Friday, January 23, 2015

Humanities Open Book: Unlocking Great Books

Humanities Open Book: Unlocking Great Books


photo: open books in library


WASHINGTON (January 15, 2015) — A new joint grant program by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks to give a second life to outstanding out-of-print books in the humanities by turning them into freely accessible e-books.


Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to “unlock” these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States. Working together, NEH and Mellon will give grants to publishers to identify great humanities books, secure all appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a Creative Commons license.

The new Humanities Open Book grant program is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ agency-wide initiative The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, which seeks to demonstrate and enhance the role and significance of the humanities and humanities scholarship in public life.

“The large number of valuable scholarly books in the humanities that have fallen out of print in recent decades represents a huge untapped resource,” said NEH Chairman William Adams. “By placing these works into the hands of the public we hope that the Humanities Open Book program will widen access to the important ideas and information they contain and inspire readers, teachers and students to use these books in exciting new ways.”  

“Scholars in the humanities are making increasing use of digital media to access evidence, produce new scholarship, and reach audiences that increasingly rely on such media for information to understand and interpret the world in which they live,” said Earl Lewis, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is delighted to join NEH in helping university presses give new digital life to enduring works of scholarship that are presently unavailable to new generations of students, scholars, and general readers.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will jointly provide $1 million to convert out-of-print books into EPUB e-books with a Creative Commons (CC) license, ensuring that the books are freely downloadable with searchable texts and in formats that are compatible with any e-reading device. Books proposed under the Humanities Open Book program must be of demonstrable intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers. 

Application guidelines and a list of F.A.Q’s for the Humanities Open Book program are available online at www.NEH.gov. The application deadline for the first cycle of Humanities Open Book grants is June 10, 2015.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies.  To this end, it supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work.  Additional information is available at: http://www.mellon.org/


About the National Endowment for the Humanities

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.


From: National Endowment for the Humanities

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

New York City’s Municipal ID Will Do Double Duty as a Library Card

New York City’s Municipal ID Will Do Double Duty as a Library Card

12MUNI-superJumbo

On Monday, January 12, New York City began taking applications for its long-awaited municipal identification card (IDNYC). Not only will this be the first photo ID card ever issued by the city, it will also serve as a library card at all three New York City library systems—the first time a single card will grant access to Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), New York Public Library (NYPL), and Queens Library (QL).

Bearers will be able to use the IDNYC card to enter city buildings such as schools, and to access city services. Police officers will accept it as valid identification. And the card will be integrated with all three library systems, allowing the bearer to register for a library card within any or all of the three systems. Once this is done, the card can also physically serve as a library card, allowing users to check books out, place holds, and access library equipment—and users who already have a library account can link it back to their IDNYC card.

However, card holders who wish to use more than one system will need to register for each individually, and the accounts themselves will not be linked. All three of New York City’s library systems will remain separate and distinct.

ID WITH WIDE APPEAL

There is a clear need for a citywide ID card—in an urban center where barely over half the households own or have access to an automobile, drivers’ licenses are not as ubiquitous as in most other parts of the country. New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) does offer a non-driver ID card, but it requires valid immigration documentation. The IDNYC card, on the other hand, will be available to all residents over age 14 throughout the five boroughs, regardless of immigration status, homeless status, or involvement with the criminal justice system. Members of the LGBT community may self-designate the gender by which they wish to be identified.

While proof of identity and residence are required, a care-of address can be used, or a letter from a shelter or city agency can be provided. Applicants can request that an address not appear on the card, which makes it a safe proposition for undocumented immigrants or those concerned about the stigma of a shelter address, as well as people returning to the community from prison who may have difficulty getting the necessary identification to access basic services.

However, with this concession comes a new concern: that the IDNYC card will be perceived as a benefit primarily for those who need that level of anonymity. As one New York City librarian explained to LJ, “the Mayor’s office had concerns that if there were no incentives for already-documented New Yorkers to get the ID, it would tag the people who did opt for it.”

To combat that possible problem, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office hopes to position the card to appeal to all sectors of the population, starting with its convenient access to the city’s libraries. Five of the 18 permanent IDNYC enrollment centers will be located in libraries, including NYPL’s Mid-Manhattan and Bronx Library Center, the Grand Army Plaza branch of BPL, and the Jamaica and Flushing branches of QL. The NYC Human Resources Administration will provide full-time staff members in each library enrollment center, and each library system is hiring several part-time enrollment assistants to help move the process along. Applications will be available in 25 languages, and all enrollment centers will be ADA compliant.

In addition, those who sign up in 2015 will receive one-year memberships to 33 popular cultural institutions around the city, including the Bronx Zoo, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Carnegie Hall. “[The administration] wanted not to have a card for only people who needed it, people who couldn’t otherwise get photo IDs in other ways,” said Nick Buron, VP of library services at QL. “They wanted …what I call an ‘I’m a New Yorker’ card.”

While combining a municipal ID and library card would seem to be a logical choice, few have merged the two (although New Haven’s Elm City Resident Card, which also serves as a New Haven Free Public Library card, has been in use since 2007). Attempts in other cities to incorporate existing library cards as some form of municipal identification have been largely unsuccessful as well. In 2013 the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that Memphis Public Library cards could not serve as voter IDs, and in 2012 the Los Angeles Public Library was forced to clarify that library cards would not be used for city services.

“There could have been a risk of creating an ID for groups of people that would further stigmatize them,” Nick Higgins, BPL’s Director of Outreach Services, told LJ, “but I think the city’s done a terrific job of partnering with other organizations, including the library, to make it attractive for everybody in the city to get this ID. It works hand in glove with the mission of the library, which is to provide access to services for everybody.”

