Rethinking Government: Why We Need Library Rental Fees

It's time to bring a beloved institution into the 21st century

by: Barry Greenfield

Image: grahamwell/Flickr

As a municipal official (selectman) and taxpayer, I often wonder why government evenly distributes taxes when there are clearly ways to lower the burden across the general tax base by charging fees for services that are used by specific groups. Take into consideration the following example:


Public libraries have been in existence for thousands of years, but for the purposes of this article, let's start with the year 1731, when Benjamin Franklin began a subscription library as a means of sharing thousands of books. Members needed to either purchase stock in the library (which was setup as a company) or become a member -- for about $5.

By 1833, Peterborough, New Hampshire, began to use tax revenue to purchase books for a publicly owned library, free to all residents. In 1854, the Boston Public Library became what is widely known as the first real public library, and more than 20 years later, the Dewey decimal system was brought into use.

In the early 20th century, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated $50 million to build 1,700 libraries in the United States. There are now more than 9,000 public libraries, not including branches. Around 85 percent of library funding comes from federal, state, and local taxes. The majority (90 percent or more) of that comes from local property taxes.

As a constant user and supporter of my town library, I am grateful for the access to the thousands of books, newspapers, and periodicals available within the library system. But I also have trouble understanding how the public library system has essentially undergone no fundamental change in the last century.

In the last 100 years, the cost of a new book has gone from 10 cents to $30, but anyone with a library card can rent that same book for free.

At a time where the tax burden can often be onerous, doesn't it make sense to ask library users to pay a nominal fee for a book rental? When municipal budgets are tightened, almost universally the library is left to hang by a thread. Amazingly, when library usage is at an all-time high, I read about library closings every week across this country.

But I never hear any politician or citizen's group recommending a rental fee to support the library.

Why do libraries get the short end of the stick? For a multitude of reasons, but primarily due to changes in how people have been gathering since technologies like radio and TV came on the scene. Prior to their introduction, libraries were a community gathering place. That's no longer the case, and in today's computer-based home environment, the majority of taxpayers in a municipality do not use the public library.

Does that mean we shouldn't offer the service to the community? Of course not. Instead, the municipal government should give baseline funding to the library, with the remaining funding coming from operational revenue.

In my town, more than 600,000 items were borrowed in 2010. Just a 50 cent fee on each item would add $300,000 to the bottom line (increasing the budget by more than 50 percent), allowing for facility upgrades, newer materials, and maybe even the opportunity to consider ... wait for it ... a small café to earn revenue on those people who come to the library for its in-house offerings like computers, newspapers, and magazines.

In summary, municipal government needs to stop thinking like it's 1900. There are opportunities to provide tax relief in our towns and cities by moving towards targeted fees that affect those who use municipal services. Next week, I'll discuss some other low hanging fruit before moving on to profit centers.

from: The Atlantic

Guerrilla Librarians Making Noise

by: Ashlea Halpern

Colin McMullan holds the handmade book he contributed to his 'micro-library' in Williamsburg. Borrowers can take any item for two weeks.

Even in a neighborhood overrun with trendy shops and edgy galleries, the Corner Library stands out—and not just because it's four feet tall and shaped like a doghouse.


The guerrilla athenaeum, which appeared this spring at the intersection of Leonard and Withers streets in Williamsburg, has clapboard siding and sits on a hand truck chained to a one-way street sign—a clever skirting of city regulation by its founder, 31-year-old artist Colin McMullan. Instructions on the library's padlocked door explain how to obtain a membership card.

Inside, the shelves are lined with books, zines, cycling maps and other curiosities, including a CD filled with baby pictures of world dictators and a handwritten recipe card for skillet cornbread. The library boasts some 25 to 30 members to date.

While public libraries continue to struggle financially and bookstore chains succumb to the e-revolution, privately funded micro-libraries like Mr. McMullan's are popping up around the city. Their founders—mostly artists and bibliophiles who tired of Googling their way to enlightenment—share a reverence for conventional libraries and their tradition of community programming.

"The internet is an incredible information tool, and Kindles seem very convenient," Mr. McMullan said. "But they don't satisfy a need we have for local, real-space exchange. These libraries are meant to help neighbors meet, know, and help each other."

A second Corner Library, also operated by Mr. McMullan and dubbed the EAsT Harlem Seed & Recipe Library, was unveiled June 3 in front of the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center. It masquerades as a planter and is stuffed with seed packets and recipe cards. Volunteer librarian Christine Licata, a curator at the nonprofit arts space Taller Boricua, has watched flummoxed locals circle the planter several times before opening its hidden drawer. She said the project redefines "what is a library and what are the possibilities of interpreting that word." A third Corner Library, destined for Coney Island, is in the works.

Micro-libraries are not unprecedented. In 2009, Jerome Chou, director of programs at the Design Trust for Public Space, set up the temporary BRANCH community library in an empty parking lot in Fort Greene, in part as a reaction to the Brooklyn Public Library's diminished weekend hours. Elsewhere, the Underground Library, founded in October 2009 by two anonymous New Yorkers ("the librarians"), circulates handmade works through in-person trades; it has 200 members and counting. And Steven Peterman, founder of the Brooklyn Art Library in Williamsburg, plans to open a semi-permanent outpost for thousands of art journals, solicited via the International Sketchbook Project, in San Francisco next year.

The king of micro-libraries, however, is indisputably Proteus Gowanus, an interdisciplinary arts venue located in a former box factory overlooking the Gowanus Canal. It houses six non-circulating collections, including a Cold War reference library and an Oulipo archive (a dozen or so books exploring the French method of constrained writing).

The most established of Proteus's archives is the Reanimation Library, founded in 2006 by Andrew Beccone. It catalogs some 1,300 books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation—like 1976's "Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones" and 1982's "The Great Pantyhose Crafts Book." Cosmetology textbooks share shelf space with tomes on Tibetan grammar, bowling and palmistry.

"The effort is modest in scope compared to many public libraries, but it does provide a place to house and reactivate overlooked gems from the sediment of print culture," said Mr. Beccone, 36, who is in the process of launching branch libraries in Portland, Ore., Providence, R.I. and Paris. "The only resistance to the project that I ever encounter is from librarians," he said, "and usually from librarians of a specific vintage."

Colin McMullan's Corner Library, at the intersection
 of Leonard and Withers streets in Brooklyn.

Lauren Comito, a Queens librarian and communications director for advocacy group Urban Librarians Unite, sees niche libraries as a threat that "perpetuate the myth that libraries are 'a bunch of books on a shelf' and that anyone could be a librarian, you just have to like to read."


