01.27.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:54 pm by Greg Landgraf
As my last Midwinter post (from the Denver airport, on a decidedly spotty wireless connection), I offer this collection of interesting, thought-provoking, or just amusing quotes from the meeting—weather heard or overheard.
“I’m just going to stand here and have a wonderful time!” —a woman near the entrance on Friday, apparently after unexpectedly meeting the latest in a string of friends.
“I’ve had comments about areas of librarianship that have not been included. If you included every area or specialty of librarianship, you wouldn’t have the core anymore. You’d have the whole field.”—Linda Williams, coordinator of library media services at Anne Arundel County (Md.) Public Library, defending the Statement of Core Competences at the Forum on Library Education.
“My job is to kind of drag you along or pull the reader along and keep you surprised”—author Erica Spindler at the Women of Mystery author discussion.
“I’ve managed to come this far by doing everything wrong. I couldn’t write an outline with a gun to my head.”—author Nancy Atherton at the Women of Mystery author discussion.
“Badges and smiles, folks! Badges and smiles!”—demand of the Colorado Convention Center employee monitoring the entrance to the exhibit hall at its opening.
“One technology we do not have is amplification.”—Maurice York, chair of the LITA Top Tech Trends committee. Attendees were pleased to have wireless access, but the lack of microphones sometimes made hearing difficult.
“It’s the Karen show.”—Observation at the Top Tech Trends discussion; three of the panelists were named Karen (Schneider, Coombs, and Coyle).
“The test for the open source community is, can you move past your founding library or founding community”—Karen Schneider, community librarian for Equinox, at the Top Tech Trends discussion.
“They use robots because they’re efficient. I love automation but you have to not overautomate.”—Marshall Breeding, director for technology and research at Vanderbilt University, warning against overexuberance after Schneider told of an Australian library where patrons can watch through windows as robots check their books in.
“There are visible staff to assist, but you don’t want to tie people into doing mundane, routine, mind-numbing tasks.”—Schneider, confirming that the library hadn’t overautomated.
“Technology is like a rabid puppy. It’s running around destroying your house.” Karen Coombs, head of web services at the University of Houston, discussing the need to constantly upgrade technology and why grants might not be sufficient to help rural areas to get broadband internet access.
“Bernie Margolis, proud and pleased to be the state librarian of New York.”—Margolis identifying himself, to enthusiastic applause, at the Membership Town Hall.
“If we could ask the president to commit $1 for every person in the United States to flow to public libraries through IMLS and state libraries, can you imagine what an impact that would be?”—Barbara Genco, Brooklyn Public Library, at the Membership Town Hall.
“I’d like to encourage you to say thank you because [Obama's] done more for public records in two days than many administrations did in 12 months.” Gladys Ann Wells, Arizona state librarian, at the Membership Town Hall.
“Any initiative [Obama] has, there’s probably a way that libraries can support that.”—Heidi Dolamore, Contra Costa Public Library, at the Membership Town Hall.
“I love my library!”—Colorado Convention Center employee, exclaimed as he passed the ALA Press Room.
“About to drink second cup of tea without Marmalade this morning. Also, I just won the Newbury Medal for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK.”—Newbery Medal-winning author Neil Gaiman’s Twitter tweet announcing the honor.
“Newbery, not Newbury. Also ****!!!! I won the ******* NEWBERY THIS IS SO ******* AWESOME. I thank you.”—Gaiman’s tweet correcting his spelling error—and enthusing with a bit of decidedly adult language. Apparently the news had started to sink in.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 2:20 pm by Greg Landgraf
I visited Denver Public Library this morning, invited by DPL writer/editor (and author of AL’s Midwinter dining guide this year) Sherry Spitsnaugle. It was a lovely tour of a wonderful building, but the whole event was overshadowed by the big event of the day.
This morning, a woman who was riding the bus to work went into labor. The bus was passing the library at the time, so she got off and got help inside the building, and the girl was born (before opening hours) in the library foyer.
While details weren’t well-known, the news was still on the lips of all of the staffers, with many brainstorming names for the healthy baby girl (my favorite: Dewetta), and the librarians in the children’s department quipping that if only the ambulence had been a bit slower to arrive they could have finished the paperwork to get the child her first library card. The library, naturally, is eagerly seeking more information, and the Denver Post is following the story.
With that happy news on our minds, Sherry gave me a tour of the building. Several photos from that tour are below.
