* Repeat heavy-handed announcements over the PA during the last 30 mins before closing, flashing the lights, and wander around asking if you heard them.

* Lock the bathrooms more than 15 mins before closing. Perish the thought that you might need a bathroom on your way out.

* Turn off most of the lights more than 10 mins before closing. I guess everyone is supposed to have a flashlight to pack up and find the door.

* Lock the doors (out as well as in) right at closing time.

Is there a big problem with people failing to leave that warrants such measures? No.

How would you feel if a commercial bookstore did these things? Wouldn’t you shop someplace else? Is it any wonder that so many people are turned off on government running things?

Marc McElroy writes:
I object to the CONSTANT use of the word “Google” in this show. Google is ONE kind of web serach. It should not be used to refer to all web search, and the sum of all information on the web. I know, I know, sometimes a brand name enters the language and comes to mean that exact same product. However, there’s more to the web then Google.

While I agree in principle, the whole point of ROS is communication, and the word “Google” now probably communicates the concept of Web search better than the actual generic term “Web search”. So while I think it would be good to note and link to other forms of Web search in the show notes, I nonetheless think it makes sense to use the term “Google”, just as “Xerox copy” communicates better than “copy by electrophotography”.

Marc McElroy writes:
I object to the CONSTANT use of the word “Google” in this show. Google is ONE kind of web serach. It should not be used to refer to all web search, and the sum of all information on the web. I know, I know, sometimes a brand name enters the language and comes to mean that exact same product. However, there’s more to the web then Google.

While I agree in principle, the whole point of ROS is communication, and the word “Google” now probably communicates the concept of Web search better than the actual generic term “Web search”. So while I think it would be good to note and link to other forms of Web search in the show notes, I nonetheless think it makes sense to use the term “Google”, just as “Xerox copy” communicates better than “copy by electrophotography”.

All I am saying is you don’t HAVE to use Google, or Yahoo, or Live Search, or any other search engine name, just say “search, or internet serach.” Especially in this case when the show tries over and over to say that the library transends the commercial, and all that is bad about it, why polute the idea by giving too much credit to Google?

Well I’ve gotta go.. I need to Hover the carpet, stock the Fridgidaire, go out and buy some Band-Aid’s and Q-Tips, and Xerox some things.

(Also, s/he posted one on Cookie Monster in the library).

I suppose we’ll preserve a few book repositories as historical landmarks, but most are gone in my children’s lifetime, and my grandchildren don’t miss them. They make better use of the space. Call an illibrarial curmudgeon, but that’s how I see it.

I agree with an earlier poster that a program with a focus on challenges and practical, exciting ways libraries are using technology shifts to better accomplish their missions… and be more useful and effective. There are some startlingly novel, practical and inspiring things going on right now that we (library folk) are working on getting right and I think it would serve the general population well to hear about these. Besides, this practical groundswell that we are working to nurture is just plain, flat out, COOL!

Thanks for this great show!

In the Pennsylvania town where I grew up, the town library was actually a wing of one the town’s churches. This was a huge Georgian brick pile, with big Ionic columns across the front: http://www.lewisburgpresby.org/good_church.jpg. (It’s the spire to the left in this picture: http://pix.epodunk.com/PA/pa_lewisburg02.jpg)

The Himmelreich Library was a miniature version of the adjacent church, but was still stately in its own right. Inside, everything was dark wood and glass-fronted cabinets, with mazes of bookshelves lit by small, warm, wall lamps, and all the strange variety one might expect in a good small-town library.

The reading room had a high ceiling, with a frieze running around the room, well above head-height. It depicted a beautiful Jesus reading to enraptured children.

I still recall the first book I borrowed from this Library, as a child. It was a mystery, the first mystery I can recall.

The town library long ago moved to a new building out on the edge of town. When I last visited, this old library was still around; it had become a religious library, filled with Christian books. It still had that amazing beauty.

Seattle’s big Koolhaas library has its pros and cons. I think that the Vancouver library is more beautiful and community focused. But it’s the neighborhood libraries in any city that matter in the end, that still allow for the sort of magic that the old library in Pennnsylvania had. It’s something that the Web, for all of its reach and speed, can never achieve.