"At least one of these 'DIY' libraries is a doghouse full of books," Ms. Comito said. "Well, if people confuse [public libraries] with being just a bigger version of a doghouse full of books, then yes, they could weaken our finances by cheapening our value from a profession to a hobby."

Not every librarian agrees. Melissa Morrone, who works in the city's public system, understands the need for some creative types to think beyond the public system. "Public libraries are bureaucratic, beholden to governments and broad community norms, and becoming more and more open to corporate elements in their buildings and operations," she said. "A DIY library can be accountable to a much smaller base of like-minded people."

Indeed, said Proteus Gowanus co-founder Sasha Chavchavadze, rogue collections "enhance and cultivate an interest in the disappearing medium of the book, and could possibly even lead to a renewed interest in mainstream libraries."

Mr. McMullan echoed that sentiment: "It would be extremely pretentious of us micro-librarians to think that our systems could ever take over the public library system in this country. I just think of the Corner Libraries as an ancillary system that, if anything, remind people how valuable libraries are to our communities and our sense of cultural identity."

from: Wall Street Journal

Book publishers getting to grips with the potential of apps

London roundtable reveals optimism about the creative potential, but an awareness of tight margins too

Book-apps like The Waste Land and Jack Kerouac's On the Road hint at potential

Last week, Apps Blog attended a London roundtable of book publishers convened by creative studio ustwo and consultancy Literary Platform, to discuss the opportunities and challenges offered by mobile and tablet apps.

The attendees were drawn from the digital and marketing teams of several key publishers – including HarperCollins, Faber, Profile Books and others – and while the agreement was that quotes would not be attributed, here are the key themes that emerged.

– Book-apps aren't just being made by traditional book publishers: independent app developers are also piling into the space, albeit often working with out-of-copyright content like nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Meanwhile entertainment brands like Disney - who have been involved in the books business before through licensing deals - are now publishing their own book-apps directly.

– Publishers are at an experimental stage with apps: they are trying different formats and content, but in many cases they still have to commission apps with a firm eye on delivering a return on investment.

– Publishers are looking for partnerships with innovative developers rather than pure work-for-hire projects. Often this involves revenue-share deals – something that appeals to both sides to ensure they are committed (and also reducing the upfront costs for the publisher). Developers are keen to secure a marketing commitment from the publisher as part of this though. Meanwhile, publishers say they can help developers with access to authors, dealing with agents, commissioning and editing content, and handling territoriality and permissions.

– It's still unclear what a truly compelling experience for the reader is in an app. For example, if you buy a novel, you know you're making a commitment to reading a sequential narrative. But what do people expect from book-apps? It's more obvious for some genres – reference for example – than for fiction. Are publishers re-interpreting the original book, or doing something completely different?

– Publishers realise that they don't have to confine themselves to creating book-apps, especially in the non-fiction area. HarperCollins' SAS Survival Guide was one of the first books to become a lifestyle app with more functions and features - for example Morse Code signalling using the phone's flashlight - to create something that's more of a hybrid app product built for the device, as opposed to a straightforward e-book. Apple is also encouraging publishers not to make book-apps that are too similar to e-books, which it sells through its iBooks store.

– There is already one example – Faber and Touch Press' Solar System – where what started as an app is now becoming a printed book.

– What's a good price for a book-app? This is still a very fluid area. Many cost between £2.99 and £3.99, with occasional drops to 69p for short-burst promotions. However, book-apps like Faber's The Waste Land, Penguin's Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Insight Editions' Harry Potter Film Wizardry have been selling for £7.99 and above. The conversation focused more on innovation and content rather than pricing strategies though.

– Many publishers - although not all - think that the best margins are likely to be in creating a platform for publishers to release digital book experiences through, rather than simply in the content. "Publishers need more windows, and whoever owns the windows will really make the money..."

– There is still a lot of "paranoia and secrecy" around sales figures for book-apps, not least because they're perhaps not doing as well as has been supposed. "Nobody wants to admit it's really not making as much money as we'd like..." ustwo's decision to go public with the fact that its chart-topping Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime was only earning £2,000 a day when it was the Top Grossing Book on the App Store was a welcome break from the secrecy – even if the figure was a bit dispiriting.

– There is a distinction emerging between 'marketing apps' and 'product' – book-apps as something that promotes a physical book, versus those that are products in their own right. Often the work of separate teams with separate budgets and goals within a publisher.

– Children's books seem to be a really appealing area, but there is still a compromise to be made "between making something that's really good for children, and making something that's going to sell". Possibly because parents are quite keen on educational apps for their children, whereas the kids would rather have something playful – a digital toy.

– One contrast between the worlds of books and apps: there isrelatively little analysis done of who is buying books and how they consume them – "we're pretty unscientific – I've never sat down in an editorial meeting when anyone's brought scientific data other than sales" – whereas in apps, there is a big focus on getting analytics and then acting on them.

Three reasons why publishers aren't more involved in apps than they are, according to one attendee: "It's already a risk-based business – we are spending a lot of money on things that quite often fail. Second, margins are very small – publisher profit margins are much smaller than the development industry. Third: culturally books is still a quite old-fashioned industry..."

from: Guardian

Brazenhead Books: A secret bookstore

by: Angela Hickman

When real estate prices in Manhattan got so out of hand that Michael Seidenberg could no longer afford the rent for his used book shop, he had two options: shut down Brazenhead Books, or move it somewhere else.

For a while he tried selling books at fairs and markets, but it just wasn’t for him, so he moved his wares into an Upper Eastside apartment and opened a secret bookstore.

The story of his secret New York book shop — it’s illegal to run a business from a residential space — is chronicled by Andrew David Weston as part of a series of short documentaries on Etsy, a website where small business owners and crafters can sell their wares through online shops.

The video shows an apartment completely transformed by the thousands of books Seidenberg has collected over the years. Seidenberg doesn’t advertise, of course, but if you want to do some sneaky shopping, you can look him up in the phone book.

Think of it as an old-timey Prohibition-era kind of thing, except that instead of calling in for the location of a speakeasy, Seidenberg will give you his shop’s address.

from: National Post

Digital Picture Frames as Informational Signs

by: Brian

Usually I’m pretty good at math, but in this case it took me awhile to put two and two together.

Awhile ago, our Childrens Department put a digital picture frame on their desk, using it to display photos of their various programs*. I’d seen and heard of other libraries using digital picture frame like this, and for in-building informational signs (like upcoming events), but I never thought of an application for it at the Reference Desk.

Until a couple weeks ago, when I was in the Apple Store in Boston. I’m not at all an Apple fanboy, but I admit that once in awhile, they come up with a good idea.

