Archives for July, 2011:

Reference Question of the Week – 7/24/11

A patron actually asked this question a couple weeks ago, but it's still quite timely. Also, it's a good example of two things: one, of someone asking a question expecting one answer but the actual answer being something different, and two, of being one of the most frustrating kinds of questions.

A patron walked up to the desk and said,

All this talk about raising the debt ceiling, and the idea of raising taxes instead of cutting spending, sounds like "no taxation without representation" to me. That was the battle cry of the Revolution - who was it that first said it?

It seemed like a fairly straight-forward question. I pulled our Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (17 ed.), and looking under "tax" in the index produced an entry for "Taxation without representation" on page 340. Sounds good.

That entry was attributed to James Otis in 1763, and read,

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

But there was a footnote:

This maxim was the guide and watchword of all the friends of liberty. Otis actually said: No parts of His Majesty's dominion can be taxed without their consent. -- Otis, "Rights of the Colonists" [1764], p .64

Since that was not the exact answer the patron was looking for, I tried searching online for who said "no taxation without representation" (with apprehension, I should say, because an internet search like this can often be less than definitive).

The first result was a Wikipedia article on the phrase, which credited Reverend Jonathan Mayhew in a sermon in Boston in 1750, but gave no citation. In the hopes of finding a transcript of that sermon, I tried searching for his name and the phrase, and found a series of interesting posts on the topic from the Boston 1775 blog:

• Who Coined the Phrase “No Taxation Without Representation“?
• James Otis, Jr., on Taxation Without Representation
• Looking for “Taxation Without Representation”

The first one links to the text of a 1750 sermon (pdf) that carries the sentiment of the phrase, but not the phrase itself.

The blog posts, and most other sources I could find, went on to say that this sentiment had been around for decades, if not a century, and shared by the people of Ireland, England, and France against their respective governments. The American Colonists of the time we just the next group of disaffected citizens to adopt it.

Various sources cited that, while the phrase was in use in Boston by 1765, there is no clear record of who originally put those words in that order.

The patron was not pleased with this, but was getting antsy with the search process. I think what she was expecting was a very definitive "on this day, this American patriot said these words and this is why we are a great nation today," so all the maybes and ifs we found were disappointing - especially the references to this sentiment being embraced by the English and French before us.

In the end, she decided that attributing it to James Otis was most plausible - not only was he a patriot in the right time period, but he was also cited in Bartlett's, which was the most authoritative source we found.

I felt bad for not being able to find a better answer, and that's what frustrated me about questions like this - it's entirely possible that there isn't a better answer. I feel like there must be, and I have spent a little time since looking, but haven't found it yet.

Although, this does remind me of something a tour guide once said, about not having definitive answers to questions of history: "if a historical tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to write it down, did it really fall?" Of course. But now with cell phone cameras everywhere, "reality without record" might be a thing of the past.

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C-SPAN Documentary on the Library of Congress

If you've already seen the new Harry Potter and Captain America movies and thus have run out of things to watch, never fear - C-SPAN to the rescue!

C-SPAN has a new documentary on the Library of Congress, which is definitely worth watching (if you're interested in the history and function of the LoC, that is). I think it originally aired on Monday, July 18, 2011, and it kept me interested for the full hour and thirty minutes.

I've toured the LoC twice, and yet almost everything in this documentary was new to me. My favorite parts were the murals depicting good and bad forms of government (as a result of embracing or rejecting knowledge), and the tour of the preservation area, including the "document bath."

Not that you need it, but here are more teasers from their website:

“The Library of Congress” reveals details of:

• The Great Hall, Reading Room , and exterior of the Jefferson Building
• Some of the treasures among its books, maps, photos, and presidential papers
• The History of the Library of Congress and its Jefferson Building
• The Jefferson Library and other treasures of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division
• The painstaking care of the Library’s collections
• The use of technology to reveal new information about historical documents

About the Library of Congress:

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with nearly 150 million items. It was started in 1800. Its first books were bought from England with a $5,000 appropriation from Congress. Housed in the U.S. Capitol, the library was destroyed in 1814 when British soldiers burned the building. Hearing of the fire, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell Congress his book collection. After much debate, Congress agreed to buy the collection for just under $24,000. In 1851, another fire destroyed 2/3 of the library’s holdings. In 1870, Congress passed copyright legislation that required two copies of every book published be sent to the Library of Congress. Subsequently, the holdings of the library grew extensively. Congress debated whether to give the library its own building. That didn’t happen until much later. The library moved out of the Capitol building and into the Jefferson building in 1897. Today, the Library of Congress spans over a total of 8 buildings.

