I saw this article posted over at Library Stuff about British libraries having lost 13 million books over the past 6 years. It ties the loss to budget cuts and the credit crunch that's affecting everyone across the world. This brought to mind two things. One is that my area libraries have been featured in local newspaper articles about their budget losses and how that's going to affect staffing and building hours, but I have yet to see any that explicitly list what materials and databases are being cut. In times like this when more people are using the library than average, you'd think patrons would be interested in knowing exactly how they are losing access to information. It seems like this would be a good time to rouse patron interest and call on them, not just librarians, to contact their local lawmakers about these losses. The other thing this article brought to my mind was a trend in some of the libraries in my area away from library collections that have depth in terms of lots of books on all kinds of things and towards what's often called a "browsing" collection. If your local library looks more like a bookstore than it used to with lots of pretty books on popular topics instead of a meaty often ratty-looking collection full of more items than anyone would ever want to read, it's probably a victim of this trend. The idea is to "give the customer what they want" and the bottom line is to increase circulation statistics. Why? Because people who control library budgets often want hard numbers to justify the funds that go to the public library, and how many times a book is checked out per year is one way to get such numbers. So that often means books that do not get checked out, no matter how much they are used by the community within the building or in ways that aren't measured, are likely to lose their place in the collection to make way for another copy of the latest bestseller. In summary, I'd advise anyone who is worried about the state of their local library collection to dig deeper - are budget cuts really the reason there aren't as many books on the shelf or has there been a change in philosophy about what should be on the shelf at all?
I found this article about how long various email sites keep inactive accounts a good one to take note of. This happened to me when I switched from a Yahoo account to a gmail account as my primary a few years ago. After not visiting my Yahoo account for a few months, I went back and found everything had been deleted. It was not fun.
The last few weekends have been an adventure in trying to put together Ikea furniture, which I've been assured time and again is the simplest thing ever. Their product instructions don't even contain words - who needs words when you have cartoon drawings, right? Ever since I saw this, I've been re-living it again and again:
It's funny because it's true. I'm in the process of trying to find out why I've been given the wrong 4 metal brackets for my new dining room table twice now. Even their customer service department couldn't look up details on how far apart the holes on the brackets were supposed to be - those details were not available to the woman I spoke with. Which is why I still have brackets that are for holes spaced 4 inches apart instead of 2.5 inches apart, like the holes that were pre-drilled into my table top. Oh well, at least the chairs were easy to put together. And I suppose I should take some comfort in knowing that the guy who sold us his Malm bed didn't understand the directions either - we found that out while trying to re-assemble it.
This story about an iPhone application that allows people to browse for the best bookstore price is interesting.
I love reading about all the latest uses and tools that come up for Twitter. Here's one for twittering your books with LibraryThing. And my other new favorite Twitter site: Retweetradar. It uses a tag cloud to show you what people have been tweeting about during the past day.
I guess that's all for now. There's much out there I want to be blogging about, but time is just getting away from me. I was listening to a podcast the other day - I think it was TWiT - and the hosts were discussing how blogs seem to be falling away as more people are moving to microblogging tools like Twitter and aggregators like FriendFeed. This is starting to be my personal experience as well.