A friend of mine was having trouble with her Mac laptop, so we took it to the genius bar to having someone help us with it. I still really like the idea of the genius bar in and of itself, but what got my attention was that, behind the genius bar were great big screens scrolling through tips and information. The messages were all about using or fixing Apple products, which were perfectly targeted at the captive audience of people waiting for the genius bar.

I didn’t get any photos myself (Apple is funny about taking pictures in their store), but here are some from the interweb:

You get the idea.


When I saw that, it finally dawned on me – this would be an easy thing for libraries to do at service desks, using a simple digital picture frame. As soon as I can get approval (and funding) to purchase one, I’d like to try one with rotating tips on topics like:

■how to renew books

■how to book museum passes

■using online resources and databases

■where the bathrooms are

■online events calendar

■how to find summer reading books

Really, good topics are anything that might be interesting to someone waiting in line at the Reference Desk.

The “photos” will just be slides created in PowerPoint, and hopefully, having something interesting to look will give patrons waiting in line something to do (in addition to teaching them something they may not have known).

I bet other libraries have already thought of this, so if you’re doing it, please comment with how it’s working. When I get ours up and running, I’ll post an update with how it went.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*They decided to use a digital picture frame rather than flickr or other online service, because they were reluctant to post photos of kids on the internet. Keeping the photos offline and in the Childrens Room was a good compromise (between online or not at all), and it might be more likely for the kids to see themselves, too.

from: Swiss Army Librarian

King County Wows Again

by: Nancy Dowd

So I'm scanning through the finalists for the PR News finalists and there they were, King County Library System - Take Time to Read. Will that library ever stop being fantastic? Our friend Marsha Iverson is the driving force over there and we can't say enough good things about her, but it makes it so much easier because so is everyone else.


According to the news release, "the coveted Platinum PR Awards set the industry benchmark for excellence across all areas of PR. Celebrate the industry's best—those who took chances, made tremendous strides and understand the power of public relations. This must-attend industry event will honor the top PR campaigns of the year, the smartest communications initiatives and the people behind them." You go girl!

Have we talked about the campaign yet? The KCLS Take Time to Read campaign is a three-year project featuring innovative ways to promote reading as a community value. They installed outdoor community galleries of book art and audio narrative as an innovative way for the public to interact and engage with books and reading in a surprising, fun way. Book covers and audio narration, yes! I can imagine they'll be connecting QR codes to this project if they haven't already.

I love it because its bringing us back to our brand, reading. It's helping people remember why it's important to take the time to read. And its providing some fun motivation to help people get back to what they love. Read this copy from the press release:

"Why is it important to Take Time to Read?

No matter how you measure it, Americans are overbooked and under-read. We work more hours than a medieval peasant did, and read less than we did ten years ago. The results are far from trivial. Just as our frenzied work schedules affect our health, our communities, and our sense of well-being, reduced reading time is taking its toll.

The National Endowment for the Arts studied American reading habits, producing an alarming report in 2007: To Read or Not To Read: A question of National Consequence. Among their more disturbing findings: "On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading."

Like all skills, reading improves with practice. The less we read, the worse we get at it. Our vocabularies are dropping, along with reading comprehension, critical thinking and analytical skills.

Young adult author Paul Kropp writes in The Reading Solution: "There are almost half a million words in our English Language - the largest language on earth, incidentally - but a third of all our writing is made up of only twenty-two words."

In Illiterate America, educator Jonathan Kozol points out: "50 percent of American adults are unable to read an eighth grade level book." It's worse than it sounds. Nationwide, low literacy skills affect employability, productivity, health, lifelong earning capacity, and economic stability.

In today's hectic culture, it's hard to find time to read for pleasure. The KCLS Take Time to Read campaign is a three-year project featuring innovative ways to promote reading as a community value.

Learn more about Take Time to Read at King County Library System's www.kcls.org/taketimetoread."

They even help people find the time to read on their website:


Give yourself or someone you care about a Gift of Time to read. Pick up a gift card at any King County Library and indulge in the pleasure of reading.

Turn time to kill into time to read. While you’re waiting for your medical appointment or your oil to be changed, take a little time to read. Take advantage of the books, short stories and magazines on of our Quick Read Shelves throughout the county.

Go for the reads that don’t take much time. Suggestions from our librarians for Quick Reads.

Take Time to Read Programs

Do you want to have more time to read? Get organized, clear your clutter and learn time management techniques at your library.

Very nice.

And those programs" Summer reading, of course, but there's walking with your library, opera, writing workshops, creating reading journals.... love it!

from: The 'M' Word

Prospect of privatizing Toronto’s library sparks outcry

by: David Kumagai

Steve Hubbard has been helping the people of Fargo, N.D., find the books they want for nearly 30 years as a reference librarian. The 62-year-old began working at the local library part-time in high school and never left.


But in 2001, he was faced with a plan that would make most librarians cringe.

The city decided to outsource the libraries’ management to a company called Library Systems and Services, and Mr. Hubbard would answer to people in the library business to make money.

But after an initial public outcry faded, Mr. Hubbard says, “everyone was pretty happy. They were certainly capable professionals.”


The concept of for-profit, privately run libraries is fairly new. But in the United States it is has become an increasingly popular option for cash-strapped cities, and according to the Library Workers Union Local 4948, Toronto could be next.


The union launched a campaign called Project Rescue July 13 to fight the threat of outsourcing library services as the city waited for Thursday’s KPMG report on cutting costs. The report recommended Toronto, “rationalize the footprint of libraries to reduce service levels, closing some branches” in order to save $13.3-million. The consultants also suggested trimming library outreach and programming.


“The cuts would be devastating to the library system,” says union president Maureen O’Reilly, who’s running Project Rescue. She says the library’s budget has already been cut 10 per cent since amalgamation.

While the report didn’t suggest outsourcing as a way to cut costs, Ms. O’Reilly insists it’s “still in play.”

“We’re only in the first year of the Ford administration. We also have a budget process where the city manager is asking for another 10-per-cent budget cut.”

As part of the campaign, the union set up a website and a petition last week responding to Councillor Doug Ford’s comments in February that the city is going to be “outsourcing everything that is not nailed down.” Mr. Ford fuelled the campaign by carping on CFRB radio recently that his neighbourhood has more libraries than Tim Hortons – Etobicoke has 13 libraries and 39 Tim Hortons.

The website explains the union’s fear: “We are likely to see our City Council privatize some or all of the TPL’s operations, unless we act to change this outcome.”

The site crashed Thursday evening after Margaret Atwood retweeted a message telling people worried about the “threat of privatization” to visit. The server was briefly overwhelmed by the surge in traffic.


While Anne Marie Aikins, the TPL’s communications manager, said they have no reason to believe further outsourcing is being pursued, she admits, “everything is on the table and we understand people are concerned.”

