Superpatron

Ask a librarian

2011-11-16T19:41:39-05:00

Here's a compilation of "ask a librarian" services in 12 of 50 states, and as many countries as I could find. Whenever possible, these will have a (verified) note by them, signifying that I was able to ask and receive an answer to a reference question.

This is a work in progress.

United States.

Library of Congress Ask A Librarian (Library of Congress). Organized by reading room; several have chat based help available, others are via email or phone. "The primary mission of the Library of Congress is to serve Members of the Congress and thereafter, the needs of the government, other libraries, and members of the public. The Library's staff will respond to reference and information requests in accordance with this mission."

Alabama. Mobile Public Library Ask A Librarian. Call (251) 208-7078, or fill out an online form. No chat.

Alabama. University of Southern Alabama Library Help. Call (251) 460-7025, fill out online form, or via chat.

Alaska. Consortium Library Ask A Librarian. Call (907) 786-1848, or reference via email or chat. Consortium supports the University of Alaska at Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University.

Arizona. University of Arizona Ask a Librarian. Call (520) 621-6406 for the main library information desk, or reference via email and chat.

Arizona. Arizona State Museum Ask a Librarian. Reference via email, including research assistance related to archaeology, ethnology, and anthropology; questions answered in 3 days.

Arizona. Scottsdale Public Library Ask a Librarian. Reference via Questionpoint, a forms interface from OCLC.

Arkansas. University of Arkansas Ask a Librarian. Call 479-575-6645. 24x7 chat available; also reference by email.

California. San Francisco Public Library Ask A Librarian. SFPL does 24x7 reference by chat, or via email or telephone at +1 415 557 4400.

Colorado. Boulder Public Library, Contact Us. Reference: +1 303 441 3194.

Connecticut. Darien Library, Contact Us. Information services: (203) 669-5236. Chat available during business hours.

Delaware. Ask a Librarian Delaware. Statewide service through Questionpoint.

Florida. @AALFlorida (Twitter). "We provide Florida with reference via live chat or texting FOR FREE from 10am-midnight Sun-Thurs ET, & 10am-5pm Fri & Sat ET. Email us 24/7."

Georgia. Georgia Tech Library Ask a Librarian. Call +1 404 894 4530 or +1 888 225 7804, or reference by chat, email, or text.

Hawaii.

Idaho.

Illinois.

Indiana.

Iowa.

Kansas.

Michigan. University of Michigan Ask A Librarian. "Ask a Librarian is tailored to the research needs of UM students, staff and faculty, but any one can inquire about specific UM library resources and services. You can connect to a librarian by IM, email, phone or in person, and now, via text message." Call [+1-734-764-9373] for general reference and reference referrals, or text to +1 734 531 9275.

Michigan. Michigan State University Ask A Librarian. Call 1.800.500.1554 or 517.353.8700. A Reference Librarian is available by phone during hours when the Main Library Reference Desk is open. Reference also available by text message and by chat 24/7.

Ohio.

Oregon. L-Net. Statewide cooperative online reference by chat, text, email; uses KnowItNow.org. An L-Net weblog for staff shows the behind the scenes detail of managing the service.

Washington. Ask a Librarian - Washington State Library. "We are here to answer your questions about Washington state government, history, culture, the federal government, and genealogy. We have an extensive collection of Washington newspapers, state publications, federal publications, and other sources for information." Answers delivered by email; obituaries may take as many as 6 weeks.

Credits

Thanks to Julie Weatherbee, Michelle G, Lou Rosenfeld, Eli Neiburger, John Blyberg, Peter Morville, Jessamyn West, Billy Barron, Sam, Caleb and many others for help in putting this list together.

Telephone numbers will be marked up as specified in RFC 3966, if I can manage it.

Ann Arbor District Library summer reading game for 2011

2011-07-07T10:19:46-04:00

The Ann Arbor District Library has launched a summer reading game for 2011. It's brilliant.

Once you have signed up, you can get points for doing a whole set of library-related activities. Checking out books, reading them, reviewing or rating them, and adding them to published lists all give you credit. There's also points to be scored for visiting library branches, attending events, and reading and commenting on the web site.

Essentially, almost any measure that the library might be able to count and use in national surveys of library use - here's a sample set of survey data from IMLS - have some game-related scoring attached. As points accumulate, they can be traded in for gifts that are funded by the friends group. Nothing is worth very much, so the competitive aspect stays in the realm of gameplay and doesn't go off into Bitcoin-style real money that would prompt you to set up a bot army to review books for you.

I can imagine any organization that's measured by external metrics using an internal gaming system to trigger behavior that shows up when overall counts are done at the end of some accounting period. AADL had to cope with some of the point structures being not quite correct - for instance, the number of points you got for making reviews was reduced ("nerfed") because the incentive was too good.

Libraries make excellent systems to add this to because in a typical system there's so much unexplored inventory of books that there would be no worry about too many reviews. I recall a similar gameplay within Epinions more than a decade ago that somehow prompted me to write 46 reviews, including this 1999 review of their incentive system - which was a moderately lucrative game in dot-com era dollars.