Something I just noticed: The Jefferson building of the Library of Congress was built in 1897, and the Chelmsford Library was built in 1894 - that was a good decade for libraries.

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Another Take on the End of Borders

Last week, the owner of Gibson's Bookstore in Concord, NH, sent a message to all his customers about the closing of Borders. There are primarily only two big bookstores in Concord, Gibson's and a Borders, so you might think this would be a celebratory message.

It's not. It's a very somber analysis of how the closing of Borders has the potential to have a widespread negative impact on the bookworld at large. I know there has been lots of articles and posts about Borders closing, but I thought this was worth passing along - thanks, Michael:

Book lovers love to go to bookstores. That’s always been true, and always will be.

Most people remember the first time they went to a book superstore, to encounter what seemed like acres of space, visual interest everywhere, beautiful art on the shelves, infinite discoveries awaiting the explorer, symbols of learning and entertainment as far as the eye could see. And room for like-minded explorers to gather and celebrate their love of books, often with coffee, that drug of choice for the serious reader.

It was Borders that pretty much invented that concept in their flagship store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and it was Borders that spread it across the nation. And today, with Borders going out of business, book lovers are upset and worried. What does this mean for the future of the book industry and of reading in general?

Let me get to that answer in a roundabout way, through a little local history.

When I bought Gibson’s - Concord’s oldest retailer, and now the oldest independent bookstore in New Hampshire - in 1994, it was my belief that Concord was too small a market for chain bookstores to enter. Amazon was still just a glimmer in a Wall Streeter’s eye. There were other small bookstores in the area. I thought we could coexist, serve our market in different ways, and grow.

Borders entered the area in 1999, right after we had doubled our space and added Bread & Chocolate as our café and retail partner. I was surprised and, frankly, worried for the future. Borders was like another independent, that was the buzz, except they were eight times larger than you, had a limitless supply of cash, had whole teams of people working on issues you could only tackle after you’d put the kids to bed, and - the killer - they had a real literary culture. It was hard to find a weakness there. It was hard to convince yourself that you had a future. All you could do was believe in yourself, in your book and business smarts, in the people you had around you, in your public, and in your luck.

Gibson’s took an immediate 25% hit when Borders opened. This was standard and inevitable. We were prepared for it. What we weren’t prepared for was that we would never climb back. Between Borders, the rise of Amazon, loss of parking, and various recessions, we were hard-pressed to stay in business at all. It wasn’t money but pure stubbornness that motivated me, to be honest. That, and the fact that I just loved books.

What did we do? Whatever we could do with no budget, because, frankly, sales were lousy. We introduced a loyalty program, we started doing more events and attracting bigger authors to the area, we built our newsletter and our presence on the Web. We did as many offsite events as we could handle, partnering with dozens of non-profits and schools. We became active in trade organizations, and through networking and staff development we improved what we do in the store.

Adversity made us better. Not richer, but better.

Over the same period, what did Borders do? They continued to attract great bookselling talent at the store level, here in Concord and across the nation. But at the management level, in Ann Arbor, they lost their focus. They frittered away a great brand. Injudicious long-term leases meant that they were stuck in many unprofitable locations. Their business model of the 1990s - relying heavily on CD/DVD sales, encouraging people to lounge for hours without buying - didn’t translate well to the 2000s, and the folks at the top didn’t come up with a viable new approach.

The Borders board in Ann Arbor hired team after management team with no book experience, and not a lot of their innovations worked. Outsourcing their online sales to Amazon, during such a critical time, was a mistake that will be studied in business schools for years to come. Aggressive “upsells” of Borders rewards cards alienated many customers (not to mention booksellers who were disciplined for not meeting their targets). “Category management,” a philosophy imported from the supermarket trade, didn’t translate well to the book industry. And that “make books” program - in which every bookseller in the chain was obliged to hand sell a particular title, as if it was his own favorite - was off-putting to readers who expected to get real recommendations from the talented booksellers they met at Borders.