Creation of a municipal ID card had been on de Blasio’s agenda since taking office in January 2014, and discussions with the city’s libraries began the following spring. One issue, said Buron, was making sure that the new card’s bar code would work at libraries across the city. “It’s not merging accounts,” he explained, but rather making sure the bar code could be read properly by all three systems. QL, for instance, already has reciprocal borrowing arrangements with the other systems, as well as Queens College, St. John’s University, and the City University of New York’s York College. Technical integration of the card’s bar code turned out not to be an issue, and all three library systems were enthusiastic partners from the outset.

In a statement issued by the mayor’s office, NYPL president Tony Marx said, “The benefits that come with an identification card available to all New Yorkers fit perfectly with free access to the books, services and programs of the public library—so making it easier to get both makes perfect sense,” adding, “We are delighted to be part of this creative solution.”

A WIN-WIN SITUATION

But no matter how many New Yorkers plan to apply for the IDNYC card for the cultural extras, there is no denying its advantages for undocumented new Americans—and that libraries are positioned to help them as well. “Whether you want to take out a book, print a document, seek a job, or access critical City services, libraries have always had their doors open to the community in a way that is welcoming to everyone regardless of immigration status,” said Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs Nisha Agarwal in a statement issued by the Mayor’s office. “Because immigrant communities find libraries to be safe and accessible, they make the ideal enrollment centers. Partnering with the library systems on this will ensure that IDNYC truly becomes the one card easily accessed by all New Yorkers.”

Higgins told LJ that he has been making sure to spread the word about it to the immigrants, formerly incarcerated, and older adults served by BPL’s outreach services office. He is also making sure that the library’s IDNYC enrollment office has plenty of information available, in multiple languages, about BPL’s outreach programs, including citizen test preparation classes, one-on-one help with the naturalization process, and assistance with acute legal services from the Immigrant Justice Corps. It’s a win-win situation, he believes. “People are going to come in and get their IDs,” he told LJ, “and then once they’re here in the library they find out about all the other stuff we do. So it’s an access point to more concrete services we provide that they might not have had before.”

A soft launch was conducted during the first week of January at the library enrollment centers and several city agencies, with many employees enthusiastically signing up for the card themselves. “We tested it with staff who could get photo ID anyway, and they were very excited about the card,” said Buron. “The cultural institution incentive—people pick up on that very quickly. It was very smart of the mayor’s office. We’re expecting to see an increase in the number of [library] card holders as well.”

Higgins also believes the card’s implementation bodes well for the current administration’s relationship with the city’s libraries. “The municipal ID is a perfect example of [the mayor’s office] looking across the city and seeing what organizations are available to partner with…I think this administration has shown signs that the libraries are certainly on his agenda.”



From: Library Journal

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Santa Rosa library offering art workshops to homeless

Isabel Sell, left, and Kenneth Manners work on art pieces during a drop-in workshop as part of the project "Seen and Heard: Visual Histories of Homelessness in Sonoma County" at the Sonoma County Library in Santa Rosa, California on Monday, December 22, 2014. (BETH SCHLANKER/ The Press Democrat)



BY DAN TAYLOR   THE PRESS DEMOCRAT   December 31, 2014, 10:15AM 


To ordinary motorists on their morning commute, the homeless people gathered on sidewalks and in alleyways must look idle.

But for those who spend their days and nights living on the streets, life can be a constant search for food and shelter. Any spare time they have during the day is spent at places like public libraries, where they can be indoors for free.

Recently, one library employee decided that even the homeless need a little constructive downtime.

“They just need a chance to come in and do something for a couple of hours that isn’t survival-based,” said Rebecca Forth, founder of a new program she calls “Seen and Heard.”

Starting last month, the central branch of the Sonoma County Library in downtown Santa Rosa began offering the homeless a weekly art workshop on Monday afternoons, when the library is closed to the general public.

“I like it here,” said Greg von Kreiger, 42, homeless since September, on a recent Monday. “I like the staff and the people who come here, because they let you be true to what you feel, and express that. I want to be part of this, because I don’t have anything to be part of.”

Forth, who works as an assistant to the director at the downtown branch of the Sonoma County Library, said she got the idea for the “Seen and Heard” program while jogging with a friend along Santa Rosa creek. Spotting an artistic arrangement of rocks beside the trail, Forth’s friend called it “homeless art.”

Concerned that the homeless remain separate and often invisible in our midst, Forth found $5,000 in state and federal grant money for her program and then approached homeless people on the streets to invite them inside.

Ken Manners, 61, who has been moving from one Sonoma County homeless shelter to another for the past 20 months, sat at an art table, mounting bits of cut-up calendars on a sheet of blank, white poster paper.

“I just started this project,” Manners said. “I’ve realized this is what my life is like. There are pieces, but no pattern. I am going to fill in the spaces and see what it looks like.”

During the weekly sessions, drop-in participants also are encouraged to record videos telling their life stories. The stories are striking. Manners is dealing with the death of his mother, and his own back and head injuries from an unrelated car accident. And von Kreiger has been in and out of prison five times over the past 20 years, mostly for robbery and resisting arrest.

“I don’t make excuses,” von Kreiger said. “I don’t want handouts. I want chances.”

Isabel Sell, 57, has been homeless off and on since childhood, after her father died and her mother left. She dreams of buying land to serve as a haven for herself and others in similar circumstances.

“I want to start a farm for the homeless,” she said, as she drew pastel farm scenes. Sell has been coming to the “Seen and Heard” sessions since the program started. “I like it a lot. It relaxes me.”

Once a live-in care-giver for an elderly client, Pam Yoho, 53, found herself homeless after the death of her patient, but recently got into a low-income housing program and continues to be a regular at the library’s Monday sessions.

