Bibliotechguy

Das Lern- und Sprachzentrum (The Learning and Language Center)

2009-11-05T13:25:00.000-08:00

Self-learning (or autoformation as the French call it) appears to be much more popular in German and French public libraries than in American public libraries.With its recently opened Lern- und Sprach Centrum (Learning and Language Center), the Hamburg library has adopted the Information Commons idea from English and American universities and applied it, including e-learning and chat rooms, to the public library setting.

The library obtains its online courses from Bipmedia, a German/Austrian firm that provides online training to SAP, BMW and other companies. The library asked Bipmedia, which had never worked with libraries, if it could be on its platform, but Bipmedia offered to create a platform for the library to host instead. The library now offers 102 courses in IT, language, economics and other subjects and it has contracted with Bipmedia to sell this service to other libraries. The IT staff promoted the service at the recent Frankfurter Büchmesse, the world's largest book trade fair, where Leipzig and Frankfurt signed on.

The Hamburg library’s eMedia offer includes eBooks, eAudios, eVideos and eMusic, and ePaper (newspapers, journals and magazines), which it obtains from DiViBib GmbH, Wiesbaden, Germany. DiViBib buys the media from the publishers. The Hamburg library and 105 other German libraries, including Bremen, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich and the Association of Public Libraries in Berlin buy licenses to use the media from the publisher. See http://www.onleihe.net

The ePaper incudes Der Speigel, the German news magazine; four national daily newspapers and Manager Magazin and Wirtschafts Woche, two business magazines. Under terms of its contract, the libraries can eloan Der Spiegel to only one customer at a time only. When I used the temporary Hamburg library card I was given (good for 30 days) to download the 156-page four-color most recent edition of Manager Magazin in pdf format, I was told my loan period was one day, three hours and 13 minutes. For Wirtschafts Woche my loan period was one day three hours and nine minutes.When I requested Der Spiegel, I was put on a waiting list. I received an email a few days later telling me that magazine was available for me to download.

Customers access the Learning and Language Center by clicking the eLEARNING link on the library’s home page. They access the library’s eMedia offering by clicking the emedien link on the home page.

The library’s website tells customers that with the new eLearning platform, Bücherhallen Hamburg is the first German library to give customers this new online offering. It tells them they can enter the world of online learning round the clock by choosing from more than 100 courses, including language, management and computer courses as well as courses to help them pass their European Computer Driver’s License exam. With the new eMedia service, the website says, the Bücherhallen Hamburg together with Stadtbibliotheken in München (Munich),Würzburg und Köln (Cologne) enter a new virtual world where it is possible for customers to choose the eMedia they want and need from a large pool. All they have to do to access this world of eLearning and eMedia is enter their library card number and PIN. The loan period for most eMedia is one week during which they can read or work with it whenever they want, or put it on a USB stick and take it with them to their weekend house. At the end of the week the loan expires and the items is longer be available to them.

Customers learn on the library’s website that to use the eLearning platform or the eMedia they need Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Windows Media Player 9 or higher; Adobe Reader 7.0 or higher; Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher; and Firefox 1.5.0 or higher. They are advised that they will be able to make only limited use of the eMedia with Mac or Linux operating system. It gives a list of MP3 players compatible with the system, and a list of compatible eBook readers, which currently includes only the Sony eBook Reader. (The Kindle is not yet available in Europe; but even if it were, it would not be listed because eBooks for the Kindle have to be purchased from Amazon.) The website also has tutorials customers can follow to learn how to use the eLearning platform and eMedia.

The eMedia offer includes more than 1,000 eBooks, eAudios, eVideos and 4,000 music titles. It can also be search by theme:

Children (207 titles): Adventure and Discovery, Detective and True Crime, Earth and Universe, Fantasy, Friendship & Family, For our Children, History, Religion & Folklore; Horror, Body & Health; Songs & Poetry; Fairytales, Sports, Games & Fun; Animals & Nature, Other;

Young Adult (241titles): Adventure and Excitement; Family, Friendship & Love; Fantasy & Science Fiction; Free Time & Sport; Horror & Mystery; Body & Health; Fairytales; Real Life; Travel, Lands & Cultures; Novels & Experiences; Animals & Nature; Other;

School & Learning (1702 titles): Reference; Work and Study Techniques; Career Choice and Application; Professions; Test Preparation; Other.

Nonfiction & Advice (9621 titles): Education & Study; Beauty & Wellness; Occupation & Career; Computer & Internet; Parenting; Esotericism & Astrology; History, Peoples & Lands; Society; Health; Home & Religion; Hobby & Lifestyle; Information & Documentation; Art, Culture & Media; Music; Practical Advice; Nature and the Cosmos; Pedagogy & Psychology; Politics; Law; Travel & Adventure; Religion & Philosophy; Sport & Fitness; Languages; Environment & Environmental Protection; Consumerism & Finance; Economy & Business; Science & Technology

Fiction & Entertainment (1153 titles): Biography & Memoir; Drama; Essays; True Crime & Thrillers; Verse; Fairytales; Oral Tradition & Humor; Novels & Experience; Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Music (4632 titles): Genre and Epoch.

Reflections

2009-11-05T05:01:00.000-08:00

In conversations about libraries in France I often heard the word patrimoin (patrimony), a word with several meanings, one of which is cultural heritage. How frequently the word is used indicates how libraries are viewed in France. More than American libraries, they're seen as protectors, defenders and extenders of the country’s cultural heritage. Their role is to educate, elucidate, elevate.

The emphasis in libraries in the U.S. seems sometimes to be more on entertainment than information. It is important for American libraries to remember that they are essentially cultural institutions and that they have a loftier mission than merely to entertain.

Some conversations turned to discussions about what it means for France to be a republic, what it means to be a citizen of the republic, and what kind of services libraries should provide French citizens.

Citizenship in France, according to the director of the Montreuil library, is viewed as separate and apart from any other status or condition, such as race and religion, and it is from this point of view that the French government has attempted to help immigrants, especially those from France’s overseas departments who are already citizens, to assimilate into French life. In many cases these attempts have not worked, especially among immigrants groups who come from cultures where life is not compartmentalized and where the conditions of a person’s being, including citizenship, race and religion, are not distinct.

In France the need to help immigrants assimilate is becoming more urgent. Until recently most immigrants came from France’s overseas departments and former colonies, but today they come from many more countries around the world. As the debate about immigrants and immigration continues in France and elsewhere in Europe, French librarians are asking themselves what role they and their libraries should play and what programs and services for immigrants they should provide.

French as well as German libraries provide programs about immigration either to contribute to a cultural shift; i.e., help citizens accept immigrants and help immigrants adapt to French or German life, or to meet the immediate, everyday, practical needs of immigrant groups. French and German libraries would like to offer more of these programs, but face obstacles that are very different from those faced by their American counterparts.

After the Second World War, Western European countries set up elaborate social support systems that, in addition to medical care, meet many of the social needs of their citizens. Since their creation, the agencies that provide these services have become institutionalized and entrenched. In their presentations and conversations about programs for immigrants and the unemployed, French and German librarians often mentioned the turf battles they have to fight with these agencies. Despite the help they provide, the Western European social support systems can also be a hindrance.