And so the machine ground to a halt, and a once great chain eventually went out of business. Not because of e-books, not because of Amazon, not because of tough conditions in the book business, but because bad decisions made them vulnerable to those tough conditions.

How do we feel about that? Not good. Sure, Borders made our life difficult, and they didn’t make good decisions over the past decade, but let’s face it, the book industry has just lost millions of square feet of display space at a critical time. Even though e-books have not made the apocalyptic inroads that you might believe from news reports, the industry needs showrooms. The industry needs physical bookstores. No one has figured out how the industry can sustain itself, not to mention how writers can put food on their tables, without physical bookstores, and now all but a few thousand have disappeared.

This is not good news. So even though meeting payroll has just become easier, and maybe we’ll now have the resources to improve what we do here, we at Gibson’s are not as happy as we thought we’d be. The loss of a bookstore is sad for all, and the loss of 500 sadder still. Many of these were beautiful stores, a reader's dream. And they were staffed by thousands of people who love books just like we do.

We don’t know what the future holds. We might expand, we might sit tight. Another chain bookstore might move into the area, or they might not. E-books might take more than the 20% of the market we predict. The situation is in a terrible state of flux.

All we say is this: we are committed to the art of bookselling in Concord. We believe that the independent bookstore is a model not only from the past but for the future. Despite the rise of e-books and the cultural challenges facing our nation, there has never been a better time to own an independent bookstore. Readers still want physical books, and they want to shop in bookstores that are staffed and lovingly curated by local book people. We want to craft the best possible store to showcase the best the book world has to offer. We want to build it so they will come.

To do that, we need your help. In the next few weeks, we’ll be sending out emails describing some new initiatives we’re either contemplating or implementing. Please send us your ideas, too. And above all, buy books from us, if you want there to be an independent bookstore in Concord. That’s all it takes. The future, in large measure, is in your hands. If you want this store to stay in business, give your business to this store. We promise to do our best to earn it.

--Michael Herrmann & all your friends at Gibson’s

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Library Day in the Life, Round 7

Today starts Round 7 of the Library Day in the Life project, chronicalling what librarians do on a daily basis. I'm going to try to live-blog my day like before, and other people are contributing to #libday7. Thanks as always to Bobbi Newman for providing the push and the forum for this.

11:00 AM

• Get to work, talk with coworkers about the heat from the weekend.
• Check my mailbox: purchase suggestions from staff, reference question from patron (I still get reference questions via USPS about once every couple months), and letter from former coworker who still has the library street address memorized, so he sends me things here instead of to my house.
• Check staff email: one message from a patron asking how to do something in our catalog, and then another twenty minutes later from the same patrons saying nevermind, her husband showed her how

11:15 AM

• Look up and request summer reading books for patron
• Tell two different patrons they have to go to the main circ desk to check out their books
• Explain to a girl how to print, and then make change for her a few minutes later
• Take a call from circ staff because they're not able to move a patron higher up in a hold queue - have to submit that as a help desk ticket to developers because even though Evergreen has the menu options to do this, it doesn't work for me either
• Notice that this week is also our quarterly stats recording day - mark down six tick marks because I forgot to count as I went

11:30

• Try to confirm for a girl that our copy of The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde really is the full version of the story, even though there are other stories in the book as well. She has to read it for summer reading and doesn't want to read the wrong book - she leaves skeptical.
• Try to help a patron connect his iPad to our wifi network. We have more trouble that we should, so make a note to let our IT person know. Also, this isn't the first time iPad patrons have trouble connecting
• Talk to one of our pages about her weekend, summer sports schedule, her new haircut, and the list of tasks her mother has assigned her to finish by the end of the summer - she is not amused
• Give one of our teen volunteers a quick rundown on how to shelf read in the teen room, then set her loose to help keep things organized - thank you!
• Patron with a study room reservation comes in late, and someone else has already snuck into his room - try to make everyone happy, and manage in this case