“I like it that they have a lot of different art supplies here, and the fact that the staff and volunteers here care about our stories of how we became homeless and what our lives are like now,” Yoho said.

“Seen and Heard” is funded until late February, with an additional $1,500 art supply budget funded by the local chapter of Bread for the Journey, an international nonprofit. The sessions run from 1:30 to 4 p.m. on Mondays in the Forum Room off the library’s main entrance.

Forth hopes to raise money to extend the program, and plans to stage an exhibition of both the art done by homeless participants and the video histories they’ve recorded.

“Everybody who has come here has been open, ready to talk and very articulate,” Forth said. “It’s amazing. It’s not what we expected.”

Professional art therapist Shellee Davis of Cotati, who serves as an art instructor during the “Seen and Heard” sessions, said the program’s homeless participants need no prompting to express themselves.

“They just dive in,” Davis said. “I think the program is working well. Being welcome somewhere feels really different to them. They can just hang out and be themselves.”

For more information: 545-0831, sonomalibrary.org/node/21597

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Radical Librarianship: how ninja librarians are ensuring patrons' electronic privacy

Radical Librarianship: how ninja librarians are ensuring patrons' electronic privacy


Librarians in Massachusetts are working to give their patrons a chance to opt-out of pervasive surveillance. Partnering with the ACLU of Massachusetts, area librarians have been teaching and taking workshops on how freedom of speech and the right to privacy are compromised by the surveillance of online and digital communications -- and what new privacy-protecting services they can offer patrons to shield them from unwanted spying of their library activity.

It's no secret that libraries are among our most democratic institutions. Libraries provide access to information and protect patrons' right to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive. Libraries are where all should be free to satisfy any information need, be it for tax and legal documents, health information, how-to guides, historical documents, children's books, or poetry.
And protecting unfettered access to information is important whether that research is done using physical books or online search engines. But now it has become common knowledge that governments and corporations are tracking our digital lives, and that surveillance means our right to freely research information is in jeopardy.
When you know that people are recording what you are doing online or if you know cops, the FBI, the DEA, or ICE could access your library or digital history, chances are you are not going to say or research what you might otherwise. Self-censorship ensues because surveillance chills speech.

Library Patrons Are At Risk

Researching online often means leaving a trail of information about yourself, including your location, what websites you visited and for how long, with whom you chatted or emailed, and what you downloaded and printed. All of these details are all easy to associate with a particular computer user when insufficient privacy protections are in place. This information is often thoughtlessly collected and stored, allowing government or law enforcement to make requests for library computer records. Meanwhile, companies may already have these records and use them to manipulate your search results and refine their contextual advertising. Worse a government may assert that users have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" when we "hand over" information to companies like Google and Twitter, and thus no constitutional protection against a government's searching of these records.
But libraries need not fully participate in this surveillance; libraries can strive to give users the chance to opt-out.

Librarians Take Action

One of the authors of this article, Alison Macrina, is an IT librarian at the Watertown Free Public Library in Massachusetts, a member of Boston's Radical Reference Collective, and an organizer working to bring privacy rights workshops to libraries throughout the northeast. Librarians know that patrons visit libraries for all kinds of online research needs, and therefore have a unique responsibility in helping keep that information safe. It's not just researchers who suffer; our collective memory, culture, and future are harmed when writers and researchers stop short of pursuing intellectual inquiry. In addition to installing a number of privacy-protecting tools on public PCs at the Watertown library, Alison has been teaching patron computer classes about online privacy and organized a series of workshops for Massachusetts librarians to get up to speed on the ins and outs of digital surveillance.
It all started with a zine Alison and some cohorts from Radical Reference made as a quick and dirty introduction to basic privacy and security tools. These zines were distributed at two conferences for information professionals: Urban Librarians Unite and Radical Archives.
The zines were a huge hit, and from there, Alison was inspired. She contacted the ACLU of Massachusetts, and invited them to join her in teaching privacy workshops to other librarians all over the state. It was an obvious choice: the ACLU of Massachusetts' Technology for Liberty project has done ground-breaking work on privacy, and the privacysos.org website and blog (run by Kade Crockford) is an incredible resource for privacy news, legislation, and advocacy.
Jessie Rossman, ACLU staff attorney, and Kade Crockford, Director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the ACLU of Mass., worked with Alison to create a three-hour workshop. Offering a broad outline of digital surveillance issues, the legal rights and responsibilities of librarians in Massachusetts, and an online privacy toolkit of software that can be installed on library PCs or taught to patrons in computer classes, the workshop has now been replicated multiple times and more have been scheduled across the state.

Digital Privacy is an Intellectual Freedom Issue

Although many librarians may be understandably new to the topic of online surveillance, information professionals are not new to defending intellectual freedom and the right to read and voice dissenting opinions, as well as the rights of historically marginalized people who continue to be under the most surveillance. Librarians are known for refusing requests from local law enforcement soliciting details on user browsing and borrowing records. The ALA has counted privacy among its core values since 1939, recognizing it as essential to free speech and intellectual freedom. And the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions is a signatory on the Thirteen International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance. As Kade Crockford puts it, "Perhaps more than anyone in our society, librarians represent the values that make a democracy strong, intellectual freedom foremost among them."

