100%! It’s a popular observation among librarians that public libraries are “the last place you can go in America without being expected to spend money.” They’re a rare noncommercial “third-space.”
Dewy dee or ellocee?
I’m not crazy about either, but DDC is better suited to public and LOC works better for academic.
I just donated a ton of books to our local library. What percentage of donated books makes the shelves of the branches? What percentage are sold off as “50¢ specials” to raise funds? What percentage are discretely sent to the paper recyclers?
Do you have a book on Pavlov’s dog and Schrödinger’s cat?
Can you get in some better magazines?
And the garden book section needs updating.
Dewey Decimal System.
Can I safely forget everything I know about the Dewey Decimal?
Those are great questions! The answers will vary a lot depending on where you are, what you donated, the library’s financial situation and space constraints, and library policy. Most public libraries will have their collection development policies publicly available, often through their website or through the city/county gov’t site. That policy will usually say precisely how donations are handled.
That said, generally, relatively few donated books will wind up on the shelves. People don’t tend to donate brand-new currently-in-demand fiction or nonfiction. Even if the book would probably check out (“circulate,”) if it’s not in really good condition, it probably isn’t worth the labor to catalogue and process.
That rings a bell, but I don’t know if it’s there or not!
Oh, no, wait, here it is!
Yuk yuk yuk. I’m an academic librarian now, and above such petty concerns!
Yep! That’s what we’re here for. We’re always happy to take you directly to what you need (or we should be, anyway. There’s always gonna be grumps.) Honestly, DDC and LOC are more for the benefit of librarians than they are the public. And with electronic catalogues having been around for decades now, I don’t think even we need them anymore. But that’s a soapbox for another day.
How well could you handle things if your computer system went down?
I used to work at a library software company (our customers were primarily school libraries) Do you deal with MARC records much?*
Do you/have you considered a maker space? The larger city library near me has sewing machines, 3D printers, etc. IMHO that is a cool service libraries can have.
Do you have board games?
Brian
* All I remember is tag 100 is author, 245 is title, and 852_p is item (barcode) number
Hm. What kind of “things” do you mean? Some things would work just fine, others not so much. Also depends on the library and the librarian.
Circulation - checking things in and out - is handled by the computer. So we wouldn’t be able to check out or return materials that way… But if it was important that a patron have an item right now, I could take down their library card number and the barcode number for the book, let them take it, and enter those manually once the system came back up. As for locating items on the shelf… At my old library, no sweat. I’m pretty good with DDC and very familiar with the space. At my new library, I’d be useless! I’ve only been here a few months and I don’t have LCC anywhere nearly as down.
Yes, I work with MARC a lot! In fact, I learned to do original cataloguing with MARC records when I was still a part-time library assistant. A lot of librarians are very intimidated by cataloguing and by MARC, so it was a pretty big advantage for me in both my cataloguing courses and in applying for full-time librarian roles.
My old public library did indeed have a makerspace! I was in charge of it for a while! We had computerized cutting machines (cricut/silhouette), FDM filament 3D printers, art supplies, video/audio equipment, and more! I don’t think there’s budget/space for one at my new (very very tiny) college/library, but it would be a hella awesome thing to have for a mostly-indigenous economically disadvantaged community like ours. And yes, my old library did have lots of board games, too. In fact, before I left, I had plans to run a community 3D design contest. I wanted people to create 3D-printable chess pieces so that we could have a chess set out for people to play at will… And if pieces went missing, we could just print more! I thought it was a great idea, but I left before it could happen.
I’ve been reading a ton of ebooks that i borrow from my public library recently. (I use Libby and my Kindle.) How do you feel about this development? How do you think it will play out long term?
I’ve been a librarian since 1991, working in academic, public, and school libraries. School libraries are the hardest, and to me it’s not even close. When I retire in a couple of years I’d consider volunteering at the public library, although I wouldn’t do anything they should be hiring professionals to do.
How well is your public library supported budget-wise? You may about as professional as they can afford.
Maybe she’s more like the dragon (I think) librarian in this song, which I immediately thought of when I saw the thread title:
How come?
I don’t have super strong feelings about it? Digital license management is really sticky for the reasons I talked about above, but I think that has more to do with the amount of power we let tech and publishing companies have than with anything intrinsic to the format. If ebook checkouts work best for you, awesome!
I’m don’t think ebooks are going to supplant print media, though. I think that print and ebook formats serve different use cases and that they will eventually settle into an equilibrium.
DDC uses shorter, simpler numbers and broader, more intuitive categories. For a collection intended for use by and aimed at the interests of the public, it’s a great fit. LCC uses a longer and more complicated number system and has a lot more granularity, but (imo) it’s not nearly as simple to use. Better for technical or academic use.
I am retiring soon and library volunteering is high on my list of possibilities. Our local library, like so many, has regular used book sales, which I know are staffed by volunteers. What other volunteer opportunities do libraries typically offer?
Also, have you ever shushed anyone?
I mean, literally.
Like, “shhhhh!”.
mmm
She can shush you so hard, your grandparents shut up. #MLISpowers