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December 23, 2006

Happy holidays!

Have a very joyous holiday season ...

December 16, 2006

First responders

So I'm working on a paper for school (bleh), but I ran across this:

...

”For most people in the community, a public library represents a safe place,” says Sharman Smith, executive director of the Mississippi Library Commission. And that’s literally true. Libraries usually are housed in solid, well-constructed buildings, less likely than some other structures to be affected by Mother Nature. And virtually everyone in the community knows where they are. Moreover, a whopping 70 percent of library computer users depend on libraries as their primary access to the electronic world. So it’s not surprising that libraries are a natural place citizens turn to during a local emergency.

But while library personnel have, in effect, become de facto first responders, they don’t get any additional help to do the< job. Recognition of this additional community role that libraries play — beyond books and reading rooms — seems to be missing. Nearly half of U.S. public libraries either lost funding or received no additional funding in 2006, according to “Public Libraries and the Internet 2006,” a recently released report funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Despite that discouraging fiscal trend, “public libraries,” says John Carlo Bertot, a professor at Florida State University and co-author of the 2006 report, “are taking on additional roles at their own expense.”

It may not be anything new, but it's powerful stuff.

December 14, 2006

Dreamy ...

Dang it. Dang it. Dang it.

I suspected it would happen this way.

A news librarian position has actually opened up in the Bay Area. San Jose, to be exact. It's hardcore (no, really ... you need to be part math-philic data analyst) and I don't have enough experience and it's the type of job where you need to be available after hours and weekends and dang it.

Good luck to whoever gets it. Dang it.