In his February 4, 2008 Boston Globe column Alex Beam quotes Louise Blalock, Hartford librarian who oversaw a $42 million renovation and expansion of that city’s public library, in turn quoting Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago: “If a city takes care of its schools, parks, and libraries, everything else will follow.” Ruminating a bit about the digital/print impact upon libraries, Beam notes the Pew study that says a young generation looks to libraries for answers, not just books, and Blalock’s observation that libraries are about connecting people with content, no matter the form. Bernie Margolis tells Beam about the hundreds who have looked at Haiti’s Code Henry since it went online and how it is important to have “a beautiful place” to come look at the original.
Boston is buidling a new branch library in Mattapan, designed by William Rawn Associates, doubled the size of the Hyde Park branch, designed by Schwartz/Silver Architects, and Hartford’s downtown library renovation was designed by FCHM-S; Fletcher, Harkness, Cohen, Moneyhun-Stopfel.
A short piece in Boston’s April 9-16, 2008 freebie weekly dig entitled “80 percent of success is just showing up” cited high school dropout rates in large cities. No surprise, not showing up is a strong predictor for dropping out. Students with with high test scores yet high absence graduate at lower rates than those with low absence and low test scores. The Boston Plan for Excellence factors attendance in its newly developed Composite Learning Index (CLI), creating a risk profile for each student based upon academic and behavioral measures.
Showing up for the boring counts, too. The article included complaints about how teaching to the required MCAS test in Massachusetts has made high school more boring then ever, but the Boston Private Industry Council’s director does not think enough is being done to convince kids that a high school diploma is worth 2 million dollars over a lifetime of income. Interest helps: “’strong teacher-student trust made a difference of five days more of attendance over the year’” [there was no information on how trust was measured], the implication being improved graduation prospects.
So, unless you’ve got the talent to write a best-selling novel and strike it big, the ploddingly simple task of showing up pays off in the long run. We’re back to the hare and tortoise sculptures featured in Copley Square nearby the end of this weekend’s Boston Marathon.
Leading requires showing up! In fact, it’s one of the secrets to leading: being there, volunteering, following through.
Ann Wolpert, MIT Director of Libraries, did just that as she gave the keynote at Simmons College GSLIS (Graduate School of Library and Information Science) Alumni Day at 9am on a cold March 30 Saturday morning! I think we had all struggled in – at least the older half of us – see below. Based upon the multi-school event’s theme Educate, Empower, Transform: Preparing Leaders for the 21st Century, Ann focused most on leadership. She did not have any one thing to say, but touched upon a number of topics. Not least was showing up.
As for the 21st century: that’s a done deal. Wolpert noted two out of three librarians are over forty-five years of age, which means there’s a generational handover looming in library-land. It was evident in the room – a mix of over 45 professionals like myself and ever younger graduate students; a noticeably different mix from my own mid-career-changing graduate school days. Fifteen years in the profession and I am already an old dog!
Here are my notes and observations- (more…)
Folks from the Biodiversity Heritage Library gave a presentation to Boston Library Consortium (BLC) members today about how they are using books and serials scanned from their collections into the Internet Archive (as charter participants in the Open Content Alliance) to create a scholarly portal (geek’s haven) for accessing their content in a variety of interesting ways. The natural science collections they are scanning, some of the oldest yet still currently used scientific literature, lends itself to searching by species and other like names. The most intriguing tool they have developed is to cross-index all the content of the books and journals they have scanned (and are continuing to scan) against the NameBank taxonomic classification system (currently at 10,775,553 records) created by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, whose library, the MBLHWHOI Library, is also a member of the BLC. As they explained it, names of plants, animals, insects, etc. in scientific literature very much depend upon history and precedence – where does this fit in with what has been observed and classified before? – which sounds to me a lot like the ISI principle of citation history – who cites whom – tracking the growth and development of a scholarly body of literature.
There’s no reason these same principles could not be applied to other scholarly schemes. Someone mentioned, for example, tracking every instance of the words “Tom Sawyer” in fiction not written by Samuel Clemens utilizing a human “namebank” would yield some fascinating results. A multi-type library academic consortium such as the BLC could provide fascinating “windows” into its scanned collection(s) this way. It also strikes me that there are a lot of institutional repository-like lessons to be learned here as well as a striking example of creating a sophisticated web interface using a dazzling variety (“purposeful emerging technology”) of off-the-shelf web tools / software / applications, etc.
Hit more for my detailed notes on today’s meeting-
(more…)