The TPL has already outsourced the selection of paperbacks and Ms. O’Reilly says, “now we just get generalized collections that meet quantity numbers. We believe the quality isn’t as good.”

The city has also outsourced the library’s custodial, maintenance and cleaning duties.

Library Systems and Services, the company hired by Fargo, runs libraries in 16 cities or towns and operates 63 branches, making it the fifth-largest library system in the U.S.

Founded in 1981, the company has taken off in the past decade, running libraries in California, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas and Tennessee.


LSSI chief executive officer Brad King says they haven’t had any talks with Toronto, but the union’s grievances are nothing new.

Everywhere LSSI goes there’s a backlash against the perceived takeover of public libraries, Mr. King says. “One thing we keep trying to emphasize – we operate public libraries.”

But when libraries are run for profit, how much profit is fair and what are the sacrifices?

Mr. King says LSSI makes libraries more efficient by cutting out the middlemen. “There isn’t a lot of bureaucracy, to put it mildly,” he says.

Riverside County, Calif.. is the only LSSI community to release a full audit of its LSSI contract. In the county of more than two million people, the company made a profit of $80,000 (U.S.) in 2002.


But the changes a library makes when it starts seeking a bottom line aren’t always clear to the public.

Priscilla Donovan was hired by LSSI in Leander, Texas, to run the town’s library four years ago.

“As far as I know everybody’s really happy – most people have no idea [that it’s privately run]. It’s still a library. We don’t wear LSSI uniforms or anything like that,” she says.

Ms. Donovan, 54, ran a public library in north Texas before answering an ad for the job in Leander. “I pretty much run it the exact same way,” she says, “I have a few more reports to do, but I still run the programs, order books. I have more money here, which is good.”

Warren Wickens has lived in Toronto for 21 years and says “my concern is that there would be user fees, I guess if there was a cost associated with coming to this library or other libraries, staying at home would be more attractive for me.”

Mr. Wickens, 42, has been using Toronto’s Urban Affairs library as a place to study since it opened in 1992, but the branch has been slated for relocation in an earlier effort to save money. The branch will move to the second floor of the Reference Library in September.


For his part, Mr. King says LSSI has “never introduced a new fee into a library.”

Cities in Alberta charge anywhere from $5 to $20 a year for library cards, but Ontario’s Public Libraries Act forbids charging money for access to a library or for borrowing books, which leaves few options for boosting revenue.

The Toronto Public Library Board will meet July 26 to review the KPMG recommendations, which will go before the city’s Executive Committee July 28.

As for Mr. Hubbard, LSSI left town in 2003 after the city ended its contract early, because Fargo’s board was dissatisfied with the company for failing to pay certain bills on time. But the city remains a positive reference for LSSI.

While the library is back under city management, Mr. Hubbard says, “we came out of that improved and I think we have to give some credit.”


from: Globe and Mail

Outcry as Radio 4 stops broadcasting short stories

by: Rob Sharp

Radio 4, the world's biggest commissioner of short stories, is to cut its broadcast output from three a week to one a week.

The news has been greeted with disdain by authors, who believe the art form is continually denigrated and increasingly ignored by the literary establishment.

The Society of Authors is writing to the BBC to protest about its "disappointing" reduction in output, which comes as the BBC extends the length of its current-affairs programme The World at One by 15 minutes. Short-story writer Susie Maguire is writing to Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams to complain about the decision. She said she has amassed more than 80 signatories to her letter so far including writers Toby Litt, Stella Duffy, Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman, Michael Holroyd and Nicholas Royle.

"The decision is unfortunate, if only because the short story is an ideal form for being read aloud," author Lionel Shriver told The Independent.

A BBC spokesperson confirmed the reduction, but said the corporation would still commission around 100 short stories a year.

from: Telegraph

Tim Hortons vs. Toronto Public Libraries mashup

by: Derek Flack

Doug Ford's recent remarks regarding Toronto Public Libraries have already become notorious. Speaking on Newstalk 1010 about a week ago, the Ward 2 Councillor claimed that "We have more libraries per person than any other city in the world. I've got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Hortons." A few days later, Our Public Library, a website created to campaign against the privatization of TPL branches, thankfully set the record straight.


"When the Urban Affairs branch closes, Toronto will have 3.9 libraries per 100,000 people, which is what Vancouver has. Halifax has 4.3 libraries per 100,000 people, more than Toronto. In the U.S., the entire state of Vermont, which has only one-quarter of the population of Toronto, has 30 libraries per 100,000 people, which is 7.5 times the library density of Toronto," read a post by Maureen O'Reilly dated yesterday.

"In Etobicoke (Mr. Ford's area), there are 13 library branches there, and 39 Tim Horton's shops, not to mention all the other donut shops," she continues. "In fact, on a per capita basis, the people in Etobicoke have fewer libraries than Toronto as a whole." As was the case when Rob Ford spoke on the John Oakley show last week regarding the City's labour costs, it would seem his older brother has a propensity to exaggerate when it suits him.

But how much of an exaggeration was it? Well, as it turns out, a pretty big one. In Ford's Etobicoke North ward, there are at least double the number of Tim Hortons than there are TPL branches (Rexdale, Humberwood and Northern Elms). And what about the city as a whole? Well, according to a somewhat recent list of Tim Hortons franchises with 416 area codes, the ratio of this particular donut shop to libraries comes in at almost three to one (just over 100 libraries compared to roughly 270 retail outlets, including those located at gas stations and other stores).


So, despite my limited skills, I made a map for Doug. Now he can directly compare the number of Tim Hortons franchises to public libraries in the whole city. Because, you know, the numbers O'Reilly cites above can be too big and abstract to get a handle on. And what better way to communicate this information than with a picture?

Use the map above to compare the number of Tim Hortons locations in Toronto to that of the TPL. A note about the data: the list of Tim Hortons locations is derived from GPS data that's at least a year old, so there might be minor inaccuracies. The map is used to highlight the overall trend more than as a guide to donut shops.

from: BlogTO

Amazon offers US students textbook rental

by: Lisa Campbell

Amazon.com is giving students the ability to rent textbooks on Kindle e-readers.


The company said students can save up to 80% off textbook prices with the new initiative, which launched today. Kindle Textbook Rental will also allow students to tailor the time they loan textbooks for, between a 30 and 360-day period and students can choose to buy the book they are renting at any time. Academic publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor and Francis are among those signed up to the textbook rental scheme.

Dave Limp, vice-president at Amazon Kindle, said: “We've done a little something extra we think students will enjoy. Normally, when you sell your print textbook at the end of the semester you lose all the margin notes and highlights you made as you were studying. We're extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere, even after a rental expires."