11:45

• Research the Evergreen problem (moving patron to the top of a hold queue, because she said she never got the notification it was ready and staff needed to rerequest the item, which of course moved the patron to the bottom of the list) and found there is already an open ticket on this same problem - submitting a follow-up to see if there is a workaround
• Log into my email for the first time today to submit the followup - see I have 21 new messages since yesterday. Not too bad, considering 6 I could deleted without opening, and 3 others are messages I sent myself as reminders
• Help patron find a pair of headphones to use
• Help a patron log into our computers (logins not necessary, which is why it's so difficult)

12:00 noon

• Help another patron log in (which really means restarting Windows and letting the computer auto-logon). I think this happened because all our computers are full which kicks off anyone who has been on longer than one hour - since no one else is waiting, I just log back on anyone who needs it
• While walking back to the desk, pick up some religious flier - we have one patron (a.k.a. "God's litterbug") who constantly leaves religious propgranda and printouts all over the library
• Download the free ebook of Machine of Death story collection a friend told me about - neat
• Update our mobile site with the new hours of our branch library (which should have been done July 9th, but didn't occur to me until just now - oops)
• Replying to emails
• Still can't get in to add myself to the Library Day in the Life pbwiki to add myself - it is constantly locked by other users

1:00 PM

• Finally get to add myself to the pbwiki page (#161)
• More trouble with the wireless network - this is frustrating
• Doing a little bit of selection in between helping patrons
• Get resolution on moving a patron up in the queue - it's not something staff can do for the time being, but network staff can, so I'll just email them whenever we need to do it
• Have been busy, hence less frequent updates
• Explain to someone how to use the library's Fax24 fax machine
• Heard this phrase, which makes sense in context, but is still funny:
  

  Do you have direct contact information for someone in the historical society? They're only open by appointment only which means no one is ever there, but since everyone is on vacation in the summer, right now they're even more never there than usual.

• More email - seemed to have hit a lull with patrons
• Spoke too soon - phone patron wanting me to reverse-lookup a phone number. I was able to find that it's a Haverhill number, but not who owns it, and we don't have a print directory for Haverhill so I gave her the number for the Haverhill library

1:30 PM

• Teen shelf reader checked in to say she needs to leave, and that she got up to the L's
• Finally send an email about our Evergreen Steering committee that I've been on-and-off type for the past hour and a half
• Talk to the maintenance guy and find out the reason the building was so hot on Friday and Saturday is that one of our AC units blew a fuse - but on the unit itself, and not in the fusebox, which is why we didn't see it when we started looking for the problem on Friday)

2:00 PM

• Check my personal email, and try to find a link from WordCamp from this weekend. Couldn't find it, but found great summary of the day
• Talk to coworker who just got back from a week in Florida - she was woken up one morning by the sonic boom from the space shuttle as it was landing
• Summer reading, summer reading, summer reading - I'm sorry, they're all checked out
• Start documenting a list of issues with Evergreen, from both staff and patrons, that I've been scribbling on scrap paper

3:00 PM

• Help patron find travel books for Vermont - yay, VT
• Time for lunch, I think
• Talk with my cataloger about issues we're facing with Evergreen

4:00 PM

• Continue compiling the list of Evergreen issues
• Helped two phone patrons right in a row who were each asking if we had different books - amazingly, both of them were on the shelf. That never happens twice in a row. I put them on hold and they both said they'd be right down to get them.

5:00 PM

• Yay for the day slowing down - it's dinnertime, so people are going home - there are actually public computers available
• Had a discussion with the IT director about what to do with a laptop that has been in our lost-and-found for almost a year - the easiest course is to just erase the hard drive and get rid of it, but I feel guilty doing that
• Talk with the author of a soon-to-be-published local history book about the permanence of library and chelmsfordhistory.org webpages - my best answer was "we have no plans to remove them, but whether the web will even be around 20-30 years from now, I can't say
• Update the library's homepage with this week's upcoming events

6:00 PM

• Prepare for an Evergreen priority meeting tomorrow - we're still going through the list of discovered bugs and desired features putting them into some kind of development priority order. The current list is four pages long, and more are being added daily
• Remove the Elibrary database from our website, as state funding for that database stopped
• Try to find out when John Barrasso (R, WY) said, "If this is such a good bill, why do they want out?" It looks like he said it to reporters on Feb 1st, 2011
• For the same patron, find a news article saying that Planned Parenthood did indeed file a lawsuit against the state of Kansas about defunding clinics - found multiple
• Figure out why a pdf file is printing every other page upside-down, and how to fix it - turns out, changing the double-sided print orientation fixes it, thank goodness
• Showed patron how to use http://zamzar.com to download "filmstrips" from the internet
• Spend time weeding my email inbox, trying to get it down to one page - success! I might not reach "inbox zero," but at least "inbox 25" is doable