Branching Out

Since attending these workshops, multiple Massachusetts libraries have installed the Tor browser on all of their public PCs. Several libraries are coordinating their own computer privacy classes. Others have installed Firefox with privacy-protecting browser plugins like Disconnect.me, Ad-Block Plus, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger tools. Still more are setting up Tor middle relays on their libraries' networks. One librarian said that the workshop made her feel "thoroughly empowered...[to] help stop illegal surveillance against my patrons." Amazing. If you're a patron, share this article with your librarian. If you're a librarian, contact us to get information on how to become more engaged in digital privacy. We've listed some great tools for you to explore and download, so please be in touch and let us know how it goes.
Contact april@eff.org to share your story or request more information, or contact macrina@riseup.net to host the privacy workshop at your library. Together, we'll protect the users and preserve our right to research and learn, unhindered by the pernicious effects of overbroad surveillance. We hope you'll join us.
from: BoingBoing











Friday, January 16, 2015

What should public libraries do about the Charlie Hebdo attack?

RDavidLankesThis post originally appeared on R. David Lankes’ blog.
This morning [January 8] in a Tweet Bredebieb asked me “what should public libraries do,” about the Charlie Hebdo attack. It was frankly a bit of a humbling and scary question. After all, I am not in Paris, and I cannot claim to know everything that French libraries do now. However, it would be an obvious act of cowardice to simply claim ignorance or to respond with some high level non-answer like “help the communities have a conversation.” So I provided some ideas:
  • “provide a safe place to talk about the attack and the reasons for the attack and free expression. Provide access to Charlie.”
  • “host talks and forums on free expression and democracy. Host a human library event with different faiths.”
  • “host sessions with therapists and parents on how to make kids feel safe.”
  • “above all use this as an opportunity to be a safe place to express feelings and help your community.”
  • “help your community compose a narrative and then project it to the world. Is it ‘we shall overcome?’ Or ‘we stand with Charlie?’”
and ended with:
  • “all libraries should provide safe place to recover and the tools to turn tragedy into action and understanding.”
Still, Twitter is not exactly a place to have a deep discussion of where these ideas come from, nor truly share what I think public libraries should do. So in this post I’d like to give a deeper answer to how I feel public libraries should respond to horrific acts like the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. I’d like to present three lessons I have learned.
The first lesson is to fight violence with information and understanding. On September 11th 2001 I was the director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology. I came in to work that day just after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center Towers. After the second plane crashed the entire clearinghouse staff gathered in my office with a TV watching the coverage. Horrified and a bit numb, I sent everyone home. This was a time to be with family.
Over the next week we met asking exactly the same question that Bredebieb asked: “What should we do?” At the time we ran a service called AskERIC that received hundreds of virtual reference questions each day plus a well trafficked website for educators. The answer we came up with was developing InfoGuides (think WebGuides/FAQs) on the attack that we updated as more was learned as well as other related topics. We posted them on the web and sent them out in email. The overwhelmingly viewed/used resource we develop was on Islam.
What I took away from that episode was that in the wake of tragedy, people look for understanding and knowledge of the unknown. So librarians need to inform their communities through FAQs, an archive of media coverage to create an accurate memory of the event, and lots of opportunities for interaction between cultures, races, and ideas.
The next lesson I have to offer I learned from the libraries serving Ferguson Missouri during the racial unrest this past year: help the community develop their own narrative. During riots and violence in Ferguson the public libraries (Ferguson Public Library and Saint Louis Country Public Library) not only stayed open and provided a safe place for children and citizens, it offered up an alternative narrative to violence. While much of the media focused on police versus the black community, the libraries took to social media, traditional media, and even signage outside the buildings talking about Ferguson as a family.
They highlighted how with the schools closed, educators, children and parents came together to create their own ad hoc school among the stacks and shelves of the libraries. Rather than allowing their community to be solely painted as angry black mobs fighting a militarized police, the libraries showed Ferguson to be a place of multiple races coming together around children, learning, and a desire for a better future.
The libraries did not diminish the conflict, nor ignore systemic racism. Yet the libraries did not close, and did not retreat. The libraries – no, the librarians did something and showed the world that Ferguson is not so different from Syracuse, or Seattle, or communities across the country…and that like those communities, they are more than the headlines. They humanized a narrative.
What I took away from Ferguson was that libraries not only provide a constructive space; they add depth of understanding to the world. Give the community a chance to breathe, morn, reflect, and then act and speak.
My last lesson comes from the librarians of Alexandria during the Arab Spring. In the midst of riots and civil unrest the protestors protected the library. Where many government buildings were torn down and looted, the library was protected. Why? Because for the years leading up to the riots and uprising the librarians did their jobs. They become trusted resources for the community because they provided real benefit to the average citizen of Alexandria and intellectually honest services.
So the lesson? Continue to be the resource for your communities. Continue to demonstrate the values of librarianship: intellectual honesty, intellectual & physical safety; openness & transparency; and the importance of learning.
What I hope the French libraries do is what I hope I would have the courage to do in their place: be a safe place to talk about and learn about unsafe issues. Invite in all faiths to talk about how to eliminate violence, and how to respond. Provide ready access to Charlie Hebdo, and controversial materials. Talk about (host lectures, town halls, and events) around the importance of free expression in a free society.
Help to craft the community narrative and project it to the world. What is the community thinking about and learning from this tragedy? What do you do as librarians and what works. What can other librarians learn about responding to these horrible events?
I have made it my mission to advocate for librarians to be active agents of transformative social engagement. In other words, I have made it my mission to have librarians make their communities better through active service. I believe it is crucial for librarians to actively try to change the world and make it a place for fewer abominations like yesterday’s attack. Doing that is scary. We were not trained as grief counselors and no one choses easily to run towards conflict. Yet if we believe that librarians and libraries should make our communities better (more knowledgeable, more capable, more empowered) than we cannot shy away from actively helping.
To my French colleagues I ask, how can I help?
from: Library Journal

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Toronto's new city librarian pushes the digital envelope

Toronto's new city librarian pushes the digital envelope

Vickery Bowles plans to continue predecessor Jane Pyper's work bringing digital innovation to the 100-branch system — and vision of the library as a lifelong learning centre.