As there is an upside and a downside to the Western European model, there is an upside and a downside to the United States model. The U.S. has no universal health care, for example; and millions of its citizens are uninsured. But many of the services that are provided by government in Western Europe are provided by private social service agencies in the U.S. When libraries in the U.S. want to provide services to immigrants, the unemployed or other groups, they have a smaller entrenched bureaucracy and fewer turf battles to fight. Even where battles must be waged, often they are fought against opponents who are more accustomed to partnering with organizations like public libraries and private social services agencies and may even be predisposed to working with them.

Despite the difference in obstacles Western European and U.S. libraries face, the dialog between is instructive and beneficial. Each has ideas and offers programs from which the other can benefit.

Bibliothèque Montreuil

2009-11-05T04:56:00.000-08:00

Montreuil is a suburb of approximately 100,000 on the eastern edge of Paris. The city has a very diverse population, including the largest population of Malians outside Mali’s capital city of Bamako. Montreuil’s lower housing prices attract many artists, writers and movie directors who can’t afford or do not want to pay the high cost of housing in Paris. Historically the city has had a communist government, but the green party captured city hall two years ago. The city offers many social services, and encourages dialogue between its disparate groups. These are some of the reasons, according to the vice major, Montreuil escaped the riots that wracked many of Paris’s suburbs in 2005.

The decision to create a municipal library in Montreuil “to give the average citizen access to the domain of ideas and the world of literature “was made on May 7, 1875. The library opened in September 1879. It has occupied its current building since November 1974. The library has a central library and three branches. Three annexes, or branches, were opened in 1964, 1970 and 1971.
Generally it costs nothing to join a municipal library in France, but there is an annual fee for borrowing CDs. In Montreuil, the director has removed this fee. Access to the music collection at Montreuil is free.

The director has introduced to keep the Montreuil municipal library relevant to its customers and the way they live today. The Café Literaire is one example. October is an important month for the introduction of new books in France. To coincide with this event, the library’s recent Café Literaire (literary café) gave customers an opportunity to enjoy coffee and refreshments, talk to the librarians about new books and take a “behind the scenes” look at the library.

Another example of the innovations the director has introduced is a publicity campaign the library ran to tell customers about the services available and to encourage them to suggest or request other services. Using full-page announcements under the headline “Un jour de + (one day more)” in Tous Montreuil (All Montreuil), the free weekly newspaper the city government distributes, the campaign told customers, “the library is this. It is this. It is this. Here you will find…” And then it asks, “And why not ….”

La Vie à Paris

2009-10-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Saint-Saëns and Ravel concert at Saint Eustache was wonderful. The orchestra was seated at the back of the church under the organ and all of the chairs in the church were turned around to face the orchestra. The concert was sold out, and the staff had to bring in extra chairs to seat the last concert goers. The acoustics in the church are good, but not as good as in a concert hall, and the organ wasn’t featured as prominently as I had expected. At the church I saw a tryptich by Keith Haring commemorating those who have died of AIDS and I learned that Molière was baptized and married in the church.

Theatre des Champs-Elysees
On Monday evening I went to another concert of music by Mendelsohn and Strauss by the Synfonieorchester des Westdeutschen Rundfunks (WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne) at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. The orchestra is particularly known for its performances of 20th century and contemporary music. They played a concerto for two pianos and orchestra by Mendelsohn and Eine Alpensinfonie, opus 64, by Richard Strauss. The Lebeque sisters, Katia and Marielle, were the pianists.

I was as interested in seeing the theatre and testing the acoustics as I was in listening to the music. Designed by Henry Van de Velde in a mixed art deco and classic style, the theatre was built in 1913. The concerto for two pianos was joyous, and my seat in the balcony gave me an excellent vantage point from which to view one of the pianists. When I was seated, the usher told me she worked for tips. I gave her one euro. I'd never had to pay an usher before.

The Strauss piece required a significantly larger orchestra, which produced a sound that seemed almost too big for the space. It included kettle drums, several flutes, a large brass section, and a large woodwind section, including three oboes. The music started very slowly and quietly, but featured many crescendo passages. The piece includes several solo passages, especially oboe and flute (one of which was played with a few sour notes). It was the longest pieces of music I’ve ever heard. It was pretty exhausting for the listener. I can’t imagine how the musicians felt. All I could do was slump back in my chair when it was over.

Cimetiere Père Lachaise

I finally did it. I’ve been telling myself for years that if I ever get back to Paris I will go to Père Lachaise, and I did. Oscar Wilde’s was the grave I most wanted to see. On my way, a man appeared as if from nowhere like Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He looked like a brunette Prince Valiant on a bad hair day. He told me that Frederick Chopin’s grave was nearby and motioned me to follow him. Knowing it was going to cost me, I did since I didn’t have much time. Among others I saw the graves of Oscar Wilde, Frederick Chopin, Molière, Jean de LaFontaine, Edith Piaf, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, Amedeo Modigliani, Marcel Marcau, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Sarah Bernhardt and Maria Callas.

There are some strange traditions in Père Lachaise. Victor Noir, a journalist, was shot and killed by Prince Bonaparte, the cousin of the Napoleon III. A bronze statue that depicts him as if he had just fallen in the street decorates his grave. The statue has a noticeable bulge in his trousers. A myth, which says that kissing the lips, rubbing the genital area and touching the toes (one if you want one child and two if you want twins) will bring fertility. This has made the statue one of the most popular memorials for women who visit the cemetery, and the bronze on those parts of the statue is noticeably oxidized. At Wilde’s grave women apply lipstick and kiss the stone. It’s covered in kisses.

At the end of the tour, I tipped my guide. I won’t tell you how much.

Montmartre
I ventured up Montmartre on another evening, maybe not the best time to go, but not bad. It was quite amazing to walk by the buildings were many of the impressionists lived and then to view their work when I went back to Musée d’Orsee on Thursday. Montmartre certainly has been taken over for and by tourists. When I told one of my colleagues what I’d done, his response was Montmartre is not real.

Credit Cards and Microchips
It’s strange to come from the U.S. and feel sometimes like you’re coming from a backward country. Not having a microchip in any of my credit cards has caused a few problems. I could not rent a Velib bicycle, for example, because renting one requires a credit card with a microchip. And I couldn’t add minutes to my French cell phone at the self-service machine, because the machine requires a credit card with a microchip.

