A Kinder Gentler Collection Agency?

No the Bucks County library system (PA) has not hired former President George H.W. Bush. They have hired the collection agency Unique Management Services Inc. instead. This agency in turn employs seminarian students from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, K.Y. to do the collecting. No matter how you feel about libraries using collection agencies you have to admit it's a "unique" idea.

And in case you were curious, the stuff that has disappeared in Bucks County, (according to the Inquirer article):

• Test guides to help people get into the military, get onto a police force, or obtain a high school equivalency degree.
• Baby-name books.
• Travel books, which seem to never come back from vacation.
• Anything by the guy who wrote Fight Club.

The full article can be found in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

There's always a but...

Nicholas Carr askes in this months Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stupid? Though first he says we're reading more...but there's a but..."Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But..."

Long Tail Meets Miss Universe

Last week my brother was in town and we were hanging out playing dueling laptops. He sat in one chair with his laptop and I sat in another with mine. I bring this up because at one point he called me over to watch this you tube clip...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STdNdQBd2CQ
I said to him afterwards "I didn't want to watch this the first time in 1987 ...when you made me"

and yes he "made me"

Anyway the point was that though I may not enjoy watching 80's clips of Miss Universe, there is someone out there who does. Who am I to stop them? But we can't archive everything...who gets to decide what to archive, especially the stuff that has been born digitally?

What restaurants can teach us

Last Wednesday I had the good fortune to dine at the Mesa Grill in New York City. For the non-foodies out there, this restaurant is owned and operated by the very famous Bobby Flay. The food was wonderful, but what really impressed me was the service. It was friendly but not over friendly. It was attentive, without being intrusive. The right questions were asked, and everybody received the correct meal. When I went looking for the Ladies Room, I was asked politely if I knew where to find it. Now I know that we in libraries can't say "Do you lovely ladies know where the Ladies Room is?" But it was nice to know that the restaurant employees were keeping an eye out for us, and that everyone we encountered wanted us to have a positive experience. It was, in a word, just so.....nice.

The Digital Divide

Parks Associates
(a market research and consulting firm focused on all product and service segments that are "digital" or provide connectivity within the home.) recently released a very interesting survey.

Here's the Engadget blog post

Survey Says that One-Fifth of Americans Have Never Used Email

"Does this surprise you?"

Yes and No....

What to call the VRC

Aaron Schmidt wrote such an interesting post on his Walking Paper blog. When the Washington County library community was trying to decide what to call their databases, they asked their patrons. And the top choice was................“Online Resources." Yes, I know this doesn't mean paid resources, but apparently this is what patrons understand. Why didn't we think to ask them as we struggled with this issue?

As Aaron says in his posting "trying to come up with the right terminology for a library website isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be all guess work either. Asking even just a few people about a term is better than asking no one. This applies not only to labels on our websites, but also what to call our services. For more on usable library terms, see Library Terms That Users Understand."

Pro Quest Promo

Check out the neat ProQuest Video. ProQuest makes it easy for you to load this wherever you want. Originally a flash file we converted it to a Quicktime Movie played with the sharpness and it was ready to post.