Superpatron notes for June 2011 from A to L; M to Z to follow

2011-06-24T11:30:00-04:00

I don't write in the Superpatron weblog as much as I once did, but every so often there's so much library information in the news that I want to at least put a finger on what's happening before it floats downstream.

Ann Arbor District Library Summer reading game. As of this writing I'm 47th on the reading game leaderboard, after having figured out that writing brief reviews of books with links to the author's web site is a time-efficient way to score points.

Borders Books and its rapid decline. I'm not even sure where to start thinking about how many ex-Borders people I know, and how to reconcile the current sad state of the bookstore chain in 2011 with my memories of Borders Store #1 as the platonic ideal of a bookstore in 1986. 25 years have not been kind to the retail book trade.

Paul Courant on the University of Michigan's decision to offer digitized orphan works for on-campus access: "These works were written to be read, and we now have the means to increase the chances that they will be read."

Dictionaries and wiki. A piece I wrote about wiki as a link language got me to thinking about how technical dictionaries are structured and how tremendously useful it is to have a handy glossary for jargon. The challenge is to figure out which set of jargon you are looking at right now, and which compact handbook helps decode it best.

Echo chambers. How much of your reading is only from works written for people who read other things you are reading? Here's Portlandia's Did You Read? sketch.

Flooding at the Minot, North Dakota library. A photo shows the status on Thursday, June 23, 2011, and the water is projecte to rise further.

Google newspaper project. It started in 2008 to great fanfare, announcing a goal to make "billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online." It ended in 2011 with about 60 million pages digitized; no new works will be put online, but the existing collection will stay intact.

How to search the shelves in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog for adjacent books. Find the call number you are looking for; the corresponding search is http://www.aadl.org/catalog/search/callnum/303.483. Note however that the call number is not hyperlinked from the book record page; to get it visible, either paste it into a search box, or add the book to a list and pull it from the list. Adjacent books in similar classifications can be found by truncating the call number and putting in a wildcard "*" character in the place of the extra digits.

Internet addiction and books that address it. The aforementioned 303.483 classification is full of books that urge, implore, and plead the reader to go offline long enough to finish the book. I love the idea of the Internet Sabbath, enforced by a hardware store timer that turns off your modem at sundown on Friday.

Juxtaposition. In the absence of visiting a new books shelf at your local bookstore (cf. Borders above), how do you look for new items in your library's catalog? For the AADL catalog, do whatever search you'd normally do, and then select sort by "just added".(e.g. http://www.aadl.org/catalog/search/callnum/303.483&sort=catalog_newest). Nothing really beats browsing the new book shelves - just figure out which call numbers routinely have your favorites.

Knitting books, new. The search that I've taught people how to do is "find new knitting books". Feed this into your favorite RSS reader like Google Reader: http://www.aadl.org/catalog/search/subject/knitting?=&output=rss

Law libraries as 7-11s, Carl Malamud.

Today, law libraries risk becoming a 7-11, where one vendor comes in and fills up the donut case, another stocks the ATM, and your job is all about managing vendors and answering an occasional query from a customer. (Full text, 9 pg PDF).

Is there more to write? Of course - that's like asking if there's more to read.

Why I love reading old patents. (The evolution of useful things / Henry Petroski)

2011-05-09T23:30:16-04:00

Henry Petroski's 1992 "The evolution of useful things" gets a pass from Book Reviews for Real People. The authors found the writing style in some of the denser passages the "prose equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard."

Fasteners of dissimilar appearance were also developed to answer the objection to the paper-piercing points altogether.

The image is from patent 1,523,861, which illlustrates one of many improvements on the "Gem" paper clip still in use today. Modern patents are crazy complicated as the patent attorneys have figured out how to patent all kinds of abstractions, but if the first digit starts with 1 there's bound to be a drawing that would make a nice coloring exercise for your mechanical thinker.

CIP 91-39524; LC T212.P465 1992; 609 -- dc20; ISBN 0-679-41226-3; Librarything 1943752; OCLC 24906856; AADL 609 Pe.

The LibraryThing reviews of this work are really quite useful.

This is a book about failure and how failure drives the design of all things. (Jorge Cardoso)

My new library!

2011-04-01T08:10:47-04:00

We're working out details, but I should have a new library card for a new private library at the Workantile Exchange before too long. We have an ALA accredited library scientist as manager, so we should be cool with getting catalog records that pass all appropriate validaton checks.

For my part, I bequeathed a 4 volume set of DDC 20 to the reference collection. The volumes are ex lib. Ann Arbor Public Library, and were published in 1989 with the publisher's foreword explaining that the magnetic tapes cut in 1988. Further reading about this controversial series: Berman 1989.

Edward Vielmetti writes the Superpatron weblog.

"Libraries are screwed"

2011-01-04T23:44:52-05:00

A talk, here in two parts, by Eli Neiburger; as noted by Eric Hellman on his blog "Go To Hellman" in a post entitled "Libraries are still screwed". The comments on Eric's blog are thoughtful, probably more thoughtful than I can manage here.