Toronto's new city librarian, Vickery Bowles, stands in front of a new wall of monitors with the old technology in her arms at the Toronto Reference Library.
VINCE TALOTTA / TORONTO STAR
Toronto's new city librarian, Vickery Bowles, stands in front of a new wall of monitors with the old technology in her arms at the Toronto Reference Library.
This week Vickery Bowles, 58, became Toronto’s new city librarian, succeeding Jane Pyper, who was lauded for pushing the system into the digital age. The Star sat down with Bowles, a 32-year Toronto Public Library veteran, in her office.
You have been handed the keys to the one of the world's busiest urban public library systems, with 100 branches, more than 2,000 employees and a budget of more than $170 million. What are you going to do with it?
It's about continuity and change — building on past success and identifying new ways to continue to improve service and deliver services in more innovative and creative ways. One of the big opportunities is to continue to lead the transition to digital. We have a large e-collection. Last year it grew 65 per cent, so it represents 3.5 million circulations out of 32 million, so it's almost 11 per cent of circulation. So we need to continue and develop that.
What specific digital innovations are you looking at?
We've just started to introduce digital innovation hubs, here at the Toronto Reference Library and at our new Fort York branch, where we have (video production) green screens, 3-D printers, other technology, and staff to help people learn how to use it. The library is a place to create, not just a place to come and consume and access information, although that's really important. It's also a place to collaborate, create and innovate, and that's an important part of the new public library of the 21st century. Also, e-learning is a big area of growth, where people can take courses online together at the library and there might be an instructor-intermediary who assists. That gives us an opportunity to reinvent the library and offer services in a different way, but continues to support a fundamental mandate of the library, which is lifelong learning. It’s an area I want to explore.
With digital information swirling everywhere, what’s the library’s role?
The way people consume information is changing, but the role of the library remains constant: children's literacy; preserving the past; offering opportunities for lifelong learning; equitable access to information; providing welcoming, safe public space in 100 different communities across Toronto. Libraries are not book repositories — they are literary and cultural destinations. An author reading, a puppet performance, story time for children, a session with teens about life-skills — all of those kinds of programs are happening in different communities across the city.
We had over 18 million people visit libraries in 2014, over 32 million items borrowed, including electronic items. In a world with this huge explosion of information, it is more important than ever that the library is a place to go to get the facts. We have professional staff who can guide people and point them to reliable sources of information, and help filter through what are the facts, what is opinion and what is speculation.
As a senior library manager, what has been your biggest surprise of the past 10 years?
With the public's adoption of e-books, the biggest surprise is the difficulty that we've encountered to access the content of publishers, and now to respond to their different terms and conditions — including price and caps on time and use.
I'm very sympathetic to publishers, I understand that the landscape is changing tremendously and I value their contribution to the literary and cultural experience in Canada. But I also know the value of the public library in making the printed word, whether e-printed or paper-printed, available to people and introducing readers to new authors. Really, that is the biggest challenge we are having — with the demand for e-content, it's putting a lot of pressure on our collections budgets because we are having to spend a lot more than we think we should be.
I hope we can come up with a business model that works for them and for libraries. We have made some progress, and acknowledge we should be paying more than consumer prices, but, in some cases, what we are paying is far too much.
Does this focus on collaboration and new uses mean that librarians can’t “shush!” us any more?
We have zoned our branches so there are areas of quiet study and there are collaborative work areas. All of those different aspects are important. No one does “shush!”

This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
from: Toronto Star

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Burlington library offers puppy rooms for studying students




Hamilton, ON, Canada / AM900 CHML | Hamilton News


It can be a stressful time of year for high school students preparing for exams but the Burlington Library may have a solution.
This year the exam cram study hall program will be bringing in some furry friends from the Lion’s Foundation of Canada Dog Guides.
Students will be given the opportunity to pet and play with puppies as a method of stress relief.
The foundation’s Jenny Gladish says the puppies also benefit because socialization is an important part of their training for a future owner.
Puppy rooms were first introduced in 2012 by universities as a creative way to deal end of term stress and promote mental health.
The  exam cram sessions with the Canada dog guides will be held on January 22nd at the Central branch in the Builders Room and on January 24th at the Aldershot branch.

from: AM900 CHML Hamilton News

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The Future of Britain’s Libraries: Why Lattes and Wi-Fi are Nothing to Fear

By: Lucy Mangan

Few victims of austerity have been so fiercely mourned as libraries. If they are to be revived, a recent report argues, they must look down the High Street to Starbucks. Can that approach change a writer’s beloved childhood sanctuary for the better?

I started coming to Torridon Road Library in Catford, south-east London with my book-loving father when I was four or five. My parents still live in my childhood home, five minutes’ walk from Torridon, and Dad still visits the library every week. But until today I hadn’t been back since I took my GCSEs nearly – God help me – a quarter of a century ago.

Torridon is the sort of library – small, beloved, attuned to the needs of the neighbourhood – that most people would agree we need more of, but which recent local authority cuts have made rarer than ever. Accordingly, it seems like a good place to settle down quietly and read the Independent Library Report, a recently published set of proposals for how those cuts might be mitigated. From the outside, only two things have changed since I shook the exam-room dust off my shoes: automatic doors have been installed behind the heavy oak originals (which now stand open all day) so that all may enter easily and not have to wait for a strong young man to happen past and help them get in; and the bit on the left that once housed the silent study room has been demolished and replaced with a two-storey children’s centre.