A spokesperson for Amazon UK said the Kindle Textbook Rental service was restricted to US Kindle users through the Amazon.com website.

from: Bookseller

Students Get Up Close And Personal With Rare Books

by: Sandy Hausman

The Rare Book School was founded in 1983 to support the
 study of the history of books and printing.

Three stories underground, in the University of Virginia's main library, 60 librarians, collectors, scholars and other bibliophiles divide into small groups. They're barely breathing as they lean over texts that have been around for centuries, like the 1497 Latin edition of Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools.


Staff members like Barbara Heritage shuttle from room to room, bearing precious cargo. "Our job is to be almost like stage hands," she says.

The university's Rare Book School estimates that it owns about 80,000 publications and print-related materials. And while some of those items are quite valuable, Michael Suarez — director of the Rare Book School — wants students to be able to handle them so they can better appreciate the history of paper, binding, typography and illustration.

"We insist that students touch and smell and shine light through items, and investigate them to understand the book in history, and understand the book as history," Suarez says.

The classes that bring students into this underground treasure trove mostly deal with antiques, but the program also explores the preservation of materials that were born digital. That might sound easy, but consider this: In the late 1980s, the BBC created a modern-day version of the 900-year-old Domesday Book, using a then-cutting-edge technology — laserdiscs.

"Very recently they had to spend 70,000 pounds, about $100,000, to try to recover that information, because there were no machines extant that could read those laserdiscs," Suarez says.

After a week of intensive studies, students leave with a wealth of information and confirmed in their passion for books.

Amy Elkins, a graduate student at Emory University, is one of those students. "Whether you're a collector or a scholar of the book, things can get a little bit lonely, and it's important to have people who listen to your ideas openly and will engage with that," she says.

"One of the most valuable things about this program is who you meet, and it's really nice to kind of have raw, distilled bookishness," adds Eric Johnson, a curator of books at Ohio State University.

That spirit gives Suarez and his faculty hope that books will survive even in the digital age. After all, he says, second to coins, they're the most common artifact left to us since medieval times — a clear sign of their staying power.

 from: NPR

A bookshop going places

Although it's geared to a much easier-going kind of shopping than we're used to, the Book Barge is a genuinely dynamic enterprise

by: Lee Rourke




The Book Barge: a buoyant business

First we had slow food, then slow writing and now, quite naturally it seems, we have slow bookselling. Slow bookselling? I hear you ask. We're all aware of what's happening to the average independent book shop in today's accelerated, one-click internet-led environment: they are closing down by the score, and it's becoming a major struggle for the average independent bookshop to survive. I've written before about what my ideal bookshop would be like, but I have to admit my ideal wouldn't stand a chance today.

I've been lamenting the demise of the independent bookshop for a while now, everything just seems to be disappearing. And then last week a strange but truly brilliant thing happened. Actually, it all started several months ago, when I received an email from The Book Barge informing me that my debut novel The Canal was their bestseller. Obviously, I investigated further and was amazed to find out that The Book Barge was indeed a floating bookshop on a canal boat (57' Cruiser Stern) in Lichfield, Staffordshire.

It is the brainchild of Sarah Henshaw. "By setting up on a canal boat," she explained, "we hope to promote a less hurried and harried lifestyle of idle pleasures, cups of tea, conversation, culture and, of course, curling up with an incomparably good Book Barge purchase." I was immediately sold. But why a canal boat? "I hoped that by creating a unique retail space, customers would realise how independent bookshops can offer a far more pleasurable shopping experience than they're likely to find online or on the discount shelves at supermarkets."

A few months later I received another email from Sarah. This time she informed me that she was about to embark on a six-month tour of the UK's canal network, incorporating a series of onboard author events along the way, including David Vann and Per Petterson, and wondered if I would like to read at one of her book clubs in London. The tour is a mammoth undertaking, as Sarah will be living on The Book Barge, hoping to swap books for the odd meal, or for the use of a shower along the way. (Most recently she offered to swap books for a mechanic to have a look at the engine – I hope she found one).

So, last week I stepped aboard the Book Barge on the Regent's Canal by The Narrow Boat pub for a planned reading and book signing event. At 7.30pm on a balmy evening, we set off along the canal, through Wenlock Basin and towards Islington Tunnel. The thing is I didn't get to read, as we were all enjoying ourselves so much it didn't seem right to spoil the fun, besides it has always been a geeky ambition of mine to travel through the Islington Tunnel (I have never seen so many spiders' webs in my life). It was the best (non)reading I have ever taken part in.

On the way, as Sarah navigated the barge along the canal, I managed to ask her just whom her average customers might be. "I've had school teachers and kids who are skiving school," she laughed, "tourists and a bride groom; the odd celebrity; a whole shop full of parents waiting for a Justin Bieber concert to end and most recently a bunch of drunkards diving off the roof into the canal at 5.00am on a Sunday morning. A good independent bookshop shouldn't have an average customer. The more diverse the custom, the better independents are doing at bringing books to the widest possible audience."

The Book Barge is a breath of genuinely fresh air and quite possibly the coolest bookshop in the UK. With a wonderful kids' section and an excellent selection of contemporary and secondhand fiction and non-fiction it makes for a pleasurable book-buying visit. At the moment, it is moored outside the Guardian offices in London. but be quick, the Book Barge sets off for Bath, Gloucester, Worcester, Manchester, Skipton, York and Derby soon. A full itinerary of events can be found here.

from: Guardian

At Tacoma Public Library, a new digital lab offers space where teens can create, learn

Just beyond the main checkout counter, in a soundproof room covered in gray egg carton foam, the future of the Tacoma Public Library is spilling out in graphics, text, video and sound.
by: Lewis Kamb

LUI KIT WONG Staff photographer
Aarron Johnson, 15, foreground, assists
Jacob Minor, 14, on a video at the digital media
lab in the downtown Tacoma Public Library on June 3.

Just beyond the main checkout counter, in a soundproof room covered in gray egg carton foam, the future of the Tacoma Public Library is spilling out in graphics, text, video and sound.

It can be found in the computer-aided fashion animations of 18-year-old Anna Slunaker, and in the video game-inspired “mockumentary” filmmaking of Christian Bowser, 15, and Andy Beattie, 19.

And it’s there in 16-year-old Ullysses Mosely’s rap lyrics, which he plans to set to beats with the help of Jacob Minor, a 14-year-old producer-in-the-making.

“I’m not necessarily looking to become a rap star, but I like music and poetry,” said Mosely, explaining how the digital smorgasbord around him is impacting his life. “All this stuff really just helps me kind of explore what interests me.”

“This stuff” is a new array of high-powered computers and state-of-the-art software, collectively known as StoryLab – the Tacoma Public Library’s new digital media center for teens. Funded by a three-year $150,000 grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation with matching funds from the library, StoryLab is believed to be only the third digital media center in the nation now provided by a public library, library officials say.

