Multilitteratus Incognitus

Today I am at my last Basic Library Techniques (BLT) course, after this I am certified to be a library director - in a town of 10,000 or fewer residents in Massachusetts. OK those are a lot of terms and conditions, but I've gone through workshops in Library Administration, Collection Development, Cataloguing and now I am finishing up with Reference. Prior to this workshop I read Reference and Information Services as well as Introduction to Reference Work vol I and vol II by Katz. A lot of the stuff from this workshop I am in right now is review, but they are also plugging holes in areas that I opted to not read up on (like Children's Librarianship and Young-Adult Librarianship - I have no interest in these fields). In any case, one thing is really perplexing about the homework. Among other things in this workshop we were given a set of questions that we needed to answer using ONLY print materials. Seriously? What is this 1959? Now granted, many small libraries do not have ...

I came across this article a while back on Open Source Exile about the deficiencies of the MARC format. For those of you not in the library world, MARC is essentially a digital version of the information you found in the card catalog. The article echoes a lot of my thoughts on the subject from when I was reading about information organization and cataloging a few years back when I first started working for a library. It's nice to see that I am not the only one who's thought of the issue lol :-)

OK, now that I've got your attention, I decided to create a complimentary post to this blog entry called instructional design is dead Much discussion has been had on publib recently about the downgrading of librarianship as a profession. One comment says: I certainly wouldn't suggest that we should make our cataloging systems deliberately arcane or complex simply to justify our existence(s). But there are libraries and library systems who are working hard to downgrade the profession and thinking about making libraries increasingly bookstore-like makes me wonder who, in this new model, will be at the Information Desk? Things change in life. So do libraries. If you do the same old thing decade after decade, your position will be downgraded as newer customer service models evolve, newer technologies come into the limelight and people expect more and different kinds of services. It's up to the library folk to provide a value added for their communities and maintain ...