Municipal Libraries of the City Paris

2009-10-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

Paris has a population of approximately 2.1 million, 14.4% of whom are foreign born. In the past most foreign-born residents came from former French colonies or protectorates that are now overseas department of France and they have French citizenship. In recent years immigrants have come from many other countries as well. There is wide economic disparity between the native and foreign populations. The city’s unemployment rate is 12%. Only 742,000 of the 1,815,000 people who work also live in the city. In the 20e arrondissement, the unemployment rate is 17%; and one-third of the unemployed are 25 years old or younger.
Paris has not had a central library since the central library was destroyed in a fire at the Hotel de Ville (city hall) in 1871. The library administration is housed in offices at 16 rue des Blancs Manteaux 4e (Street of the White Coats). Paris has 59 community libraries, 10 special libraries and 735,000 library card holders. These libraries house 44 million books and 81,000 DVDs and videotapes. They get nine million visitors a year.
The special libraries are Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris Historical Library), Bibliothèque Administrative de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris Administrative Library); Bibliothèque Forney (Forney Library [plastic, graphic and decorative arts]); Bibliothèque Musicale de Paris (Paris Music Library); Bibliothèque du Cinéma (City of Paris Cinema Library); Bibliothèque des Litératures Policières (City of Paris Detective Story Library); Centre de Documentation sur les Métiers du Livre, Bibliothèque Buffon (Buffon Library of Library Science); Fonds Historique & Documentation sur la Litterature Jeuness, Biliotheque l’Jeure Joyeuse (Children’s Literature Library); Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (Women and Feminism Library); Bibliothèque du Tourisme & des Voyages, Bibliothèque Trocadéro (Trocadero Library of Tourism & Travel).
Competition with book and video stores is of much greater concern to French libraries than to libraries in the United States. According to French law, citizens can show the DVDs they buy only in their own homes, and they cannot lend them to friends. (As you would expect, this law is widely ignored.) Libraries can buy DVDs only after they have been available in video stores for nine to 12 months. And even then, libraries pay more for them because they also have to buy lending rights. The cost of these lending rights varies. For Disney movies, for example, they are especially high.
In an earlier posts I reported on my visit to the Bibliothèque Couronnes community library. I spent the day on Tuesday, October 27, with Catherine Auzoux, Coordinatrice du Réseau (network coordinator), who brought me to Bibliothèque Picpuc, one of the most recently renovated community libraries, and to the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

Mediathèque Picpuc
Libraries in France are sometimes called mediathèque to indicate that they offer multimedia materials, not just books. The Mediathèque Picpuc is a Paris municipal library that reopened in January 2009 after extensive renovations, including the installation of RFID technology. It is housed on six floors of a social housing building owned by the city. In addition to books, its collection includes 20,000 CDs and 9,000 music scores. The library also has an extensive DVD collection, including many popular American TV series.

One of the busiest municipal library in Paris, it circulated 600,000 items last year. Its music collection draws patrons from a wider area than its print collection because not all Paris municipal libraries have music collections and the Picpuc collection is one of the most extensive.
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The library is starkly modern, but welcoming. Its uncluttered spaces encourage visitors to go about their library business without distraction. The monochromatic color scheme of black, gray and white is accented with orange, but only selectively, and mostly in the children’s room.

Cyrille Fierobe, library manager, was able to make many of the color, surfaces and furnishings decisions, which included the purchase of two orange chairs with Keith Haring designs for the children’s room. Catherine Auzoux said that with budget cuts managers of other libraries slated for renovation probably won’t be given so much leeway.

Cyrille acknowledged that a six-story space with only one elevator is not ideal for a library, but explained that the library had to make the best of the space the city made available. He conceded that the fourth floor, which would be the fifth floor in an American building is not the best floor for a children’s room, but it was chosen because it is the best of the public floors because it has the most light. On Saturdays, which are the busiest days, customers often have to wait for the elevator.

The ground floor houses only the circulation desk, newspapers and magazines and a seating area. The rest of the space is left open and used for program. Glass doors from the ground floor lead to an outside area with comfortable seating that patrons can use in good weather. Above the ground floor, in addition to the children’s room, are an adult fiction floor, an adult nonfiction floor, a young adult floor and an office floor. The adult, young adult and children’s areas of the library have computers for public use. The library has areas where customers can plug in their laptops, and it offers wifi.

Germany has very strict laws with regard to the amount of space and the amount of natural light that must be made available for each employee. Since the office floor at Mediathèque Picpuc is flooded with natural light, I asked Catherine if France had similar laws. Not laws, she said, but recommendations.

Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris

The Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris is in le Marais (swamp) a district of Paris with many old buildings because it is one of the few districts that were not affected by Baron Houssmann’s plan to rebuild the city during the reign of Napoleon III. The Bibliothèque Historique is housed in a Hotel Particulier that dates from the 15th century. Hotels Particuliers were the medieval mansions of the aristocracy.

The Bibliothèque Historique is a reference library whose collection of 600,000 documents about the history Paris includes maps, photographs and books. The collection replaces an earlier historical collection destroyed in a fire in the Hotel de Ville (city hall) in 1871.
The library was part of the Musée de Carnavalet, the city’s history museum, until 1968 when it moved to its present location. The library computerized its catalog in 2004. It recently undertook a digitization project, and to date it has digitized 200 of its maps.

The only areas of the library open to the public are the map room and a reading room that seats 80. Anyone 18 year of age or older is eligible for a library card, which is different from the municipal library card. Since the collection (except map facsimiles) is closed, customers have to request the items they want and wait approximately 20 minutes for them to be retrieved from the stacks. The library is used mostly by journalists, students and historians.

The map room contains an collection of facsimiles of maps arranged by date. Many of the older maps offer a bird’s-eye view of the Paris looking east. During my visit, Genevieve Madore, chief librarian showed me six maps that traced the growth of Paris from medieval times to the late 19th century. In these maps you can see the facades of the city’s churches which were always built facing west.

The Bibliothèque Historique collection includes original as well as facsimiles of manuscripts by authors such as Voltaire, Georges Sand and Gustave Flaubert. The library hosts special exhibitions and is planning one on the 1910 great flood of Paris when the water level of the Seine reached 20 feet above normal drowning streets throughout the city and sending thousands of Parisians fleeing to emergency shelters.

Libraries as Places for Social Cohesion

2009-10-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

Thursday, Friday, October 8, 9, 2009
Bibliothèque Public d’Informtion, Paris

The challenge facing libraries today, according to information I received about the workshop, is “to diversify their offer by adding services linked to economic and societal changes; to create new relationships with their publics; to find a “discussion space” with socially involved organizations and associations; and to define a role to play in order to strengthen social cohesion and professional integration.”

The purpose of the workshop was “to make an exchange of knowledge and experience possible, not just successes but also difficulties if not failures, and to develop a collection of ‘would be’ models and practices.” Thought also was given to “ways to defend the existence of such services in municipal libraries.”

During the workshop French librarians alternated with German librarians in making presentations. Their presentations included a brief description of their library and the programs it offers for immigrants and the unemployed. In this summary I have not included presentations made by or about the Paris, Cologne, Bochum, Bremen or Berlin libraries, because I provided detail about these libraries in other blog postings.

Municipal Library of Bordeaux
The City of Bordeaux has a central library, nine branch libraries and one bookmobile. It has a self-learning center called L’espace Autoformation. It has 34 computers and books on language learning.

The unemployment rate among the library’s customers is 20%. The library works with the Pôle Emploi, the national unemployment office, and PIMMS, an organization created to help immigrants assimilate into French life, to help the unemployed find jobs. The librarians often complain that it is difficult to work with the Pôle Emploi.

Municipal Library of Rennes and Library of Rennes-Mctropole
The public library of Rennes, the capital of Brittany, has 35,971 subscribers. It circulated 856,000 items last year. It has eight 15-minute public computers and 21 one-hour public computers. The library provides one-on-one computer training to customers on Saturdays. Among constraints the library representative listed that hamper its efforts to provide services to the unemployed and immigrants are the staff's need for more knowledge about information technology; resistance among staff members to performing tasks they consider social work; a lack of knowledge among target populations of the digital resources available at the library; and the limitations on computer inherent in some of the measures taken to protect the library’s network security.