Inside, the lovely polished parquet floor has been mostly covered with inoffensive but unmistakably municipal carpet, and the space has been slightly reconfigured by the removal of two walls. Computers and automatic loan/return stations, a sofa and a loo have been added. The long oak table in the children’s section has gone and the hardback pony books replaced by paperback vampire romances.

But the bones of the place I remember are still there. The beautiful dome that I had no idea then was probably an homage to the British Library’s famous reading room is still intact, and comfortable seats are still clustered for long reading stints in the light-filled area beneath. Elsewhere, the high windows bordered with amber-coloured glass that for some reason used to fascinate me more than the dome are also untouched. It is not silent, but it has what Jeanette Winterson recalled her childhood haunt, Accrington Public Library, having: “a sense of energetic quiet.”

I sit, as I used to, next to one of the splendidly chunky, needlessly curlicued cast-iron “school” radiators (I knew the word “Victorian” then, but not that it could describe even heating apparatus). Opposite me is 17-year-old Hannah Akinfala, a student at a local state school who is revising for her A-levels here “because at home is my bed and my TV and I am drawn to both those things! And I’ve got two brothers, who bring friends over and get quite rowdy.” At weekends, she’s in here; during the week, she uses her school library (“They call it a learning resource centre. Which pretty much is a library”) and every day after school goes to Lewisham’s big central library to work (“if I don’t daydream”) until it closes.

Impressed and chastened, I open up my laptop, connect to the free Wi-Fi and start reading the report. It was commissioned by culture minister Ed Vaizey to investigate the current state and possible future of libraries – which is either brave or breathtakingly hypocritical, depending on your feelings about the local authority cuts imposed by his government, which have led to the closure of 324 libraries, the handing over of 400 more to volunteers, and the loss of 6,000 staff jobs since 2011.

The report’s recommendations include setting up a task force to unify and disseminate best-practice guidelines among the 4,000 or so public libraries in the UK, which are run by 151 different library authorities, to stop duplications of effort and benefit from other people’s inspirations and economies of scale. “At the moment,” says the report’s author, entrepreneur and publisher William Sieghart, “ there can be a great inequality of offering. There can be brilliant, amazing things happening at one library, and then, a mile down the road, it’s the 1970s. Larkin land.”

The government has agreed to pay for the taskforce, but not yet for anything else. Funds are needed for improvements, such as installing free Wi-Fi in the one in three libraries that still don’t have it (all Lewisham’s libraries do – on my visit I see one person doing some fairly panicked Christmas shopping, another researching a holiday with a librarian’s help, a man watching the racing and another looking up mature student placements), for creating a national stock catalogue and for other measures designed to make libraries more useful, popular and high-profile.

More contentiously, the report suggests that libraries need to broaden their remit and appeal by delivering more services (such as small business advice, as they do in Northamptonshire, or forming partnerships with local GPs to provide health advice, which is starting to happen in York and Devon) and transforming themselves into “community hubs” rather than simple book-lending centres. And that they do so in a “retail-standard environment” that includes cafes, so as to entice the people who would otherwise do their Wi-Fi-ing and reading in the Costas and Starbucks down the road.
“Oh GOD,” say all of us who instinctively recoil from the notion of modernity, commerce and especially, y’know, modern commerce. “Must we?”

Yes, says Sieghart, we must. Because for the most part “we” are not those who actually use libraries, let alone depend on them. According to the report, 35% of people in England use their local libraries, rising to 50% among poorer and immigrant groups. “The [socioeconomic] AB group, who run the country and the media, don’t use libraries. They do not understand how vital they are, or how many social problems they deal with. I remember one man who kept on coming up and asking for help with his housing while I was talking to the librarian, and she said: ‘Start looking through that shelf over there and I’ll be with you in a minute,’ and he said: ‘No, you don’t understand – I can’t read.’ As a middle-class professional from London, this was amazing to me.” Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, adds: “It’s vital to remember that for the majority of users libraries aren’t a comfortable, soft, ‘extra’ thing. It connects them to services, keeps them from isolation and is often actually a social lifeline.”

At Torridon, 46-year-old Trisha Johnson is passionately grateful to the library staff who taught her how to use a computer when she and her brother were made redundant after 15 years of employment. “They have been blinding,” she says. “So patient and helpful. I’ve just stayed with them ever since.” She’s here picking up another batch of eight books – thrillers and ghost stories for her, and some wartime romances for her mother, who finds walking difficult. She has recently been re-employed by her old firm. “I read more in the morning now than in the evening because the shifts I’m on mean I fall asleep then! The amount of books I get through, I’d never be able to afford to buy them. I’d be lost without the library now.”

Resistance to change has dogged public libraries almost from the beginning. At first, for example, they all employed the closed-access system, with most books kept in stacks and brought out as needed and requested. Enraged pamphlets were written and distributed by protesters when Clerkenwell library adopted the first open-access system (a “safeguarded” version, librarian James Duff Brown assured all) in 1894, half a century after public libraries began, and bitter arguments about it persisted until the 1930s. Similar outcries greeted the gradual evolution of libraries’ traditional layout. Most were originally set up with a centrally supervised reading room for serious students (implicitly male), a “magazine room” for women (implicitly middle-class), a “conversation” room for men (middle-class, but less scholarly than the reading-roomers), a newspaper room (effectively for working-class men) and a borrowers’ lobby open to all for brief lending and returning transactions, often via a hatch above the counter. Whenever restrictions were loosened, or rooms were merged or done away with altogether, there were vociferous objections. Today’s anti-hubbers may come to look as foolish as those 19th-century segregationists and pamphleteers do to us.