“This really speaks to the way libraries are changing,” said Susan Odencrantz, the city’s library director. “More and more, there’s a movement toward digital literacy and uploading content. This just lets us take it to the next level to serve people with more modern tools and training opportunities.”

City library officials submitted the idea for StoryLab to the Allen foundation under a broad new grant initiative focused on “strengthening the role that libraries and librarians play in connecting people to information and ideas,” the foundation’s web site says. In response, Tacoma landed the foundation’s largest award among seven grant recipients named under the inaugural program.

Money from the Microsoft co-founder’s charity helped cover the library’s purchase of – ironically – five Apple iMacs, replete with expanded memory, oversized monitors, video cards and speakers. It also covered purchase of a new laptop, digital camcorders and a variety of other equipment and multimedia software to help library visitors make movies, produce music, design web sites, edit photography, create illustrations and generally tell stories using digital technology.

Staffed with a digital media specialist who helps guide and train patrons on the use of the new equipment, StoryLab is open to teens from 13 to 19 years old on afternoon weekdays after 2 p.m.

For now, library officials are limiting use of the new media lab to teens, partly as a way to foster a relationship with younger library patrons. The hope is that the library eventually will expand the program to others.

“But we’ll have to find the money to do that,” library spokesman David Domkoski said.

In the meantime, the new lab is a natural fit with the student crowd, said teen services librarian Sara Sunshine Paschal.

“With the way kids have to function in society today, they have to be digitally literate,” Paschal said. “Now, we can encourage that by giving them the ability to explore their own stories and own interests.”

Since it opened in April, teens have used StoryLab for a variety of group and individual projects, Paschal said. They collaborated to write scripts, perform skits and edit the podcast, “A Tacoma Home Companion” – a riff off the popular National Public Radio show hosted by Garrison Keillor. One girl read and researched the book, “The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind,” then utilized media lab equipment to record and edit an interview with the author, William Kamkwamba, for a podcast.

StoryLab patrons are posting their work on the library’s Facebook page, Domkoski said. A newly established web site, www.storylabtacoma.org, will also eventually showcase their projects, he said.

The first few months largely have been an orientation, during which teens have learned to use the equipment and software, library officials said.

“But his is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Jerome Myers, manager of the city’s main library.

Library officials soon plan to introduce more formal training courses, workshops and seminars taught by professional media experts and volunteer mentors. One class will teach patrons how to check out and download eBooks and other digital library materials. Another plans to teach teens the dos and don’ts of online copyright issues.

Digital technology won’t necessarily replace books or other traditional library materials, library officials noted, but it will play a more prominent role in the library’s services and collections. As it does, the library plans to provide more tools and training opportunities, they said.

In the meantime, StoryLab’s teen users say they’re learning fast and furiously.

On a recent afternoon, Slunaker, who just graduated from Tacoma School of the Arts, used one of the souped-up iMacs to draw digital animations for a graphic comic book she’s creating about Japanese fashion. The skills she’s learning now are ones she’ll use when pursuing a college degree and an eventual career in fashion design, she said.

“You can learn how to do a lot of cool things here that will help you later on,” Slunaker said. “Plus, it’s just a lot of fun.”

from: News Tribune

Canadian Bookshelf is now in Beta Testing

Canadian Bookshelf, the resource for all Canadian books is now in Beta testing. The intent is to officially launch in the Fall. They do have a section dedicated specifically for Teachers and Librarians. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, they would love to hear them. Their tagline is "if it's Canadian, it's here".

via: Dewey Divas

Johann Hari: How to survive the age of distraction

Read a book with your laptop thrumming. It can feel like trying to read in the middle of a party where everyone is shouting.
by: Johann Hari

In the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21st century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart's novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat – an even more omnivorous i-Phone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn – and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing.


I have been thinking about this because I recently moved flat, which for me meant boxing and heaving several Everests of books, accumulated obsessively since I was a kid. Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice and insist that I just couldn't bear to part company with it, no matter how unlikely it is I will ever read (say) a 1,000-page biography of little-known Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar. As I stacked my books high, and watched my friends get buried in landslides of novels or avalanches of polemics, it struck me that this scene might be incomprehensible a generation from now. Yes, a few specialists still haul their vinyl collections from house to house, but the rest of us have migrated happily to MP3s, and regard such people as slightly odd. Does it matter? What was really lost?

The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.


In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he "became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read". He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. "What I'm struggling with," he writes, "is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there's something out there that merits my attention."

I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That's getting harder to find.

No, don't misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn't going to turn into an antedeluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there's a reason why that word – "wired" – means both "connected to the internet" and "high, frantic, unable to concentrate".

In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: "The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can't afford to lose."

We have now reached that point. And here's the function that the book – the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: "Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise."

A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now. The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says "the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy." It's precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn't know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen's apartment – that the book matters.

That's why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don't just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals.

I'm not against e-books in principle – I'm tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person's internal life – can sing.

So how do we preserve the mental space for the book? We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys – but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us.

The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web – and to love it in the limited window I allow myself. I have installed the programme "Freedom" on my laptop: it will disconnect you from the web for however long you tell it to. It's the Ritalin I need for my web-induced ADHD. I make sure I activate it so I can dive into the more permanent world of the printed page for at least two hours a day, or I find myself with a sense of endless online connection that leaves you oddly disconnected from yourself.

TS Eliot called books "the still point of the turning world". He was right. It turns out, in the age of super-speed broadband, we need dead trees to have fully living minds.


from: Independent

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything

by: Linda Holmes

iStockphoto.com

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.


Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.


Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore. (Don't forget books not written in English! Don't forget to learn all the other languages!)


Oh, and heaven help your kid, who will either have to throw out maybe 30 years of what you deemed most critical or be even more selective than you had to be.

We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television – you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.


Roger Ebert recently wrote a lovely piece about the idea of being "well-read," and specifically about the way writers aren't read as much once they've been dead a long time. He worries – well, not worries, but laments a little – that he senses people don't read Henry James anymore, that they don't read Sinclair Lewis, that their knowledge of Allen Ginsberg is limited to Howl.

It's undoubtedly true; there are things that fade. But I can't help blaming, in part, the fact that we also simply have access to more and more things to choose from more and more easily. Netflix, Amazon, iTunes – you wouldn't have to go and search dusty used bookstores or know the guy who works at a record store in order to hear most of that stuff you're missing. You'd only have to choose to hear it.