Bibliotheque d’Etude et d’Information de Cigny-Pontoise
This library has created a study/career center where, according to the librarian representative, it has adapted its resources to the real needs of job seekers and other people. The library works with the Pôle Emploi, the national unemployment office, to host Journées Consiels Emploi, job advice days. The librarian said she did not find the agency as difficult to work with as did the representative from Bordeaux.

Blogging is wildly popular in France. The Bibliotheque d’Etude et d’Information de Cigny-Pontoise writes a blog about employment that patrons can access by clicking the Nos Services (Our Services) link on the library’s home page. The library’s weekly blog post includes information about job fairs, job training, and other practical information about employment-related activities in the Cigny-Pontoise area as well as information about the latest materials on the topic available at the library.

Stadtbücherei Stuttgart
According to the director of the Stadtbücherei Stuttgart, 35% of the city’s population is of “immigrational background.” They come from 100 different countries and speak 120 different languages. The director described her city as “multicultural but peaceful.” Stuttgart offers 3,000 programs a year in its central, music and 17 branch libraries, many of them in partnership with the Volkshochschule (school for adult education). The city is building a new central library, which, the director said, will be a center for life-long learning. The library created a 600-page book composed of letters written by citizens about how they feel about the library. The book was put into the cornerstone of the new building.

The director listed a variety of programs the library offers, some more successful than others. Like other libraries in Germany, it offers a fee-based research service, but there is no longer much demand for it because the library provides free access to many databases. It offers an information skills course that is also meeting with less success and may be discontinued. It offers a popular digital literacy course, which focuses not on computer technology but on providing a deeper understanding of what is expected to happen in the digital world. It has a course on protecting online information that is extremely successful.

The library has a volunteer staff of learning guides who help senior citizens with computers and help all patrons with spelling and grammar. It provides a message board where people who want to learn a language and people who want to learn each other’s language can connect. And it has a Knowledge Café that, according to the director, provides social networking, but in real rather than virtual time.

Breakout Sessions
Workshop participants were asked to indicate which of three breakout sessions they would like to join: minorities and social integration; services for the unemployed; and life-long learning. Presentations took longer than anticipated, however, and after a tour of the Bibliotheque public d’information, participants convened in a general session to discuss the three topics instead.

Public buildings in France and Germany must be handicapped accessible. Much of the general discussion had to do with laws in France and Germany that require public institutions like libraries to have handicapped-accessible websites as well.

Gender Mainstreaming
A European Union (EU) directive that generated considerable discussion had to do with “gender mainstreaming.” The UN Economic and Social Council formally defined the concept as “mainstreaming a gender perspective in the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation policies and programs in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.” According to a European Union (EU) directive, this gender perspective must be integrated into the budget planning process for all public institutions like public libraries by the year 2011.

La Bibliothèque des Sciences et de l’Industrie

2009-10-28T16:04:00.000-07:00

The Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie is the science and industry museum of Paris just as the Centre Pompidou is the city’s modern art museum. The heart of the Cité is the Bibliothèque des Sciences et de l’Industrie (Library for Science and Industry), a vast multimedia public library entirely dedicated to science, technology and industry. It has several specialized areas including the Cité de la Santé (health information center), Carrefour Numérique (Digital Crossroads, a digital resources training area), the Salle Louis-Braille (Louis Braille Room), a fully equipped area for visually impaired and deaf readers, and the Cité des Métiers (vocational guidance center). It receives approximately 650,000 visitors in every year.

The museum has many permanent exhibitions on automobiles, aeronautics, energy, mathematics, light, space, sound, man and his genes, the story of the universe, etc. In addition it hosts special exhibits such as Epidemics of the 21st Century, and The Earth: What Is It? It also has a planetarium, a cinema, a theatre and special exhibitions for children. The library often creates displays relating to both the permanent and special exhibits.

The library is open to the public, but it is not free. I believe it costs €20.00 to join. The fee entitles members to borrow books, including e-books; journals; CD-ROMs and DVDs and to access the internet for up to eight hours a month.

You do not have to be a member, however, to use the Carrefour Numérique, which has an autoformation (self-learning center) with free access to hundreds of computerized self-learning courses. Visitors to the Carrefour Numérique can pursue the self-learning courses or their own or they can also attend scheduled practical work sessions monitored by staff members who are available to answer their questions.

The Cité des Métiers
The Cité des Métiers offers employment and training information and advice at any stage of life or profession. The Cité des Métiers at the Library for Science and Industry is organized into five areas: education/professional development; job offers; vocational training; assess your skills/change your professional life; and create your own business. It conducted 22,000 interviews in 2008. It averages 700 visitors a day, many of whom are job seekers.

The Cité des Métiers receives both public and private funding. It started at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, but out of it has grown a non-governmental organization (NGO) called the Réseau des (network of) Cités des Métiers that has replicated the Cité des Metiérs model at many locations throughout Latin Europe.

Members of this network are located in libraries, museums, unemployment offices and in street corner offices. In Barcelona, the Cité des Metiérs is inside a business incubator. The creators try to put inside “what the future will be,” according to Dr. Oliver Las Vergnas, the founder. It’s a question, Las Vergnas said, of how politicians see the future. Nearly nine of every 10 attempts to create Cités des Métiers fail, according to Las Vergnas. The challenge is trying to get labor and education to work together.

There are not many Cités des Métier in libraries, Las Vergnas said, because politicians don’t think of libraries and vocational guidance centers as being linked. The traditional French library concept was very limited in the kind of information you could give, he said, but now you can give information about everything.

Belleville Revisited

2009-10-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

I returned to Belleville in the 20e Arrondissement yesterday to visit Bibliothèque Couronnes, a medium-size Paris municipal library (More about that in the previous entry) at the Couronnes (crowns) stop on the 2 line. I had been in Belleville once before where I had a very good dinner in a Chinese restaurant in a part of quarter near the Belleville stop that is home to many Chinese and Vietnamese. The food was steamed and brought to the table in a stack of baskets.

Bibliothèque Couronnes is in a working-class neighborhood with a large population of Arabs and Jews from North Africa and immigrants from former French colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The flavor of the neighborhood is decidedly North African. In some ways it reminded me of the northern reaches of Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, only much larger.

I walked through the street market along Boulevard Belleville, not as large as the Marché Bastille, but still one of the largest in Paris. The sardines were tempting. I seriously considered buying some, but then decided I didn’t want to buy flour to dredge them or oil to cook them in. I bought Brussels sprouts and potatoes instead. I will eat them with the ribs I bought at the Marché Bastille, which were not, by the way, fully cooked. But I mijote’ed them (to coin a Franglish word) for about two hours the other evening until the meat nearly fell off the bone. They taste just like the corned spare ribs I ate as a kid and prepared again about six months ago in New York. (Leave the ribs in a brine of one pound of kosher salt for every five quarts of water for a week. Remove from the brine and simmer (or mijotez) in fresh water for about two hours.) All I have to do is reheat and eat with the vegetables.

The most memorable meal in Paris to date was the grilled duck breast with fig sauce served with a gratin of potatoes on a street in the 10e along the Canal Saint-Martin. This was preceded by escargot, eaten with good red French wine and followed by Tarte Tatin. I’ll recreate that one when I go home (probably without the snails).