I miss somethng at the library from my childhood though. It was called a card catalog, it was this monstorous thing, with hundreds of the deepest drawers I had ever seen. Each drawer awaited my delving mind and fingers, ready to reveal its hidden secrets to me. It was some of the best instant gratification I enjoyed as a child. I so dearly long to again browse eagerly through the shelves via the magic of the card catalog. Alas, that pleasure is no longer available at my local library nor would I guess many others.

We were all gipped I’m sorry to say when the computer terminals arrived at our local library. The “real” card catalog contained typically anywhere from 120 to more than 300 access points for patrons. Realistically every drawer of the card catalog was available for patrons. Now it’s a dozen or so compouter terminals and some internet computers. The numbers don’t lie people, and if you’ve never experienced eureka in a card catalog drawer you are really missing something, I sure don’t get it from the terminals. All the software I’ve used is cumbersome compared to a drawer filled with 3″X5″ title cards.

For at least the last fifteen years it has irked me no end that whoever designed the interface for electronic catalogs also took it upon themselves to redesign title cards and redeploy the information so now I have to go to a second page to get a call number for the book I want! As Lewis Black would say “Are you kidding me!?”. How is it that we used to be able to fit all the pertinent data on one side of a 3″X5″ card and now it takes a 17″ screen to see it all, only not all at the same time!

My idea was always that the home screen for library software should be a facsimilie of the old five drawer high by sixty wide and I would just take my mouse to the type catalog – Subject, Author, Title. and click on it, which would then enlarge to show me alpha choices then as I type in or choose the first few letters of my search item the software is assembling “my drawer” so that I can flip through a page at a time, or skip ahead, read, retreat, read some more, put a marker, then branch elsewhere. I fully expected the software would be smart enough to anticipate I would want to look at the next 10, 20, or 100 records and have them ready. Our software seems amazed that we want to look at the call number! I invisaged an endless drawer of enlarged 3″X5″ cards stretching out before me. Somewhat similar to what microsoft has done woth one of their newer softwares.

I long to become a commercially successful inventor. Not just one idea, but dozens in numerous areas. I already have that many and more seem to show up almost weekly. Please realize that this is the first time I have publically revealed one of my ideas, having decided this is an open forum and therefore safe and not subject to dispute as to the timing of my ideas presentation to the world. I am taking a chance that if somebody, or some company develops it they will remember me well with $$$$ (2-4% of gross) of which I will donate one-half to charity (say Habitat, UNICEF, and two others of their choosing {each receiving 25% of the donated one-half}) I am quite serious. I have three ideas for GE alone, A pension revamping idea for the auto, airlines and other such industries that will blow your socks off. Thanks for listening. charles

Thanks for letting me vet. I hope you all mean it when you say you read all these. I phoned in once and it was a gas. There don’t seem to be as many callers on as there used to be.

I was out of work a few years ago for over a year, and I went every day to the Connolly Branch of the BPL in Jamaica Plain. I applied for jobs on their computer. Once one of the librarians printed an application for food stamps for me. She didn’t charge me for the use of the printer. Once, after I lost my apartment, I was sleeping on someone’s floor, and I locked myself out. I was wearing a sweatshirt, leggings, and slippers. It was mid-December. I walked several blocks to the Connolly Branch and they lent me money to take the subway downtown, to get a spare set of keys. At Christmas, they had a party with a jazz band. I remember how depressed I was being unemployed and homeless, and I remember one of the librarians hugging me when I came to the party. Recently, they had their 75th anniversary party, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t know about it until too late.

As an adult, I didn’t use the library for a long time, probably because I hadn’t had one as a kid. Since the year at the Connolly Branch, I am at the BPL several times a week. I used to buy books all the time, but many people cannot afford to do that anymore. I know more people who use libraries than ever before. I came to them late and I’m grateful, I swear, everry single time I pick up a book or a DVD.

I really liked Amanda McKeraghan. Her story reminded me of the Connolly Branch and the librarians there, whom I miss. And Chelsea’s interview with Matthew was extremely moving.

This is a link to it from the British Library website.

Too bad I was driving while listening to the program or I would have supplied the link before the end.