Week 2 (January 21st) Public Library Management 101: Note to thyself.

          Shirley D. Kennedy's article, "Give Them What They Want," is primarily responding to a quote she disagreed with from Steven J. Bell's article, "Submit or Resist: Librarianship in the Age of Google. Kennedy is a librarian at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida and Bell is the library director at Philadelphia University. Kennedy's article response disagrees with Bells quote; 

     "There needs to be a balance between integrating library resources into Google and educating users to understand that they sometimes need to be where the library is."  

      Kennedy responds with a counterargument saying that she cannot relate to her "end users" as the same group Bell discusses in his article. 

     One thing that I learned from reading these two articles is that as a publishing professional you have to be ready for criticism from other professionals in your field from all over the world. I really think that Kennedy did a really good job in her introduction leading up to her opposing view as well as making her point as to why she does not agree with Bells statement. She seemed very professional in her delivery.  

      I was not aware that a military base’s community included a library. Reading Kennedy's article has sparked a new area of research interest. How do these libraries compare to public libraries regarding services and collections? 

     “Let Them Steal Books,” by David Isaacson is an article written with a very sarcastic and over exaggerated tone. In the section, ”to measure a thief,” Isaacson points out that many books eventually end up in the trash once they have not been sold at a library sale. This is pretty sad. You would think that these libraries would have created and established programs with schools, specially, low income schools that are in need of literature for their students. Is there a lack of communication with professionals from libraries and schools? What about donating books to a local religious establishment? Or maybe finding an organization like the Peace Corps to help bring the gift of literature to another part of the world? It sounds like the ones that need to be punished here are the ones who are throwing away the books as well.

      Here are some questions that I have regarding steeling and inventory: A patron comes up to the checkout counter. The computer shows that the patron has an outstanding fee for not turning in a few books. They tell the person behind the desk that they have turned them in. How do you deal with this situation? Another question is… How often does inventory happen? Once you have finished inventory and you figure out what books have been misplaced or lost, do you try to replace them?  

     An important point that Michael Cart makes in his article (“What Literature?”), is that one of the most significant factor that influences a librarian to purchase is, reviews. Reviews are critical to the purchasing decisions a librarian makes because it will reflect what patrons will come in to the library requesting.

     Tagging on the internet is like a review. You are tapping into the wisdom of crowds. This deals in large with the majority of users. The more a document or object is tagged in the same way the more people are going to come across it because of the attention it’s getting from a large population. This phenomenon can be seen in recommender systems like Amazon.