The library is across rue des Couronnes from Parc Belleville, a park with many trees and flowers on the side of one of the few hills in Paris.

There is a sweeping view of the city from the top. I especially liked the sign giving recognition to the gardeners who maintain the park.

Loosely translated, it said “Welcome to our gardens. A Team at Your Service: the Gardeners. We work to enhance your daily life. The gardeners maintain the green patrimony of the city of Paris in the parks, gardens, woods and public spaces… The gardeners plant the flower beds and the vegetable gardens, and apply themselves each day to making the gardens more attractive… Thanks to their work everyone benefits from the pleasant gardens and colorful flower beds. Thank you to those who help them with their mission and respect the parks and the botanical creations.”

I saw a motorbike accident in Belleville. I wonder why I hadn’t seen one before. Motorbikes are everywhere—even on sidewalks. I was surprised to see them speeding between the lanes of traffic on the expressway on my way into the city from the airport on my first day. A motorbike had apparently struck an old man crossing the street. The motorbike was damaged. Several people were helping the old man who was bleeding from head wounds. Just after I came upon the accident an ambulance arrived.

I’m going to a concert of music by Camille Saint-Saëns and Maurice Ravel by l'Orchestre National d'Île de France at l’Eglise St-Eustache on Friday night. This ought to be good. St-Eustache you may remember if you read an earlier blog entry is the Paris church with the organ that shakes the rafters.

Bibliothèque Couronnes

2009-10-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Bibliothèque Couronnes is a medium-size Paris municipal library. It has an adult area, a children’s area and a discothèque (music library). It occupies approximately 1,000 square meters on two floors of a social housing building in the Belleville quarter. It has a staff of 21. Romain Gaillard, library manager, explained that the staff would be smaller if the branch wasn’t engaged in so much activity outside of the library with local schools and community organizations.

Bibliothèque Couronnes has a collection of 56,000 items and circulates approximately 7,500 items each month including many fiction CDs. Previously these novels were recorded on several discs, but with MP3 technology they can be recorded on one.

The Bibliothèque Couronnes manager plans to weed 10 to 15% of the collection. The Paris municipal library has no central library, but it has a warehouse where approximately 140,000 books are stored, including many books weeded from the branch libraries’ collections. If customers request these books, they are delivered to the requesting location within two days.

The library has three public access computers that customers can use for 15 minutes. It also has eight computers customers can reserve for up to 90 minutes. Self-learning or autoformation as it is called at the Bibliotheque Publique d’Information appears to be not as popular in French libraries as it is in German libraries. The Paris municipal library branches do not offer self-learning computer courses.

Books in the Paris municipal libraries are classified according to the Dewey Decimal System, but French music libraries organize their collections according to the Principes Classification de Musique, of which Musique du Monde (world music) is the largest part. Bibliothèque Couronnes has gone one step further by color coding world music from Arabic countries blue and world music from Africa orange, and arranging its music in these categories by country of origin because many of its customers are from North or sub-Saharan Africa. Library cards are free in France, but Paris public library customers must pay €40.00 a year to borrow CDs and €61.00 a year to borrow CDs and DVDs.

Only a fraction of Paris municipal libraries have DVD collections because they are considered unfair competition to private business. For the same reason public libraries in Paris get only one or two copies of best sellers and only after they books already have been in bookstores for two or three weeks.

The administration of the Paris public library prepares extensive lists of new books. On the day I visited the Bibliothèque Couronnes, staff members were reviewing the lists and deciding what books to buy. The branch’s collection includes 2,500 books in Arabic, which it buys from the Institute do Monde Arabe in Paris, the supplier currently approved by the administration. Many of these books are published in Lebanon. The library also subscribes to an Arabic newspaper for women published in London that is very popular with its customers. It had far fewer books in Arabic 10 years ago, but the administration directed it to buy more contemporary fiction. It also buys Arabic books on Vie Pratique (practical life) such as cooking, education and child rearing. The library has a large collection of books on sub-Saharan Africa as well, but these books are in French.

The children’s area was recently renovated with new paint, new furniture and new carpets. The library arranges some books by theme and others by a simplified version of Dewey. The non-fiction is arranged by age, with the books for younger children on the lower shelves and the books for older children on the higher shelves. The library also puts books and magazines together on the shelves in the subject areas.

Like the libraries in Germany, the Paris libraries open library accounts for schools and community organizations. The lending period for these organizations is six week. Children pay no fine if they return their materials late, but if they do this too many times their accounts are blocked.

Plans for the branch library include weeding many print reference resources, especially some encyclopedias because customers now get this information from the internet and replacing the books in this area with foreign language and other self-learning materials as well as job and career materials. Romain also wants to replace the furniture in the newspaper reading room and put a coffee machine in the foyer. Customers will be allowed to drink coffee in the library.

Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin (ZLB)

2009-10-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

While plans for a new Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin move forward, the library’s collection of more than three million items is housed in three locations: the Berliner Stadtbibliothek, the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek and the Senatsbibliothek Berlin ZLM. In addition to these sites, the library operates an e-LearnBar, a self-learning center, at a fourth location.

We were given a tour of the e-LearnBar by two of the three employees who staff the recently opened facility in the vicinity of Berliner Schlossplatz. The e-LearnBar has 15 individual learning stations, 14 group learning stations, five standing learning stations and work areas for the visually impaired. It offers tutorials in the Microsoft office suite, Magix, Music Maker, Adobe Photoshop and other photo editing programs as well as self-learning programs in a wide range of subjects. It also offers scanning and Internet research. Anyone 18 year of age or over with a ZLB library card is welcome, but customers are advised that basic knowledge of PCs and basic mouse skills are assumed. Library cards cost €10.00 for adults and €5.00 for students. They are free for children and the unemployed. To be eligible, you must have a permanent address in Germany.

The facility was financed by Kultur in den neuen Ländern, an aid program for the states of the former Deutsche Demokratishe Republik (German Democratic Republic), in partnership with the ZLB, the Landesbetrieb für Informationstechnic (Berlin Office for Information Technology), Cisco Systems Gmbh, Netfox and IBM. The facility is state-of-the-art and quite impressive; however, it is not as accessible as it might be. The fact that it had to be located in the former East Berlin might have something to do with this, although the Stadtmitte (city center) is itself in the former East Berlin.

We also took an unescorted tour of the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, the first library where I was told the taking of photographs was verboten (no translation needed). The building was a gift of the United States to Berliners for enduring the 1948/49 Soviet Blockade. It was conceived by American and German architects like Fritz Bornemann and Willy Kreuer and opened in 1954 as a symbol of freedom of expression and thought. Designed as a library, the building appears to function well and to have withstood the test of time.

The representative of the ZLB who attended the workshop in Paris showed us an extensive and impressive list of the libraries with which the ZLB has reciprocal reference agreements. I was hoping to learn more about this service and maybe meet the librarian responsible for creating it, but that did not happen.

The ZLB hopes to construct a new central library on the site of the former Templehof Airport, which closed on October 30, 2008. A story in a Berlin newspaper on the morning we left, however, reported that a former Berliner Kindl brewery in the Neu Köln neighborhood is also being considered.