You used to have a limited number of reasonably practical choices presented to you, based on what bookstores carried, what your local newspaper reviewed, or what you heard on the radio, or what was taught in college by a particular English department. There was a huge amount of selection that took place above the consumer level. (And here, I don't mean "consumer" in the crass sense of consumerism, but in the sense of one who devours, as you do a book or a film you love.)

Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you're well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.


Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It's the sorting of what's worth your time and what's not worth your time. It's saying, "I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it." It's saying, "I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I'm not going to read this one."

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn't have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, "I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I'm supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn't get to."


It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you'd have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

What I've observed in recent years is that many people, in cultural conversations, are far more interested in culling than in surrender. And they want to cull as aggressively as they can. After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you'd otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, "All genre fiction is trash." You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you've thrown out so much at once.


The same goes for throwing out foreign films, documentaries, classical music, fantasy novels, soap operas, humor, or westerns. I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don't talk about rap; it's not important. Don't talk about anyone famous; it isn't important. And by the way, don't tell me it is important, because that would mean I'm ignoring something important, and that's ... uncomfortable. That's surrender.

It's an effort, I think, to make the world smaller and easier to manage, to make the awareness of what we're missing less painful. There are people who choose not to watch television – and plenty of people don't, and good for them – who find it easier to declare that they don't watch television because there is no good television (which is culling) than to say they choose to do other things, but acknowledge that they're missing out on Mad Men (which is surrender).


And people cull in the other direction, too, obviously, dismissing any and all art museums as dull and old-fashioned because actually learning about art is time-consuming — and admitting that you simply don't prioritize it means you might be missing out. (Hint: You are.)

Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That's the moment you realize you're separated from so much. That's your moment of understanding that you'll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there's something being performed somewhere in the world that you're not seeing that you would love.


It's sad, but it's also ... great, really. Imagine if you'd seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you're "supposed to see." Imagine you got through everybody's list, until everything you hadn't read didn't really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we've seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can't change that.


from: NPR

Poet creates 'buzz' around work by reading over phone to potential buyers

Heather Christie launches new book by offering one-to-one readings over the phone

by: Alison Flood

It's one way to connect with your fans: poet Heather Christle is launching her new collection by offering readers the opportunity to give her a call and hear her read a poem.


The American author, whose poems have appeared in the New Yorker, has just published her second collection, The Trees The Trees, and rather than relying on the usual publicity tour, has decided instead to list her phone number on her website. At set times every day until 14 July she will read a poem to anyone who calls her.

"The book itself is full of references to phones and phone calls, and the speaker often seems to mistake the technology of the page for that of the telephone, imagining that the reader is right there in the moment," said Christle. "My father is a merchant mariner, and when my sister and I were small we would record messages to him on cassette tapes. I'd often ask questions and then pause for his response. There's something so lovely and sad about the hope that another actual person is on the other end of any technology. So I thought it would be interesting to bring that dynamic forward, to read these poems (which frequently address a 'you') directly to another person, across the intimate distance a telephone creates."

So far she has received around 60 calls, from a multitude of different readers, from a couple from Toronto looking for a love poem to a class in western Massachusetts. "I've been amazed at how variously people respond. Some callers state quickly that they're calling for a poem, listen, say thank you, and then promptly hang up. Others want to chat a little bit about the project. I love it when people tell me where they're calling from. One man called on his break from work, which made me glow. If people seem chatty I'll often tell them where I am as well, because I think it's exciting to know that the poem they just heard was read in the middle of the shampoo aisle at the supermarket," Christie said.

"I didn't feel particularly anxious ahead of time. I trust poetry to make good things happen, and so far that's been the case. When I was writing these poems I so often had this mysterious 'you' just in front of me, just behind the page. When people call it's as if that imagined figure has suddenly come to life."

At literature blog HTML Giant, which called the collection "unprecedented, and gorgeous", readers described their experience of the calls. "It works. I felt a little creepy calling it, like I got the number off a restroom wall. She read 'My Enemy', and I'm sold. A great idea," said one. "When I dialled I was like 'can't believe it's dialling, someone smart is going to be on this phone in 10 seconds' then it was awkward and I didn't know what to say and said something stupid and then asked her to read my favourite poem from the book ('That Air of Ruthlessness in Spring') ... keep thinking how something as stupidly simple as using a phone for what it's meant to be used for can be so awesome and heartwarming," said another.

The Trees The Trees is published by small press Octopus Books. Christle said that she couldn't take full credit for the phone-a-poet idea, pointing to Frank O'Hara's Personism, about which he wrote "it was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realising that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born".

"This isn't the most terribly original idea," said Christle. "Another antecedent I should mention is the 'Dial-a-Poem' project, started by John Giorno in the late 60s, though that featured recordings, rather than live readings."

From "Plus One" by Heather Christie


I lost my phone    I am using the baby monitor instead    it's
in
the flowers    nobody's calling    but I know that some day
you will
it's just plain math    love is never more than an extension of
numbers


From "Our Sense of Achievement" by Heather Christie

every day many things do not happen  a perfect love   a perfect
winter  you don't fail once  you keep failing  just when you
think you've got it right   arrives some spring

from: Guardian

Toronto online book archive forced to fire 75% of staff

by: Liam Casey

Mark Turnbull, a scanner at Archive.org, is seen scanning pages for its website. A drop in donations has meant that 75 per cent of the staff will have to leave. CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR

If they had a million dollars, they’d buy more time. But a vast online library doesn’t have that kind of cash, so it is drastically reducing its devoted workforce.

Internet Archive Canada, a small non-profit company, fired 35 of its 47 employees on Wednesday due to a massive drop in donations. Most will leave Aug. 12 unless a white knight appears soon.

“It was one of the worst days of my life,” said Gabe Juszel, director of the Canadian operation, one of 26 offices worldwide, who will stay on.

Internet Archive’s website Archive.org is the granddaddy of digitization. The San Francisco-based company has converted millions of books into bytes, and is now doing the same with audio, video and even microfiche.

In keeping with its open-source ethos, access is free and it only scans out-of-copyright material.

The Toronto chapter, the only one in Canada, resides in a gloomy office on the seventh floor of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. Eighteen scanners, each manned by an operator, run 16 hours a day in two shifts.

Mark Turnbull, who will keep his job, scans books at an elaborate work station known as a scribe, a desk shrouded on three sides and above by black drapes to cut glare.

Turnbull places a book on a cradle. With his left foot, he releases a pedal that lowers the platen, a V-shaped piece of glass that keeps the book open. Two high-performance cameras above shoot the pages.

Then the race is on. Turnbull sets the cameras to automatically fire every six seconds, just enough time to mash the foot pedal which raises the platen, flip the page with his left hand, release the pedal and click away on the mouse with his right hand.

According to co-worker Andrea Mills, Turnbull is the “David Beckham of scanning.”