But if part of the recoil from the idea of latte-fuelled hubs is occasioned by an unthinking mixture of snobbery and sentimentality (The old oak table! My pony books!), part of it is also comes from a concern that the essential function of a library is being lost; that the peace and quiet, the unspoken privileging of seeking knowledge for its own, uncommercialised sake will be drowned beneath the bustle of coffee drinkers, online gamers and business, legal and health advisors invading the readers’ temples.

But the changes we object to are superficial, says Ciara Eastell, president of the Society of Chief Librarians. “Libraries are still fundamentally about equality of access, reading, information and learning. You can reinterpret that and modernise sensitively, according to local needs.” Douglas goes further: “The idea that education should be uncomfortable is slightly misplaced. A nice, warm destination for families, children and adults that can merge education and entertainment makes it something you want to take part in. Many people’s aspirations these days are wrapped up in their consumer experiences, so it becomes important to benchmark other things to those experiences to compete and win.” Hard reality, then, must trump soft (media) sentiment. For Eastell and Douglas – and for me, as my day working in Torridon wears on, with the noise never rising to disruptive levels despite a constant churn of visitors and activities – the loss of peace and quiet is greater in theory than in practice.

The great unknown, of course, is whether the government will pay to implement any of the report’s recommendations apart from the taskforce (a so-far unspecified sum). Sieghart is “hopeful” that Wi-Fi funding will come in the new year. As well it should, when you think how much librarians effectively subsidise various government departments by offering free help to people trying to access their services. At the moment Torridon is dealing with an influx of older users who need to renew their freedom passes online.

You don’t need to be a Marxist or a conspiracy theorist to see that it is rarely in a government’s interests to educate its citizens more than absolutely necessary, or to encourage questing minds. The Public Libraries Act 1850, from which all our public libraries and relevant legislation descend, was itself part of the liberal-driven body of reforming legislation designed to cope with the utterly changed world after the industrial revolution. Even then, the Tories forced a number of compromises before the bill could pass (including a halfpenny-in-the-pound cap on the rate increase to fund the founding of libraries, and a proviso that this could only be spent on buildings, not on books), and local authorities were not quick to seize the opportunity. By 1867, only 27 authorities had adopted the legislation. It wasn’t until 20 years later, as part of the national explosion of spirit that attended Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, that the idea really took off. Seventy-seven libraries were established in that year alone, and in the two decades after that, libraries became the pet projects of philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie (660 of whose 2,509 foundations were in Britain and Ireland), John Passmore Edwards (24 here) and Henry Tate, who set up many of his libraries in the nearby south London boroughs of Brixton, Streatham and Battersea. Torridon itself was donated by the owner and developer of the surrounding estate, Archibald Corbett, in 1907 – the same year Carnegie founded what would become Jeanette Winterson’s childhood lifeline in Accrington.

Those days of reforming zeal motivated by concern for the working populace and social stability, and supplemented by individual largesse, have gone. Sieghart himself says that libraries are facing “a Beeching moment”: more and more are disappearing, and larger and larger tracts of the population are going unserved and becoming isolated; if things continue like this, it will soon no longer be possible for libraries to function as a network at all.

And that would be such a waste – a huge, unnecessary, immoral waste. By the end of my day at Torridon, and after seeing how much libraries do to promote education and reading, give strength to the vulnerable and power to the disempowered – “the best to the most”, as the old Arts Council motto had it – I’m torn between being thrilled by the possibilities and convulsed with fear at the thought of how little the government seems to care about any of it.

As I leave Torridon, two new people arrive and settle down in the comfortable chairs under the dome. One has a paperback, the other a magazine. The library closes at dusk, but for now light still floods in.

from: The Guardian

Monday, January 5, 2015

Delaware School District Considers Permission Slips for Young Adult Books

By:

Spurred by a parent challenge to Ellen Hopkins’ novel Identical, the Appoquinimink School Board in Delaware is now considering proposals requiring parental permission for students to read any books defined as “Young Adult” in class, and separately allowing parents to bar their children from checking out any Young Adult books from the school library.

The poorly thought out proposals were formulated by the district’s secondary education curriculum director Ray Gravuer after a parent complained that his son felt uncomfortable reading Identical, which deals with sexual abuse, in an extracurricular high school book club with mostly female members and coordinated by a female librarian. The parent then “began circulating a petition to require the school district to adopt a process for ensuring that all material was age appropriate.”

Although the district already has a policy allowing students or parents to request an alternate book for any assignment, and participation in the book club that read Identical was completely optional in any case, Gravuer obliged the parent with the proposals which he presented at a school board meeting last Tuesday. One of the documents is titled “Parent Permission for Young Adult Required Material” and would be sent home for a parent’s signature before the student could read any book defined as Young Adult for class.

Of course, there are multitudes of books considered Young Adult that do not contain sex, drugs, violence, profanity, and such, but Gravuer seems to equate Young Adult with racy, as evidenced in an accompanying document outlining “the rationale and procedures for assigning/checking out books containing mature or explicit themes (From here out referred to as Young Adult or YA materials).”

In fact, Young Adult is a somewhat arbitrary marketing term that has been adopted by many public libraries, but has no standard definition for educational purposes. Moreover the one book that Gravuer uses as an example, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, is not marketed as a Young Adult title even though it is often assigned in high school classes; it is simply literary fiction, e.g. “Adult.” (Not in the pornographic sense!) As written, then, Gravuer’s proposed permission form for required reading might add an extra roadblock for books like the Harry Potter series, but would not apply to the one title that he cites as potentially controversial.