Bloomfield Hills considering library millage

2010-10-25T23:54:02-04:00

Bloomfield Hills, MI is considering a library millage; residents have been without library services since 2003.

On its website, the city of Bloomfield Hills touts itself as the nation's fourth wealthiest city, with 39 percent of its "stately homes" worth more than $1 million and an outstanding public school system.

What it fails to mention is that its elite, well-educated residents won't pay for an amenity enjoyed by 99.5 percent of Michigan residents: a neighborhood public library.

Why don't they have a library? A dispute over costs with the township. From an account of a public meeting on the millage, as noted by the local newspaper "The Eccentric":

For years, the township library was the library for Bloomfield Hills residents, but several years ago, the library and city parted ways over what residents would pay to have full access privileges. That led to a lawsuit which went all the way to the state Supreme Court and a decision that essentially sided with the library. Some Bloomfield Hills residents have turned to the neighboring Troy Public Library, but that library is facing possible closure and has undergone service cuts. And it's farther away than the township library, which is at Lone Pine and Telegraph.

The case was Goldstone v. BLOOMFIELD TP. PUBLIC LIBRARY, 737 NW 2d 476 - Mich: Supreme Court 2007; it includes an account of a particularly nasty bit of professional librarianship, as expressed in one of the dissenting opinions.

*495 Moreover, it is the majority who now gives the green "incentivization" light for library boards to politicize their accessibility by creating regulations that reach far further than merely preventing nonresident book borrowing onsite. For example, when Bloomfield Township and the city of Bloomfield Hills could not agree on a price for the renewal of their library service agreement, which failure resulted in city of Bloomfield Hills residents' loss of borrowing and other privileges at defendant library, defendant commanded a "reciprocal agreement" with 90 other libraries in which those libraries agreed not to lend books to any city of Bloomfield Hills resident. Thus, despite that plaintiff was issued a MichiCard from the Pontiac Public Library, he was refused book borrowing privileges at the Baldwin Public Library and the West Bloomfield Public Library, even though both libraries belong to the network of libraries accepting the MichiCard. Those libraries informed plaintiff that under their agreement with defendant, they "cannot furnish borrowing services to Bloomfield Hills city residents unless they have a valid card from the Bloomfield Township Public Library." The majority allows this to continue, foisting on our citizens a public library system that is subject to calculated measures to deprive plaintiff and others like him of the full use of libraries. Surely this is not what our citizens envisioned when they ratified a constitutional amendment that was to broaden library availability. Indeed, to plaintiff, who is now denied book borrowing privileges by 90 libraries, libraries are "generally not available."

"Form follows funding."

Mad Men Reading List via NYPL

2010-10-11T20:55:00-04:00

From the New York Public Library blog, "Mad Men Reading List"

If you follow The Battery Park City Library on Twitter then you've seen our tweets linking to books that have appeared in the hit television show Mad Men. These titles are a great way to gain insight into the episodes and the social and cultural times in which the series is set. Like the set and costume design, the literary choices of the show really add a stamp of authenticity. Dipping into these classics is also a great way to help with withdrawals while waiting for new episodes to air.

[needs photo of bookshelf or display]

ah, the New York Daily News did a feature story on librarian Billy Parrott:

The most in demand: "The Group," the 1963 Mary McCarthy novel about life after Vassar that Betty Draper, ex-wife of central character Don Draper, managed to keep from dropping in the tub.

"That's one that's constantly out. I can't keep it on the shelves," he said.

The Daily Beast in 2009 did some commentary and pulled a few book covers

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates (1961).

A young married couple moves into a Connecticut bedroom town with a son and daughter in 1955 and then their lives fall apart. Sound familiar? Of course, the story is probably most familiar for moviegoers who saw Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet take star turns in the story last year. Show creator Matthew Weiner told The New York Times recently, “Revolutionary Road was given to me three years after I wrote the pilot.” He said if he had read the book, he probably wouldn’t have tried to write the show. “Yates was there. This is what he was writing about.”

An exercise for the reader: find a movie, assemble the reading list that goes with it. Which other videos inspire building a shelf full of books to go with them?

Omnivoracious asks: What's on your bookshelf?

2010-10-05T22:12:00-04:00

Omnivoracious wants to feature your favorite or latest reads on our banner. Just snap a picture of your bookshelf and send it as a .jpg to omnivoracious at amazon.com. Accompany the photo with a list of the book titles in the body of the e-mail. Your submission should be around 1 MB in size or larger ... low-res photos don't work as well.

via www.omnivoracious.com

A lovely idea for a series of posts; if you find more bookshelf photos somewhere, I'll continue to collect pointers.

Rainbow Bookcase

2010-10-05T21:55:38-04:00

Rainbow Bookcase
Originally uploaded by Eccentric Scholar

Photo from Flickr user "Eccentric Scholar". I found this in the Flickr group Rainbow of Books, which is full of books sorted by color (or sorted by colour, if you have enough English lit).