Over the course of a day, an operator like Turnbull will blaze through at least five books in one shift. The Toronto chapter digitizes about 1,500 books per week, which will drop to about 250 after the cuts.

The company relies chiefly on funding from Canadian universities, which just isn’t as available now. Its monthly operating budget is about $100,000, which will be reduced to $30,000.

The Toronto operation has converted 350,000 books since it started in 2006. Prior to that, it experimented with a robot, which couldn’t adapt to the varying sizes of books.

“You don’t turn pages like you flip burgers,” Juszel said. “There is plenty of care involved.”

So they switched to the current setup. Juszel worried that a non-robot would burn out due to the repetitive nature of the work, but that has never happened.

Patrick Stitt is losing his job after three years, but still loves the work.

“It was the first time I felt I contributed to society,” Stitt said in a soft voice. “I cleaned up and it gave me a purpose.”

But the loss will be felt by more than those who will be out of work.

Most employees believe they are making the world better by liberating billions of words that would otherwise be trapped in a library.

“If we had 10 more years, we could archive every single book in Canada,” Juszel said. “But not any more.”

from: The Star

New crime novel co-written by 26 authors

Luminaries including Jeffery Deaver, Kathy Reichs and Faye Kellerman have contributed to No Rest for the Dead

by: Alison Flood

It's the literary world's version of consequences: from Alexander McCall Smith to Kathy Reichs, 26 bestselling crime writers have teamed up to create the multi-authored mystery No Rest for the Dead.

Published later this week, the authors – who also include Raymond Khoury, RL Stine, Faye Kellerman, Tess Gerritsen and Jeffery Deaver – have taken it in turns to write the novel's chapters, pulling together the story of Jon Nunn, a detective haunted by a case he thought he'd cracked 10 years earlier. Nunn becomes convinced that Rosemary Thomas, executed for the brutal murder of her husband, was actually innocent. When he discovers that a memorial service is being planned for Rosemary, with all the other suspects on the guest list, he realises it is the ideal opportunity to find out who really did the deed.

British crime author Peter James, chair of the UK's Crime Writers' Association, contributed a crucial chapter to the novel, in which a decade-old diary is discovered, providing vital clues. "The hard thing was not knowing what any of the characters were like – none of us saw what the others had written," said James. "I'm a very detailed plotter. A big part of my writing technique is seeding things into each chapter, and it was hard to not have that flexibility – I was writing it in a complete void. In a way it was harder than I thought, but in a way it was liberating."

Provided with just the outlines of his scene, James compared the experience to a paint-by-numbers painting, as well as to the parlour game of consequences, in which a story is created word by word by a group of people. "It's amazing though – it actually works," he said. "It shows most thriller writers think in a similar, Machiavellian way."

The novel, which is published by Simon & Schuster, is the brainchild of Andrew Gulli, editor of US crime fiction specialist Strand Magazine, who said it was the first time so many major bestselling authors have been involved in a single project. Gulli edited the book with his sister Lamia, and has also contributed several chapters to the novel. The siblings will donate all their proceeds to the Leukaemia and Lymphoma Society.

"The line-up of writers who have contributed to this mystery is akin to the Murderers' Row of the 1927 New York Yankees ... While they each deliver their own signature brand of storytelling to the novel, it is startling how these writers, several of whom are friends of mine, have woven a yarn that seems to be the product of one mind, one imagination (albeit schizophrenic), and one on steroids of such strength that even Major League Baseball would ban them, and that is indeed saying something," writes author David Baldacci in an introduction to the novel. "Yet I will add that if you were expecting an Agatha Christie ending where Poirot or Marple stands up, calmly lays out the case, and reveals the true murderer, you're in for a shock. The creators have, collectively, another denouement in mind. And in my humble opinion it's a twist that is so original you won't have to concern yourself with bragging on your blog about how you figured it all out long before the conclusion. Well, I guess you still can, but you'd be lying."

from: Guardian

Animated Game Created by Librarians Attracts Freshman Students

by: Sarah Sopab

Incoming freshman at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, don't have to go on a guided tour to learn more about their school's library services. Instead the staff at the DiMenna-Nyselius Library can point their patrons toward another instructive resource - a videogame.

Inspired by Scene it, a series of popular DVD games that has players watch video clips to answer trivia questions, Library Scene: Fairfield Edition is a web-based game developed by the University's Media Center and reference librarians that follows four students as they travel through key areas of the school's DiMenna-Nyselius library to complete a 10-page research paper assignment.

Players must watch scenes of live action and animation, and afterward, they are presented with challenges including word puzzles, picture matching or multiple-choice questions. Upon completion of the interactive, multimedia game, students are better oriented to the DiMenna-Nyselius building and more likely to recall the library services that have been provided to support them.

How the idea for a videogame developed
Library Scene: Fairfield Edition began as an idea in the university's library department in December 2009. Conceived as a supplement to library instruction classes, three Fairfield University academic reference librarians, Phillip Bahr, Curtis Ferree, and Jessica McCullough, decided to take the idea to the next level and produce the videogame when they recognized that a more creative approach was necessary toward fulfilling the library's vision of life-long, information-literate learners.

The team realized from the outset that they didn't have the technical skill set to build an instructional videogame, so they approached Karen Connolly, Steve Evans, and Chris McGloin of the university's Media Center to assist in the production and programming of the game.

"There were lots of places during the initial stages where the game would have gotten derailed if we had focused too much on what we couldn't do. We found it much more beneficial to imagine the best possible solution to our problem, which for us was this type of interactive game, and then figure out how to make that work." Ferree said.

The Media Center staff used Apple MOTION, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Pro Tools, Dreamweaver, and Flash to bring the game's computer animation to life, while the librarian group worked to define the game's learning objectives and challenges and wrote the script.

Developed on a total budget of $2,500, the project was completed over the course of more than 37 hours and debuted to students in September 2010.

According to preliminary evaluation data, Library Scene: Fairfield Edition has proven popular among Fairfield University students, and received recognition in the library community when it was featured as the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online (PRIMO) "Site of the Month" in March 2011. In May 2011, Library Scene: Fairfield Edition received the PRIMO award

Video game design for information literacy
While many libraries have focused their efforts on videogame collection development, instructional design through the use of videogames is still very much on the peripheral of academic libraries and has only gained steam in the last few years. Technology has advanced to a point where librarians can become instructional designers and create their ideal educational environments, whether through online instruction or the development of an interactive videogame.

"One of the things we took away from this experience was the importance of approaching the game from a perspective of possibility and potential, rather than our limitations." Curtis said.

To test your knowledge of Fairfield University's DiMenna-Nyselius Library, visit Library Scene on the Fairfield website.

from: Library Journal