East entrance to the Denver Public Library
West entrance to Denver Public Library
Denver Public Library's Western History Room, which is also often used for events.
The Legacy Table, where ten world leaders met at the Denver Public Library for the Denver Summit of the Eight June 20-22, 1997.
President Clinton's nameshield on the Legacy Table.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 11:04 am by Leonard Kniffel
ALA is a pretty big organization, with a $58-million annual budget, ALA Treasurer Rod Hersberger said at the second Midwinter session of the ALA Council. He’s concerned about ALA’s “mature businesses” that are not yielding annual revenue growth and the need to develop new businesses. Echoing what he said at the Planning and Budget Assembly, Hersberger talked about the need to develop new products for new markets. Among his ideas are capitalizing internationally on the ALA brand and turning more units into revenue generating centers.
Hersberger concentrated his report on the work of the Washington Office, urging that a larger portion (the current level is about 25%) of programmatic resources be devoted to the office.
ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels said we are introducing a more formal method for developing new businesses, especially for their capitalization. As a member of the ALA Publishing staff, I can attest to the fact that ideas for new businesses have been easy to imagine over the past few years but capitalizing them has been another matter altogether in an organization that is a 10 on the risk averse scale. New businesses mean new risks, and I wonder if the Association is going to be willing to take them, especially in a climate where financial security seems ever less attainable.
We’re not a the bottom of the slump yet, and there is always a lag in ALA feeling the pinch, said Hersberger. Units that aren’t performing as well as they should “may need some attention,” he added. Fiels said expenditures will undoubtedly need to be reduced in accord with revenue reduction, but he noted that there is no magic place where I have eight people sitting in a room doing nothing and can just eliminate the positions with no impact on the operation.”
Councilor Marilyn Hinshaw observed that ”the federal government can’t do it all,” and we will have to help ourselves through this national financial crisis.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 1:43 am by Leonard Kniffel
Muhammad Yunus
Could ALA President Jim Rettig have picked a better speaker for this Midwinter President’s Program than Muhammad Yunus? I don’t think so. With American capitalism failing at numerous levels, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty told the amazing story of his crusade to end world poverty with a lending system that defies the traditional notion of how banks do business.
Yunus started his talk by admitting that he had learned a lot about the American Library Association following the invitation to speak—first that it existed, and second that it could be so large. If you doubt that we have plenty more public-awareness raising to do, consider Yunus’s remark that “now I see what my project and libraries have in common.” He went on to explain how his Grameen Bank evolved in Bangladesh. Of poverty, he said, “The problem is difficult but the solution is simple.”
“A sense of uselessness grips you,” Yunus said, describing his conversion from a student of economics to a force for social and economic change. “Let’s forget about the study of economics,” he said. “Why don’t I go to the people and see if I can make myself useful to them?”
From this epiphany, came the concept of micro-loans. Yunus realized that poverty-stricken villagers were turning to loan sharks for money. He calculated that 42 people owing a loan shark $27 meant that so many people “had to suffer so much for so little; if I could give the $27, I could solve the problem for the people, and that is what I did.” Yunus’s initial gift of $27 led to the founding of the Grameen (it means “village,” he said) Bank, which today makes loans to more than six million families on the basic premise that if you pay the money back, you get more money.
The business of business is making money, said Yunus, but human beings are multidimentional and not only about making money. But charity is not the answer, he warned, because money given through charity never comes back.
Yunus’s onstage monologue included some compelling and moving comments about how he defied conventional capitalist wisdom, with the philosophy that “rules are made to be changed”:
On the fact that many women said the loans should go to their husbands, not to them, he said, “This is not her voice; this is the voice of the history that created her.”
On what he has been advised to do, he said, “I do the opposite, and it works.”
“Poverty is not created by poor people, poverty is created by the system, the way we build it,” Yunus said. “All human beings are packed with unlimited potential.” Yunus said with conviction that he foresaw a time when we would have to creat “poverty museums” so people could understand what had once been widespread.
Rettig noted that libraries make micro-loans—gifts really—of knowledge that help people transform their lives, improve their well-being, and literally develop their local economies. There had to have been at least a thousand people in the audience, and they spontaneously leaped to their feet with approval at the end of Yunus’s talk. While there remains much to be done, the bottom line, so to speak, for Yunus is that his system works and he has proven it.
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