were deteriorating and that we needed to microfilm (now digitize) the items for preservation. What’s happening now is that new information is disappearing from current databases and resources.

The Future of the Librarians

We have been inundated by articles about the future of the library, yet little has been said about the future of librarians; those bastions of information and troughs of information and experience people rely on. Like the oft quoted proverb from Africa “When a knowledgeable old person dies, a whole library disappears,” librarians are surely as much the library as the brick and mortar buildings they work in.

Reading With Colors

Barbara Laws, a first grade teacher in Grandblanc, Michigan, was experimenting with colors. Some of her most disruptive students (who had difficulty reading) found using color overlays improved their attention and reading. Law had discovered the idea in the book Reading by the Colors, by Helen Irlen, published by the Irlen Institute in California. Irlen’s research revealed that 40 percent of students with reading problems actually had visual problems, many of which could be overcome through visual correction.

Book? Book? Do You Know Where This Book Is?

With more than one million books now being “published” per year, will we ever be able to preserve and maintain even a hint of that number in the near future?

Libraries’ Role in the Big Sort

Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort (2008) describes how we have been collectively sorting ourselves since the 1950s, moving and living among like-minded people, politics, economies, cultures, religions. We’ve all but left behind the melting pot where we can exchange ideas and conversations about real differences and needs. This melting pot can be the key to belonging and coming together to solve the largest of problems.

Record, Record, Who’s Got the Record?

On May 10–14, 2016, nearly three hundred recorded sound experts, librarians, archivists, preservationists, electronics engineers, collectors, and producers of recordings and electronic equipment; all came together at Indiana University to celebrate the fiftieth annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC).

These are the people—representing the largest collections of sound in US, Canada and several from the countries of Brazil, Germany, England, the Czech Republic, France, Austria, and the Netherlands—preserving history and providing information—whether music or voice found on cylinders, discs, magnetic tape, wire, or film. The sophistication of the methods used and the metadata involved with so many “carriers” in so many formats, with so many issues of different rates of deterioration, boggles the mind. From private recordings to major record labels, conferees were treated to expertise in all areas.

Privacy Laws, Libraries, and Librarians

This post provides a short list of resources for public libraries to consider when dealing with privacy policies and cases.