September 2nd, 2010 Brian Herzog
One function of public libraries is to be a repository for community history. The extent to which a library can do this will vary, but at the very least, the library has holdings of the local newspaper, which patrons can use to look up obituaries of local residents.
But the reality of this is changing. As newspapers struggle to stay alive, they’re exploring new revenue streams - our local paper recently started charging families to list obituaries, instead of providing that service for free. The paper is only published once a week for a town of 32,000 residents, but you can still see the effect below:
| Year |
#/Obits |
| 2000 |
444 |
| 2001 |
527 |
| 2002 |
523 |
| 2003 |
566 |
| 2004 |
556 |
| 2005 |
479 |
| 2006 |
500 |
| 2007 |
220 |
| 2008 |
215 |
| 2009 |
80 |
| 2010 |
26 (as of Aug.) |
And of the 80 obituaries in 2009, only 12 were from June-December. With dramatically fewer obituaries appearing in the paper, the long-term research value of a library’s newspaper holdings is diminished. There must be other factors at play too, but hopefully newspaper revenues will stabilize and this downward obituary trend will be reversed. Regardless, there will always at least be a gap for anyone doing genealogical research or just looking up a friend of family member.
And this doesn’t seem to be just a local thing. A Slashdot post describes the same thing on a bigger scale. There’s also a Boing Boing post that looks into Legacy.com, the company many newspapers are using to outsource obituary listings. The bottom line in both posts is that obituaries and death notices are turning into a cash cow business - and as it becomes more and more expensive to run an obituary, there are going to be fewer and fewer of them.
So, all of that is sad news - doubly so since it’s out of the control of libraries (unless we start publishing family-written obituaries on our own websites for free). But at my library, we have been working to improve access to what we do have. Tune in next week for Part Two of this post, detailing how we created an online index to the obituaries in our newspaper microfilm records, to make then easier for patrons and staff to locate.
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Posted under Library, Resources | 5 Comments »
August 31st, 2010 Brian Herzog
Sometimes when I am working on a post, I wonder if another library blogger has already covered it - an am afraid I’ll look kind of dumb rehashing something.
So I thought, wouldn’t it be great to set up a Google custom search engine to search all library-related blogs? Before I did, I checked if anyone already created one, and it turned out Library Zen had - four years ago (I’m even further behind than I thought).
LISZEN Search searches over 500 library blogs, and has an accompanying wiki to keep track. If you write about the library world, add yourself.
Something related that would also be nice is a custom search of just library websites - so it would be easy to quickly see what other library’s policies are regarding ebooks, or circulating laptops, or how much they charge for printing, etc. But considering the breadth of libraries and the complexity of maintaining it, just using regular Google might be more realistic.
Tags: blog, blogs, co-op, cse, custom search engine, google, librarian, librarians, libraries, Library, liszen, public, search, Websites See Also
Posted under Library, Technology | 7 Comments »
August 28th, 2010 Brian Herzog
This was sort of a frustrating question, but in the end was fun - mainly because I get to tag this post “gonzo reference.”
A patron came rushing up to the desk (literally) and said he quickly needed to know John Philip Sousa’s religion. Since time was important, I gave the patron Encyclopedia Britannica and showed him how to find the John Philip Sousa article, while I searched Wikipedia. Neither identified his religion, so the next step was to grab the one Sousa biography we had on the shelf, and the patron looked through the index under “faith,” “religion,” etc., while I kept searching our databases and the internet.
Again, neither of us located anything quickly, except for a quote online attributed to Sousa:
My religion lies in my composition.
That didn’t exactly answer the patron’s question, but he felt Sousa must have meant that, regardless of what religion he was officially, he wasn’t himself a very religious person, and that was good enough for the patron. He thanked me and rushed out.
But I was still surprised that such an simple fact wouldn’t have been more readily available. I decided to keep searching until I found it, and then add the fact to Wikipedia - mainly because I can. I was already in the library’s catalog, so I requested a Sousa biography from another library (John Philip Sousa: American Phenomenon) that seemed likely to have the information.
When it arrived, I started flipping through it, then wondered if this had been scanned into Google Books - turns out, it had. I searched the content of the book for “religion” and found the answer I was looking for at the bottom of page 102.
I then composed a little paragraph and added it to Wikipedia:
Although Freemasonry is an organization influenced by religious beliefs, John Philip Sousa himself was not. He was an Episcopalian, and while tolerant of religious beliefs in general, he personally regarded music as providing more Divine inspiration for people than Sunday sermons.[13] He is also widely quoted saying, “My religion lies in my composition.”[14]
So I was feeling pretty good with myself for tracking down this information and contributing it to Wikipedia - with the logic of, “if you can’t find a reference, make a reference.” But then it occurred to me: if the book I found the information in is in Google Books, why didn’t show up in my initial internet search.
I don’t know if it did then and I just missed it, but now this book, linking directly to page 102, is showing up as the fourth result for a search on “john philips sousa religion.” Hmm. So despite my boasting last week, even information professionals can miss things. Oh, and by the way, he was Episcopalian.
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Posted under Library, Reference Question, Technology | 1 Comment »
August 26th, 2010 Brian Herzog
I recently noticed in our Reference collection one of the quirks of the Dewey Decimal System that people often refer to as “serendipitous” - but look at the picture below to see if you also see a problem:
The books that caught my eye are these (biggify the photo to see the Dewey numbers):
And here’s the Dewey breakdown:
809 - History, description, critical appraisal of more than two literatures
809.91-.92 - Literature displaying specific qualities and elements
809.933 - Literature dealing with specific themes and subjects
I didn’t see .927 described in either DDC21 or DDC22, but it was the call number specified in that book’s CIP data (©1987), so it must have been phased out long ago.
And so, I get that these books are each about specific kinds of literature. But come on - a book about the Holocaust shelved between two books about imaginary things? It really is like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other fool Holocaust deniers got into OCLC and caused this to happen - a cataloger sleeper cell.
I’m going to talk with my Head of Technical Services to see how we can fix this.
Tags: Ahmadinejad, Books, call numbers, classification, ddc, fail, holocaust, imaginary, Library, reference, shelf See Also
Posted under Books, Library, Random | 4 Comments »
August 24th, 2010 Brian Herzog
It looks like Alikewise.com has been around all year, but I only heard about it this weekend - it’s a dating website that matches people based on the books they like.
This is a great idea for a dating website - it seems a much better way to get at someone’s true nature than filling out a profile by guessing what will make you attractive. I checked around the site a bit (without creating a profile), and wonder if there’s a way to tie-in with sites like LibraryThing and Good Reads to capitalize on peoples’ full libraries. LibraryThing sort of already does this, with their You and None Other meme.
But here’s something funny: at my first library, we toyed with the idea of a “singles night” book group. We thought it’d be a perfect program for Friday nights, after work, to come and meet other single people interested in books. It never happened, but I always liked the idea. Maybe that’ll eventually manifest in Alikewise meetups.
And wouldn’t this be a heck of a social networking widget to add to a library catalog? “Like this book? Click here to meet other patrons that do, too.”
via Burlington Free Press (thanks, Carney) and more at NPR
Tags: alikewise, alikewise.com, date, dating, interests, matchi, matching, readers, readers advisory, reading, single, singles, tastes, website See Also
Posted under Books, Random, community | No Comments »
