NewPages.com sells a spreadsheet of American public libraries and their contact info. It wasn’t what drove me there but it seemed like a good idea and the price was cheap so I went for it. Upon opening it I discovered that email addresses were not among the fields being provided. My bad, should’ve checked beforehand.
Did some Googling around and then asked a real live paid reference librarian who, umm, did some Googling around with better focus, I suppose, and directed me to American Library Directory. Which lets you pay by the record (or quantity of records), do an Advanced Search, select which ones you wish to download, and then download them. Email addresses, for those institutions for which they have that info, are indeed included. Unlike NewPages.com’s data, ALD’s is not cheap:
NewPages (all public libraries in their system): $95
American Library Directory (“main”, not branches, that DO have emails): $1195
:eek:
Yeah, well, they have a 14 day free trial which lets you search to your little heart’s content and download a few hundred for free.
I decided to see how practical it was going to be to match the library records I already had from NewPages (figuring since they had considerably fewer records, they probably had at least the main ones or some such thing, right?) and then I could import as a match-merge and just add the resulting emails. Did some trial searches.
There’s almost no overlap. :mad: :dubious: :smack:
NewPages has a record for the Broken Arrow Library of Broken Arrow Oklahoma. ALD doesn’t have it. ALD has a record for (I kid you not) the Broken BOW Library of Broken Bow Oklahoma. NewPages doesn’t have it.
In North Carolina, ALD has:
Granville County Library System
Grifton Public Library
Gunn Memorial Public Library
in the same section the alphabet, NewPages has these North Carolina libraries:
Gaston County Public Library
Goldsboro Library
Greensboro Public Library
What the FUCK?!??
Hey, you’d think a spreadsheet potentially costing more than $1000 would be unabridged or close to it… oh yeah, I went back in and did a search for every library (not just “mains”), with or without email addresses. Nope, still didn’t have most of the NewPages libraries. I’m a little less perturbed that the $95 NewPages spreadsheet doesn’t have all the ones I see in ALD but this is freaking surreal.