7:00 PM

• Print out a few last resources for a patron to pick up later, tell the person coming out to relieve me what's going on at the desk, and go home for the night. Good night, libday7

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Reference Question of the Week – 7/17/11

This questions wasn't at all difficult, but I thought it was interesting because it was something I thought I knew how to do, but it turns out I didn't.

A patron walks up to the desks and says,

I have some software at home I want to install on my computer. However, there are two install disks - one for computers with a 32 bit processor and one for computers with a 64 bit processor. How do I tell what processor my computer has?

The patron had an XP computer, which is also what I was on at the desk, so that made things easier.

My first instinct was to go to Device Manager, so we did, but no matter where we looked, nothing I could find gave the processor speed. I sure there are multiple ways to find this out, but in the interest of time I searched the internet for is my processor 64 bit or 32 bit xp. The first result was titled What operating system Do I have? A 32bit or a 64bit? | Computer Tips - perfect.

The site itself looked a little suspect, but as we read the page together, the information seemed okay. It gave instructions for both XP and Vista - and the XP instructions guided us to somewhere I never would have even thought of:
Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Information

When that window opens, look for the Processor line:

Here's how the site says to read it:

If it says x86 then you have a 32 bit operating system. If the processor area mentioned ia64 or AMD64 then this means you have a 64 bit processor. If it said Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Version then this means it is a 64 bit operating system. However as you can see from above, it says Microsoft Windows XP Professional and the processor starts with X86 so therefore this is a 32 bit processor with a 32 bit operating system.

This answered the patron's question, and since we both learned something, it was a good exchange. The funny part (to me) is that the patron said he was right in the middle of installing the software, and came to the library because it was the only place he could think of that would give him free computer information. He was happy I found the answer so quickly and he apologized for rushing out.

Free is questionable, but quite timely on people thinking of the library as genius bar - all the more reason reference staff need to also provide some degree of technical support.

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Digital Picture Frames as Informational Signs

Usually I'm pretty good at math, but in this case it took me awhile to put two and two together.

Awhile ago, our Childrens Department put a digital picture frame on their desk, using it to display photos of their various programs*. I'd seen and heard of other libraries using digital picture frame like this, and for in-building informational signs (like upcoming events), but I never thought of an application for it at the Reference Desk.

Until a couple weeks ago, when I was in the Apple Store in Boston. I'm not at all an Apple fanboy, but I admit that once in awhile, they come up with a good idea.

A friend of mine was having trouble with her Mac laptop, so we took it to the genius bar to having someone help us with it. I still really like the idea of the genius bar in and of itself, but what got my attention was that, behind the genius bar were great big screens scrolling through tips and information. The messages were all about using or fixing Apple products, which were perfectly targeted at the captive audience of people waiting for the genius bar.

I didn't get any photos myself (Apple is funny about taking pictures in their store), but here are some from the interweb:

You get the idea.

When I saw that, it finally dawned on me - this would be an easy thing for libraries to do at service desks, using a simple digital picture frame. As soon as I can get approval (and funding) to purchase one, I'd like to try one with rotating tips on topics like:

• how to renew books
• how to book museum passes
• using online resources and databases
• where the bathrooms are
• online events calendar
• how to find summer reading books

Really, good topics are anything that might be interesting to someone waiting in line at the Reference Desk.

The "photos" will just be slides created in PowerPoint, and hopefully, having something interesting to look will give patrons waiting in line something to do (in addition to teaching them something they may not have known).

I bet other libraries have already thought of this, so if you're doing it, please comment with how it's working. When I get ours up and running, I'll post an update with how it went.

*They decided to use a digital picture frame rather than flickr or other online service, because they were reluctant to post photos of kids on the internet. Keeping the photos offline and in the Childrens Room was a good compromise (between online or not at all), and it might be more likely for the kids to see themselves, too.

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