An Accidental Academic (Librarian)

20 Modern Libraries from Around the World

Courtesy of Ebookfriendly, which I somehow only discovered just today:

My own library is looking at a renovation of its 1960s-era building. I see much here to inspire.

How not to weed a collection

A massive and rushed weeding project at Urbana Free Library is drawing a lot of attention after a former employee got wind of it and posted this article in response. The problem is obvious from the outset: hundreds, possibly thousands, of books were removed from the collection solely using publication date as a guide.

If you’re not reeling in horror right now, it’s probably been awhile since you went to a library, and you should fix that. The most obvious omission here is that the library didn’t consider a book’s usage before pulling it. While a lot of old books on library shelves don’t get used, plenty of them do, and removing something that’s heavily used but out of print, for instance, does a disservice to the library’s patrons.

A follow-up post includes links to subsequent coverage, including the library director’s response, which raises more questions than it answers. While installing RFID tags in library books is expensive and it makes sense to weed the collection before doing it, RFID isn’t something a library implements on a whim. Urbana Free Library had plenty of time to weed the collection properly beforehand, and actually follow their own deselection criteria in the process.

Five things the library could pay more attention to than whether students consider us essential to their success

Inspired by this excellent post from Barbara Fister, who knocks it out of the park as usual.

I largely agree with her; the recent report showing that the majority of college students do not consider the library essential to their success is not news. As an undergrad I probably wouldn’t have either. Certainly not as much as the music building where I spent most of my time and the staff of which had kindly allotted me a practice room of my very own to store my drum set in. (P.S. This is true. Thanks, Smith College!)

Here are some things that I think we should think about instead:

1. Do we really provide better, more suitable and higher quality resources for student research than what they can get through Google and Wikipedia? Equally important, can they find that stuff? I have yet to interact with a database interface that didn’t frustrate me on some level; if it annoys an expert, it stymies a student.

2. Can they get to those resources through Google? If they find a journal article this way, can they access it, or will they run into a paywall?

3. Is our space welcoming, conducive to getting the work done that students need to do, and do the staff provide good service? (This is one place where I do think libraries could learn a thing or two from retail.)

4. What barriers exist to our patrons availing themselves of the content and services we provide? What can we do to remove them?

5. Do the faculty at our institutions consider the library essential to student success? Should they? If we conclude that they should, and yet they don’t, how do we address that? Faculty have far more influence than librarians on student perceptions of the library’s relevance to their work.