Category Archives: Services

Academic, Conference, Services, Special

Announcement: Open Repositories 2018 – Bozeman, Montana, USA

Sign on southwest side of campus - Montana State University - Bozeman, Montana - 2013-07-09

Mary’s note: If you have not been to this area yet, I can tell you that it is absolutely beautiful! Bozeman itself is great, and has a wonderful public library; and the National Parks nearby are some of the most amazing places I have ever seen. If you are interested in this topic, consider attending. We have some scholarship money available to help defray costs!

Press Release:

“Bozeman, MT — Montana State University is pleased to announce the 13th annual Open Repositories conference June 4-7th, 2018 in Bozeman, Montana.

We are excited to host Open Repositories 2018 in this beautiful place. We encourage you to discover more about Bozeman, Montana State University, the state of Montana, Glacier National Park, and Yellowstone National Park as we plan for the conference.

Montana State University is a world-class research university tucked into a small mountain town just North of Yellowstone National Park. Home to both the rugged outdoors and exciting cultural activities downtown, Bozeman has something for everyone. The university is a mid-sized doctoral granting institution with a rich research enterprise, and the library is dedicated to repository innovation. OR2018 on the campus of Montana State University will be an invigorating educational meeting in the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains.

The annual Open Repositories Conference brings together users and developers of open digital repository platforms from higher education, government, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The Conference provides an interactive forum for delegates from around the world to come together and explore the global challenges and opportunities facing libraries and the broader scholarly information landscape.

http://or2018.net

Holly Mercer

Associate Dean for Research, Collections, & Scholarly Communication and Professor

Director, Newfound Press

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

UT Libraries

611 John C. Hodges Library

1015 Volunteer Blvd.

Knoxville, TN 37996-0000

hollymercer@utk.edu

Books, Programs, Services

Horse-Riding Librarians Were the Great Depression’s Bookmobiles

Majestic-Stallion

I love bookmobiles, and the idea of librarians using horses to provide great service is just cool!

(This article is from Smithsonian.com, by Eliza McGraw)

During the Great Depression, a New Deal program brought books to Kentuckians living in remote areas

“Their horses splashed through iced-over creeks. Librarians rode up into the Kentucky mountains, their saddlebags stuffed with books, doling out reading material to isolated rural people. The Great Depression had plunged the nation into poverty, and Kentucky—a poor state made even poorer by a paralyzed national economy—was among the hardest hit.

The Pack Horse Library initiative, which sent librarians deep into Appalachia, was one of the New Deal’s most unique plans. The project, as implemented by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), distributed reading material to the people who lived in the craggy, 10,000-square-mile portion of eastern Kentucky. The state already trailed its neighbors in electricity and highways. And during the Depression, food, education and economic opportunity were even scarcer for Appalachians.

They also lacked books: In 1930, up to 31 percent of people in eastern Kentucky couldn’t read. Residents wanted to learn, notes historian Donald C. Boyd. Coal and railroads, poised to industrialize eastern Kentucky, loomed large in the minds of many Appalachians who were ready to take part in the hoped prosperity that would bring. “Workers viewed the sudden economic changes as a threat to their survival and literacy as a means of escape from a vicious economic trap,” writes Boyd.

This presented a challenge: In 1935, Kentucky only circulated one book per capita compared to the American Library Association standard of five to ten, writes historian Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer,. It was “a distressing picture of library conditions and needs in Kentucky,” wrote Lena Nofcier, who chaired library services for the Kentucky Congress of Parents and Teachers at the time.

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Academic, Services

Virtual Work Question

Zonaspace-coworking-atmosphere

Here is a question from an academic library person, and a few answers from a list-serve. If your library has other strategies, share them in the comments!

“Our library is exploring virtual working models and we are trying to  gauge whether other libraries have implemented remote work practices for librarians.

If you have a librarian in your team working remotely (either full or part time) it would be great to know. Any details you are able to share are welcome too. Eg. How many days, what activities they are able to perform remotely etc.

Also, if this is happening with academics and other staff but not librarians, that would be useful  to know as well.”

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Books, Communication, Services

Day Twenty Nine of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Image result for interlibrary loan icon

The busiest day for campus retrieval in 2017: 668 requests in 24 hours

(From Minitex!)

“March is often our busiest month in Minitex Resource Sharing. For staff responsible for retrieving and processing items at our many campus libraries, it is a daily sprint. On an average day in March our staff search for about 360 requests. However, on Monday, March 20, 2017 there were 668 requests waiting to be printed, retrieved, and processed at campus locations. This was not going to be our normal sprint, but a marathon! In order to maintain our 24-hour turnaround time, staff from other areas of Resource Sharing pitched in.

Resource Sharing has four satellite offices, in addition to Andersen Library, located across the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota:

  • Wilson Library
  • Walter Library
  • Bio-Medical Library
  • Magrath Library (in St. Paul)

There are twenty-three different library collections connected to these four satellite offices. At the campus libraries, staff are responsible for printing, retrieving, and processing the requests. In some libraries, we do this three times a day. The busiest location is Wilson Library where the staff is responsible for retrieving materials from ten collections. On March 20, 2017, over 60%, or about 400 requests, were sent to the Wilson office.

For the month of March 2017, our campus libraries staff filled 93% of all requests they received. In our Wilson Library office 75% were filled with loans, and in our Bio-Medical Library office, 75% were filled with copies. This is reflective of the types of materials held by these libraries. In addition to working with technology to print, scan, and update requests, the library assistants develop working relationships with subject librarians whose assistance makes it easier to locate obscure or hard-to-find items for our patrons.

We survived and processed the deluge of 668 requests!  Who knows what that tomorrow might bring?”

Materials, Services

Ideas for old audio-visual materials

What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, by Haruki Murakami

 

 

 

We are passing on request from a library person from a listserve, along with a few suggestions from other people. Do you have this issue? Do you have other ideas? Suggest them in the comments!

“Does anyone have suggestions on what to do with audio books on cd, music cds, dvds, etc. that are coming in for our book sale that we are not selling?  Our book sale staff hates to throw them out and would like to give them away if someone could use them.”

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