Das Leben in Berlin
All of the hotels we stayed in were middle-class European hotels – comfortable, efficient and squeaky clean. All except the hotel in Berlin were decorated like middle-class European homes. Even the bars looked like somebody’s living room. And at all of them, except the hotel in Berlin, middle-class, middle-age European people gathered in the public areas in the evening for tea, beer, brandy, etc., and conversation. The Park Inn, our Berlin Hotel is a modern skyscraper. The small but clean and comfortable rooms look a little like they could be on the Star Trek Enterprise.

On our way to dinner in Berlin we made a stop at shop that sold nothing but Ampleman souvenirs. Ample is traffic light in German, and Ampleman is the man on the traffic lights in the former East Berlin. If he’s red and standing facing you with his arms outstretched, you stop; if he’s green and running briskly as if showing you how to cross the street, you go. The souvenir I would buy, if I could find it, would be a tee shirt with the word Zuruckbleiben (Stand Back) on it. Zuruckbleiben is what you hear in Berlin's subways as trains rumble into the stations. You could say it’s Berllin’s equivalent of London’s “Mind the Gap.” Wearing such a shirt, I would feel invincible on the streets of New York, even if only German tourists could understand me.

I had a hearty meal of Schweinebraten (roast pork) with red cabbage and a Kartoffelnklops (potato dumpling) at a restaurant not far from Alexendarplatz. Everyone was in a good mood. It had been a nonstop week, and I think we were all pleased at the thought of going home next day. After dinner we took a different route back to the hotel. I have visited Berlin many times, but only once since the wall came down. The city has changed dramatically. It‘s still a great place, but it doesn’t even feel like the city I knew. Following dinner I told one of my companions that it is good to travel in the company of the French because they travel on their stomachs. I think he was pleased.

La Vie à Paris: Le Bon Week-end

2009-10-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to a flea market in the 18e arrondissement. It went on forever. I expected to see second-hand and was surprised to see how much new merchandise was for sale. As I got further from the entrance, the new gave way to the old. And at the far reaches antique shops, some quite expensive, replaced the second–hand stalls.

Today I went to the Marché Bastille outdoor market. So much beautiful food, and all looking so much better than what’s available at the little supermarket around the corner! Stalls selling nothing but oysters! I spent €45,08. I bought my alimentation (groceries) for the week. I hope I didn’t buy too much – three peaches, three pears, five figs and eight bananas; two cheeses – a camembert and three small crottin de chevre. I’m buying cheeses I never ate before and keeping a list. I’ve had camembert, but not camembert made with unpasteurized milk because you can’t get it in the U.S. When I ordered it, the seller poked it with his finger. I don’t know if he was testing it for ripeness or showing me that it was ripe. Mine is definitely ready to eat. I could smell it on the subway on the way home.

I also stocked up on some menu items I can reheat during the week – fully cooked (if I understood his French correctly) pickled pork ribs, lasagna and stuffed squid. Stuffed with what, I have no idea. I didn’t buy vegetables because I don’t want to take the time to cook. I noticed that at the market they were selling fully cooked beet roots. Perhaps I should have bought one or two. Oh well, bon appétit!

I took the Lonely Planet Guide literary walking tour of the Latin Quarter today. Not being a Hemingway fan, I really didn’t care about all the bars where Papa got sloshed, but other than that it was pretty great. I saw places where James Joyce, George Orwell, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller and Kathryn Anne Porter lived. But what was greatest was seeing where Pablo Picasso painted Guernica, where Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir hung out, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas held their literary salons, and the hotel where Oscar Wilde died. Although not of literary significance, 56 rue Jacob also was on the tour. That’s where David Harley, George III’s representative, met with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Hay on September 3, 1783 to sign the Treaty of Paris recognizing American independence. This evening I went to a concert and mass at St. Eustache, the church with the largest organ in Paris. When they pull out all the stops, that thing really wails. Stirs the emotions. Amen.

Paris is expensive. A glass of beer on rue Jacob cost me €9.50 (about $14.70 at today’s exchange rate), and it wasn’t even a big glass. And this evening I went to the laverie (laundramat) for the second time. A small load of laundry cost €6.50 (a little more than $10.00) to wash and dry. Restaurants, bars, cafés, brasseries and salons du thé charge different prices depending on where you sit (or stand) and what time of day you go. I probably sat in the most expensive place at the most expensive time. Ate the squid tonight. Heated it in the microwave because I can’t get the oven to work. Not a problem. Delicious.

When is a Stadtbucherei a Bücherhallen?

2009-10-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

When you’re in Hamburg, of course. Hamburg claims to be the only library in Germany to use this word. OK, but a library is a library is a library.

Hamburg is a city of 1.7 million people, 15 to 20% of whom are immigrants. It is a major port, not only for Germany but all of Europe. It also is the German home of Airbus, the Franco-German aircraft company with French operations in Toulouse.

The central library is housed on two floors of rented space in a building that was a parcel distribution center for the German post office. The library didn’t want to move into the building, but the landlord made a very attractive offer because he hoped the library would provide an anchor for the neighborhood. The landlord’s hopes have been realized and the library is expanding to a third floor.

The library has a budget of €30.8 million, and a staff of 491 (400 full-time and 91 part-time). It has a turnover rate of 7.8 and circulated 12.82 million items last year. It collects in 27 languages and offers 120 language courses. It has issued 141,782 paid cards, but admits that with RFID it cannot control who uses the cards. It hires six to eight librarian trainees each year for whom it offers a three-year training program. In the second year of the program the trainees staff HOEB4U, the libraries telephone, email and virtual reference service.

The library owns 14,000 DVDs and 20,000 CDs. It subscribes to 7,000 periodicals. It offers free wifi, for which users don’t need library cards. Like other German libraries, it charges to reserve books and to check out best sellers. Reserves cost €1.50 and best sellers cost €2.50. The number of best sellers the library gets depends on the books position on the Der Spiegel best seller list. The vendor processes the books for the library.

Having worked in dozens of organizations during my checkered career(s), I have seen first-hand how the leader can affect the culture of an organization, and I think the director of the Bücherhallen Hamburg must be doing something right. Many staff members talked about how the director encourages them to try new things and embrace change; others demonstrated it. I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet her.

The name Bücherhallen is not the only unique thing about the Hamburg library. It has a separate “leisure library,” and its teen center is housed in a separate building. It runs the libraries in the city’s prisons. It is responsible for the city’s school libraries. It has a chat-bot named Ina who brings people to content on its website. It provides audio for the blind and sign language for the hearing impaired on its website. It has an automated book return and sorting system that handles 10,000 check-ins a day at a rate of 1,000 books an hour. In the early morning and late evening hours the system is used to handle reserves and new books. It has a soundproof room in the children’s library that teachers love because, as our tour guide said, it gets the children “away from the hurry, the stress and the noise.” It also has an RFID machine in the children’s room for children to check out their materials themselves.

The Hamburg library works with the Federal office of Immigration and Refugees. It is trying to build a network for immigrant support “to make cultural and educational institutions accessible” and “to help them learn the German language.” It holds German language sessions in the library for immigrants who know some German but need to practice speaking. The sessions are staffed by 60 volunteer discussion facilitators and the library is looking for more volunteers "with similar immigration experience." Recognizing that human contact is another service libraries provide, the Hamburg library has built a volunteer staff of medianboten (item deliverers)who deliver library materials to older, handicapped and immobile customers with whom they spend time reading and talking.