The other form that Gravuer presented to the board is titled “Parental Restriction of Voluntary Reading /Viewing Material.” Those who choose to sign it would bar their children from checking out any Young Adult materials from school libraries. Again, uninquisitive parents who get their definition of Young Adult only from the school district (which they might logically assume to be a reliable source) could be easily swayed. The accompanying explanatory document says that “some common themes in young adult literature” are as follows:
[F]riendships, crime, divorce, forms of parenting, siblings, disease, sexual intercourse, drug/alcohol abuse, death, puberty, pop culture, race relations and school. Depending upon the author and/or work, this material may contain explicit descriptions of sensitive subject matter to which not all families are comfortable with exposing their children.
In reality, books designated by the publisher as Young Adult or Teen would comprise the bulk of high school library collections and students whose parents signed the form would be left without much to read. Fortunately, some parents who spoke out against Gravuer’s proposal at last week’s board meeting were able to foresee the can of worms it would open. Michael Wagner, who has a daughter in the Appoquinimink district, pointed out that “[w]e do not need a policy for parental restriction of reading material – it is already being done on [individual] request, and what is being proposed will be impossible to implement without broad strokes of censorship which is not appropriate in a public school system.”

Another parent, Maria Poole, argued that the darker themes explored in some Young Adult books are far from gratuitous:
If even one student sees themselves in a book with difficult subject matter – make no mistake folks, there are children in our community who are victims of abuse, of incest. There are children cutting themselves. And, these books are not a roadmap to that. These books allow a child to see themselves and not be put in a corner and be marginalized and perhaps reach out and get the help that they need.
According to the Middletown Transcript newspaper, the school board did not yet vote on the proposals because “the matter needed a chance for more public input before it is finalized.” Alarmingly, however, Gravuer maintained that “he did not need their vote in order to adopt the measure he had proposed.” Nevertheless, the proposed forms are currently available for public review on the school board’s website and stakeholders are invited to send comments to parentbookpermission@appo.k12.de.us. With enough feedback, perhaps Gravuer will realize that the proposals are illogical, redundant, and would in fact facilitate censorship despite his claim that “we are not banning books or censoring books.”

from: Comic Books Legal Defense Fund

Friday, January 2, 2015

Talk, Sing, Read, Write, Play: How Libraries Reach Kids Before They Can Read

by: Lynn Neary

Literacy begins at home — there are a number of simple things parents can do with their young children to help them get ready to read. But parents can't do it all alone, and that's where community services, especially libraries, come in.
On a recent morning, parents and children gathered in the "Play and Learn" center in the Mount Airy Library in Carroll County, Md. Jenny Busbey and her daughter Layla were using the puppet theater to go on an imaginary adventure. There are play-and-learn centers in all of the Carroll County libraries.
Dorothy Stoltz, head of outreach and programming, says it's just one way the library is encouraging parents to engage in five basic practices that lay the groundwork for literacy.
"Talk, sing, read, write and play," Stoltz lists. "That is doable for every parent no matter how busy you are. You can fit in these practices in little bits of time with your children throughout the day."
These five practices grew out of a body of research showing that parental interaction with children at an early age is crucial to later success in school. A study done in 1995 indicated that children from higher-income families heard 30 million more words at home by the age of 4 than children from low-income homes. This has become known as the 30 million-word gap.
"When you learn words and know words, it's easier to gain words," says New York University professor Susan Neuman, who helped come up with the five practices. Neuman says children who live in a rich verbal environment enter kindergarten with an advantage that continues to grow through the years.
"Children who have heard many words are likely to understand more words," she explains. "They're also likely to learn basic phonics or decoding skills. So those children are on a trajectory of success, and those children who have rich vocabulary are reading, reading on their own, learning new words through books. Those children who are not are slowing down, may hate reading, and as a result get slower and slower over time."
Carroll County has woven the five practices into all of its programs for young children — from a series called "Every Child Ready to Read," which provides formal training for parents and caregivers, to activities like story time for babies and toddlers.
This is not your traditional story time where the librarian reads a book while parents and children listen quietly — and it is not just about reading. There's singing, ringing bells and shaking brightly colored noisemakers. As children's librarian Robin Dugan moves from one activity to the next, she encourages parents to play, sing and talk with their children.
Dugan says her first goal is to make story time fun. But she also hopes to give parents the tools they need to prepare their toddlers for learning to read when they get older.
"If a parent or caregiver thinks, 'Oh, I now see why we sing these songs,' they're more likely to do it at home or to try it at home. Or, they may recognize a behavior that a child is doing that is connected to here which will, one, bring them back more, and, two, have them then maybe be motivated to try on their own to expand that and have some confidence in their abilities to teach their children."
For some parents in Carroll County, attending the library's play-and-read session is an easy, natural thing to do. But that's not the case for all families.
Parent educator Viviana Calderon says that many families in the Spanish-speaking community have never been to the library. "They are afraid to go by themselves," she says. Calderon works with the Judy Center, an early literacy support organization that partners with the Carroll County Public Library. She assists parents who worry that they don't have the English skills to ask for a book or for a library card — and she introduces them to the library's bookmobile program.
Carroll County is a largely rural area sprinkled with new, middle-class subdivisions. But it also has pockets of poverty. The bookmobile is one way to reach a wide range of families, and it regularly stops at day care centers.
At one bookmobile stop — a home child care center run by Barbara Summers — the children grab books off the shelves of the narrow vehicle and make a big pile on the floor. Summers says most of the kids she cares for have never been to a library. "In the 30 years I've been doing child care, I've only had like three families that visit the library," she says.
The Carroll County library also reaches out directly to parents via informal discussion groups. "We always ask the parents the question: What more can the library do for you and your family?" says Stoltz. "I think if libraries can listen and respond to families, it's helping us do our best work."
There is no one answer to the problem of illiteracy, but early childhood intervention is key. Carroll County's programs for families provide a model for how libraries can support parents with the all-important task of getting their children ready to read.

from: NPR