Salem Press Launches The Library Grants Center

Earlier this week I received the message below from Salem Press. I don't know what kind of distribution their programs get, but I thought this was worth sharing:

THE LIBRARY GRANTS CENTER
A free, no-registration resource for librarians.

Librarians need help finding help. So we scoured the web in search of grants and awards for libraries. We discovered the options extend far beyond free money from national and state sources.

Hundreds of grants are available to libraries of all types from local foundations, family trusts, small and large corporations, professional organizations, and the publishing community. You owe it to your library to find out more about the financial aid available.

http://salempress.com/Store/grants/grants.htm

Basically it's a listing of available funding sources for libraries, with information on national grants, state grants, and a how-to section for the application process.

Just about any potential funding source is a good one when you're in need, so I thought this might be a very useful site for libraries. Thanks to Salem Press for putting it together.

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Flying Corgi Media Presents Back-to-Back Books

I thought this was neat: a member of our Friends group, along with some colleagues, just started a new publishing company in town.

The name is Flying Corgi Media, and they're focusing on something I'd never heard of: Back-to-Back Books. The idea is that they publish books in pairs, based on the same settings and characters, but written for different ages. Here's how they explain it:

Our first set of Back-to-Back Books, Thérèse’s Adventure and La Comtesse by Charlotte Rolfe! Back-to-Back Book packages provide our readers with pairs of books: one for children ages 9 – 14, the other for adults ages 15 and up. Kids and adults can share characters, settings, storylines and adventures from their books. Thérèse’s Adventure (kids) and La Comtesse (adults), are two exciting novels set in post-Revolutionary France. Get ready for adventure, mystery, and romance!

I thought this was neat - it allows people of different ages to share the same characters and ideas, but also as the younger kids get older, they can easily build on what they already are familiar with. Also, being historical fiction means there's other opportunities for expanding and learning. I haven't talked to our Childrens Librarian yet to see what we're going to do with them, but it almost seems as if they would need to circulate together.

For more information, check out their FAQ, a recent article in the Chelmsford Independent, and of course Flying Corgi Media can be contacted directly. They also have plans for videos and other interactive elements, so I'm looking forward to see where they can take this concept.

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Reference Question of the Week – 11/6/11

This was a bit bizarre. Three or four weeks ago, a woman came to the reference desk holding her Blackberry. English was not her first language, so there was a bit of a language barrier, but on her Blackberry was a photo of a book titled Show Me!

I didn't recognize it, but from what I could piece together of her story, she had found this book in the home of friends of hers. She felt it contained child pornography, and wanted to know if the book was illegal. She said she noticed it while they were all sitting around talking, but as soon as her friend went into another room, she rushed over, snapped a covert photo, and then ran out of the house and came straight to the library. She wanted to know if the library had a copy and if it was legal to check it out.

I tried to explain that "legal" and "illegal" usually doesn't actually come into play - but if it would with anything, it would be child pornography. However, her photo of the book wasn't clear enough to read the author's name, and a search on Amazon for Show Me produced a lot of results, with none matching the cover (although there were a few that were slightly uncomfortable to skim through in this context).

After a few pages of results, I think she understood that there were a lot of books with "Show Me" in the title. I told her if she could get the author's name from the book the next time she goes to her friend's house, then we'd have a better chance of finding the book.

As she walked away, I actually thought, "well, that was weird, and I will never see her again."

So I was surprised when the woman returned this week. She walked up to me as if no time at all had passed, and just said,

The author is Mac Bride.

I don't have the greatest memory for faces, but for some reason immediately knew who she was and what she was talking about. I searched for "show me mac bride," which lead to a Wikipedia article on the book Show Me!, by Will McBride (the Mac Bride/McBride mistake was me not getting over the language barrier right away).

According to the article, this book does have a history of being challenged in court, but the outcome was not definite. Distribution of the book was stopped to avoid potential legal challenges, and some libraries withdrew it from their collection, but the Supreme Court case cited seemed to only allow the government to ban the sale of the book (not owning it or loaning it, although I am no legal scholar).

We do not own a copy of this book, but I did find a copy at the Boston Public Library (through the state-wide Virtual Catalog), and told her we could request it if she wanted. She asked again if it was legal to take that book out of the library, and I said that yes, it was. Someone could challenge the library making it available, but that it didn't seem illegal to have it.