The Hamburg library has an IT staff of three, but 17 people have access to the content management system and can put content on the library’s web page. The library has retained a children’s writer to write and review content for the children’s page. The website’s pages are color coordinated. The main pages are blue. The HOEB4U pages are red, and the children’s page are yellow.

From the HOEB4U page customers can request that their question be answered by a librarian from any one of six Hamburg libraries, by choosing the library from a dropdown menu. This is a service the Hamburg library developed at no cost by working with five other libraries and using an open source ticket system.

The Lern- und Sprachzentrum (Learning and Language Center) at the Hamburg library is a work in progress. The library has adopted the Information Commons idea from English and American universities and hopes with the Center to apply the concept, including e-learning and chat rooms, to the public library setting. The Center provides self-learning, both on site and online, including language study.

DUBib in Wiesbaden, Germany, is the aggregator that provides electronic newspapers, magazines and journals to the Hamburg library. DUBib buys the media from the publishers and the Hamburg library, and 105 other German libraries, including Frankfurt and Munich, buy licenses from the publisher to use the media.

Self-learning or autoformation as the French call it appears to be a much more popular idea in German and French than in American public libraries. One of the most innovative ideas I learned in Hamburg had to do with the library’s online courses, which it obtains from Bipmedia, a German/Austrian firm that provides online training to such companies as SAP and BMW. The library asked Bipmedia, which had never worked with libraries, if it could be on its platform, but Bipmedia offered to create a platform for the library to host instead. The library now offers 102 courses in IT, languages, economics and other subjects and it has contracted with Bipmedia to sell this service to other libraries. The IT staff promoted the service at the recent Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt book fair, the world's largest trade fair for books, where Leipzig and Frankfurt signed on.

The Hamburg library’s eMedia offer includes eBooks, eAudios, eVideos and eMusic, and ePaper (newspapers, journals and magazines), which it obtains from DiViBib GmbH, Wiesbaden, Germany. DiViBib buys the media from the publishers. The Hamburg library and 105 other German libraries, including Bremen, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich and the Association of Public Libraries in Berlin buy licenses to use the media from the publisher. See http://www.onleihe.net

The ePaper incudes Der Speigel, the German news magazine; four national daily newspapers and Manager Magazin and Wirtschafts Woche, two business magazines. Under terms of their contracts, the libraries can eloan Der Spiegel to only one customer at a time. When I used the temporary Hamburg library card I was given (good for 30 days) to download the 156-page four-color most recent edition of Manager Magazin in pdf format, I was told my loan period was one day, three hours and 13 minutes. For Wirtschafts Woche my loan period was one day three hours and nine minutes.When I requested Der Spiegel, I was put on a waiting list. I received an email a few days later telling me the magazine was available for me to download.

Customrs can also download eBooks to their Sony Reader for a limited time. For some reason, Amazon has not yet introduced the Kindle in Europe, but even if it had, the library could not offer downloads to the Kindle, because Kindle owners are required to obtain their eBooks from Amazon.

Beware of False Cognates
They can get you every time. Here are a few that can cause problems for librarians:

Medien is a German word that refers to any materials, whether in print or electronic format, that a library provides for its customers.

Numerization is a word the French often use when they speak English to mean digitization because numerization is the French word for digitization.

Alphatization is a word French and German librarians often use for literacy training when they speak English because alphabétizer in French and alphabeten in German mean to teach someone to read.

Organization and Efficiency in Bremen

2009-10-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Our first stop in Bremen was at a branch library in a neighborhood with a large population of “migrational background” from Turkey, North Africa and the Near East (a very Eurocentric term). The building was shaped like a ship and filled with light. It must look like a Danish library, because Barbara Lison, director of the Stadtbibliothek Bremen, told us it was designed by an architect who likes Danish libraries.

We were introduced to Frau Martin, the branch manager, and Frau Freihalt, the children’s librarian, who had recently returned from trips sponsored by the Goethe Institute to Ramallah and the Ivory Coast, where she gave presentations on children’s librarianship.

During their presentations, the librarians explained that kids 6-12 years of age are their hauptziele Groupe (target group). Frau Martin maintains that people don’t talk in families anymore. She said this is true of German families, but especially true of immigrant families. She and Frau Freihalt try to compensate for this Sprachlosigkeit by getting children to learn, have fun and speak.

Part of the library was designed as a café, but for cultural reasons the café was not successful. The space is now occupied by a community health center with which the library partners. When the library was opened 10 years ago, there were problems with teen groups, but the library now partners with a Turkish sports club, the local Folkshochschule and other groups and neighbors have adopted the library. It has become a meeting place for all kinds of community activities.

The second library we visited was on the second floor of a shopping center in a neighborhood where many people of German (rather than migrational?) background from the former Soviet Union live. According to the director, the circulation at this library nearly doubled when it moved from the basement of a neighboring building to the shopping center a few years ago.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Germany admitted nearly five million descendants of Germans who in the 19th century established colonies in what became the Soviet Union. Few of these people speak modern German and the unemployment rate among them is high. This group, the elderly and children are the local library’s target groups.

For five years the central library has been housed in a former police station that was built, according to our host, in 1908 with reparations for the Franco-Prussian War. The renovation was a challenge for architects who essentially built a five-story tower in what had been the courtyard of a three-story building with high ceilings. They connected the tower to the original building with bridges at the level where the floors of both are at the same height. It is at this level that most of the collection is housed.

The Lesegarten (Reading Garden) is under a glass roof in the courtyard behind the three-story addition. It is the only area of the library where customers are allowed to eat and drink.

French and German public libraries seem more like academic libraries and to offer more academic programs than public libraries in the United States. The Interconfessional talks about literature at the Bremen library is one example. The series was started in 2006 because the library believes that dialogue about religion is “an important pre-condition for peace between religions and peace in the world.” It uses fiction as a vehicle to enable dialogue by discussing the cultural, social and religious backgrounds of a novel’s characters. The program was organized in cooperation with the Evangelishes Bildungswerk Bremen (Bureau of Professional Training of the Protestant Church in Bremen) and the Muslimische Akademie Berlin (Muslim Academy Berlin). The Catholic Church was a sponsor, our guide explained. It withdrew due to lack of funds, but is, she was sure, with them in spirit.

The library holds six talks each year – three in the spring and three in the fall. The panel always includes a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist and a Muslim. Representatives of other religions are invited to join as appropriate. One novel is presented at each session, where a professional actor or actress reads passages. The cost of each program is €4.00. Up to 50 people attend.

The Bremen library obtains its library materials, equipment and technology through ekz bibliotheksservice GmbH. Bremen paid €10,000 for the ekz platform, which it adapted to its website, and it pays ekz an annual licensing fee of €8,000. ekz is 65% privately owned and 35% publicly owned by Bremen and other libraries. The library-owners have greater influence than their share of ownership would imply, because some actions cannot be taken without their unanimous approval. ekz’s contracts with content providers often include restrictions on use.

All six libraries I have visited in Germany have fabulous music collections. They have thousands of CDs, which you can search by period, composer, artist, group or instrument, and there are probably a few other categories I’m forgetting about. They also have shelves and shelves of sheet music, and shelves and shelves of books about music. Many of these libraries also have extensive art collections from which customers can borrow items. The loan period is usually three months.

