Off the Shelf, June 30, 2008
I am in hot, sunny
Anaheim, California – just across the street from Disneyland, which to my
chagrin has replaced their “Happiest Place On Earth” sign with something much
less memorable (in fact, I can’t remember what it says). But I digress.
Although I am cheek-by-jowl with the Magic Kingdom, I am here to attend the
annual conference of the American Library Association. This is the largest
convention in the library universe, and draws librarians from all over the
world. I have just completed the second of three days of workshops, and so far
I’ve attended sessions on streamlined methods of service delivery; the future
of the library catalogue; social networking for libraries; open source software
in library consortia; and (my personal favourite) Patrons Gone Wild!, about how
to deal with objectionable behaviour in the library. You’ll be happy to know
that Whistler’s problems in this area are so minuscule compared to the
librarians who were speaking that I was almost embarrassed to be there.
I’ve also talked to
vendors and salespeople about spine label printing; cataloguing for consortia;
audiobooks on CD and mp3; remote book returns, and books in French and
Japanese. I got a brochure on how to get a sister library overseas; picked up
three free books for children; met Kareem Abdul Jabbar and had him autograph a
book for my sister; and attended a lunchtime session on workplace wellness
where we learned a hula from a librarian from Hawai’i.
I just read over what
I’ve written, and I realize that to many of you out there in Questionland,
these topics sound like a great big snore, or at least not something you would
travel over 2,000 km to attend. I, on the other hand, get very excited about
these things, and it’s really cool to know that we in Whistler are on the
bleeding edge of library software, with our new open source cataloguing system.
Michigan is on the track that British Columbia started down last year, and King
County in Washington, along with several other large systems, is not far
behind. But we are there already! It’s not easy, and sometimes it’s not fun to
be in the forefront, but it is rewarding.
We made the decision
to switch to the Evergreen system based on circumstance rather than pure
choice; however, I learned this weekend that, philosophically, it makes a lot
of sense to align public libraries and open source. Both are about sharing
information at their core. This idea and lots of others are popping in my head
like the fireworks that go off each night across the street. It really is like
Disneyland, at least for more than 20,000 librarians.
Lauren Stara, Library Director
Add A Comment