With that, she said thanks, that's all she wanted to know, and left.

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Automate the Internet with If This Then That

This has been in my "to blog" folder for awhile. I haven't gotten a chance to use it yet, but wanted to share it because I think it's neat.

The website http://ifttt.com, which stands for "If This Then That," allows you to makes things happen online as a result of something else happening. The If/Then is a reference to logical causality, and in this case basically means,"if this one thing happens on the internet, then do this other thing automatically."

They explain it very well on their "About" page (I put "About" in quotes because their actual URL made me laugh and is so much better than "/about").

Anyway, there already are some tools that offer consequence-action services (like Google Alerts, getting an email if someone comments on your flickr photos, using Twitterfeed to automatically tweet blog posts, etc). But this one seems the most versatile, because it isn't service-dependent, it does more than just notifications, and it lets you manage all your notifications from one service.

I'm hoping to use it to automate some of what the library does online (as seen in our Online Marketing Flowchart). There are lots of triggers and actions available, and it seems limited only by your imagination. But of course, like with any online tool, the more you use it, the bigger impact you'll feel if it suddenly goes away - which never stopped me before.

Also, like LibraryElf, this is a tool I think patrons can use on an individual basis - I say this because it offers notifications by text, phone, and email, and triggers can be calendar events, feeds, and more.

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Calculating the Value of a Community’s Library Use

This year while we were compiling all of my library's FY11 statistics to report to the state, it occurred to me to try something new with them.

Since everything we tally up for the state report is how much each library service get used, I thought I'd put all those totals into the Library Use Value Calculator - this then, in theory, will show how much value the entire community gets from using the library (instead of just using the calculator on an individual level).

Here's how things broke down*:

So at retail prices, the entirety of our activity last fiscal year should have cost our patrons a staggering $12,371,068.30 - over twelve million dollars. The library's total budget is about $1.5 million. So, by funding and using the library, our community saves about $10.5 million dollars a year.

I think that pretty clearly spells out the value of public libraries. Hopefully we'll be able to work this into some marketing materials to make the case of why our (meager) budget is important to the community.

*A couple notes on the figures:

• Interlibrary Loan Requests I think includes all of our network transfers within our consortium
• I was surprised ebooks was so low, but our Overdrive stats show that downloadable audio is still far more popular than ebooks (of course, ebooks are still new to us, so we're still building that collection)
• The state report has a single line for "Periodicals" - so I put that into the Magazines box in the calculator, and left Newspapers empty
• The state report groups all "CD" usage, so our audiobooks and music CDs are combined under Audiobooks, and I left CDs empty
• I left Meeting Room Use (per hour) empty, and am just replying on the attendance numbers - the per hour use is more individual and doesn't really scale out well to the community level
• I didn't have a total for Database Searches, so the number there is the number of times our databases were accessed (as opposed to searched) - which, again, makes more sense for the community level rather than individual level

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Reference Question of the Week – 10/30/11

Due to the power outage, this has been an odd week. The library didn't get everything restored (power, heat, and internet access) until Thursday, and since many peoples' homes were still without power, it was crazy at the library. Which made this question fit right in.

Remember the patron who asked if Donna and Eric from "That 70's Show" got married, and if SpongeBob likes Sandy? Well, Thursday he called in and asked,

Do you know how Peter Pan and Tinker Bell first met?

I kind of laughed because as odd as this was, it actually is a literary question - although, while I was searching, the patron just kept recounting the various Peter Pan movie adaptations.

Anyway, from what could remember from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, when Peter was a baby he escaped from his parents by flying to Kensington Gardens, and ended up living there among the fairies. Our copy of Peter Pan wasn't on the shelf, and I couldn't find a conclusive answer online (because there are so many versions of the story).

I summarized everything I had found for the patron, saying that they might have met in Kensington Gardens, after Peter started living there and Tinker Bell liked him because he was "lost." I don't like giving unsourced non-authoritative guesses as answers, but I don't know if there is an answer for this. The patron seemed happy though, and hung up.

It's been awhile since I've read Peter Pan - now I have to read it again and see if there's any reference to how they met.

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