As I mentioned before, libraries in Germany are not free. The annual cost ranges from €15 to €25 with added fees for other services, but children join the library for free, and there are discounts for seniors, the handicapped and the unemployed, and group rates for families. In Bremen, for example, card holders get two and students get four hours of free internet access each week, but if they want to get six hours of each week, they have to pay an additional €10. If they are 18 years old or older and want to borrow any of the 3,280 pieces of art the library owns, that’s another €10. And with the new self-service RFID, cqrd holders can subscribe to these services themselves when they buy or renew their library card.

Das Leben in Bremen
Nearly 65 years after Second World War ended, you are frequently reminded of it in Germany. In Bremen we were told that 85% of the city was destroyed. Whether rebuilt or spared destruction, many of the old buildings in the center of the city, like the Rathaus (city hall), are magnificent. With lots of red brick, winding streets and ornate architectural styles I’ve seen nowhere else, Bremen and Hamburg are two cities I would like to explore further.

Barbara Lison is a master of (dare I say German?) organization and efficiency. We stayed at a hotel near the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and not far from the central library. Barbara arrived at the hotel by bicycle to escort us on a brief tour of the city center and to dinner at a restaurant where we ate typical North German food. On the following day, she arranged transportation to branch libraries and the central library in four vehicles. At each location it seemed the entire staff was involved in our visit.

As at the libraries we visited in other cities, a staff member provided simultaneous translation to English if the presentation was in German. For lunch at the central library we had our choice of potato soup or a soup made with meat and tomatoes. Both were very good. They were served with white bread like a French baguette. Dessert was a variety of cookies, or biscuits as the Germans like to say. Barbara arranged transportation to the airport toward the end of our visit for one of our group who had to return early to France. Everything happened how it was supposed to happen and when it was supposed to happen and we arrived back at the station in plenty of time to catch our train to Hamburg.

At dinner we were encouraged to try one of the herring dishes, which I did. My cold herring was served with two warm potato pancakes, cranberry sauce and whipped cream. The pancakes, cranberries and whipped cream seemed to go together well enough. It was the herring that just didn’t seem to belong.

If It’s Tuesday It Must be Bochum: Stadtbucherei Bochum

2009-10-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

Libraries in Germany are not free. Membership costs from €15 to €25 a year with discounts or free membership for seniors, handicapped and the unemployed; and group rates for families. This was not always the case. According to librarians in Bochum, libraries began charging for membership in the early 1990s.

I heard the term “person with a migrational background” for the first time in Germany. It refers to people not born in Germany and also to people whose forefathers were not born in Germany. I think it says a lot about Germany’s attitude toward immigration, which Germans, according to one librarian with whom I spoke, are just getting around to acknowledging.

The Stadbucherei Bochum, like the library in Cologne, is trying very hard, and with some success, to attract immigrants and their children. Among other things, some libraries in Germany offer three-month free trial memberships to immigrants and story-times for kids in their native language.

Bochum has what it calls a central library with two branches, a family library and a job-career library with its own homepage. The job-career library has a branch at the local university and a branch in the Stadtmitte (downtown area). The library provides reference service by mail and by SMS.

The collections at the family library, the branches of the central library and the job-career library are organized by theme (thematische Medienprasentation)rather than the ASB (Allgemeine Systematik für Bibliotek), the German equivalent of the Dewey Decimal System. Much of the collection at the central library is organized by theme. In the job-career library, the management books are also classified by author as well to make searching for them easier. The Bochum library calls its classification system BOKLA or Bochumer Klassifikation. The library rotates much of its collection among its three branches annually.

The Job Career Library offers information about Choosing an Occupation, Job Training, Applying for a Job, Starting a Business, Continuing Education Employment Law and the Economy. It is open 53 hours a week. It has six PCs with internet access for general use and two PCs with internet access for completing job applications. The staff has partnered with employment agencies, schools that offer occupational training and organizations in the city that help entrepreneurs establish businesses. It participates in career fairs, job fairs and youth conferences.

The Bochum library gives accounts to schools and other institutions and it has linked its customer profiles with its acquisition system. This allows the library to prepare boxes of materials according to theme for teachers. The family library also prepares boxes of materials by themes for families that request this service. The library provides free delivery of these boxes to schools and institutions but families have to pick up and return the boxes themselves.

The job-career library was part of a major reorganization of the library undertaken between 1998 and 2003 with funds from the Bertelsmann Stiftung (Bertelsmann Foundation). The goals of the project were to increase membership by 50%, increase the number of children who belong to the library by 30 to 40% and to increase lending by 30%.

We visited the branch library in Wattenscheid, which didn’t become part of Bochum until 1975. In addition to the library, the building houses the Wattenscheid Archive and an adult education center. The library is in an immigrant area. It collects in German, Turkish, English, Russian.

The library offers story times in several languages. The stories are read by volunteers. The library gives children reading cards, which it stamps each time a child finishes a book. The library has an arrangement with two local bookstores whereby the children can exchange the card once it has been stamped eight times for a children’s book with a value up to €8,00.

Liselotte is the first name of a well-known author from the area. The library has a serpent named Leselotte (lesen means “to read” in German) that it brings to preschools and kindergartens. Leselotte is a serpent head and a collection of pockets strung together. There is a book in each pocket. One book is Leselotte’s diary. Someone makes an entry in the diary at each place Leselotte visits.

The library has partnered with the adult education center to run programs. It recently hosted a wine tasting.

Das Leben in Bochum
For lunch we had Ruhr currywurst, which we were told is different from Berliner currywurst. It is made with weisswurst and served in a sauce made with cayenne, whereas Beliner currywurst is made with Bruhwurst and served in a sauce made with chili powder.

Like other subways in Germany, the subway in Bochum is a light rail system. A notice in the Bochum subway cars tells riders to let the driver know if they will need a taxi when they get to their stop, and the driver will have someone arrange a taxi for them. Just another one of those things that somehow make life seem more civil in Europe than in the United States.

Bochum is in the heart of the Ruhr, Germany’s famous industrial area. It was stark zerstört (largely destroyed) during the Second World War. Bochum’s economy was based on the steel industry, which today is a shadow of what it once was. Opel is another mainstay, but Opel is owned by General Motors, which is in trouble. Nokia, the Finish company, manufactured in Bochum, but recently moved its operations to Romania. We were told that unemployment in some areas is as high as 50%.

Was Google Nicht Findet or 13 French Librarians Can’t Be Wrong

2009-10-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

Was Google nicht findet
or 13 French Librarians Can’t Be Wrong

Bibliotechonomique
On Monday morning we met at the Gard du Nord for an 8:25 train to Cologne. Due to mechanical problems, we had to change trains in Brussels and arrived in Cologne 35 minutes late.

There are 80,000 to one million Turks living in Cologne, where 40% of residents are of “immigrational background.” The library’s services include life-long learning programs and intercultural offers. The library has a five-part program for encouraging immigrants to use the library. They range from training the staff to welcome foreigners to visiting the schools to encourage foreign-born students to come to the library to encouraging these students to bring their family members to the library. Staff are also trained to work with people who are illiterate both in German and their own language.

When we arrived in Cologne, we were served a buffet lunch at the Staatsbibliothek Köln while Hanalore Vogt, the director, gave a presentation about library management. I am impressed by her intelligence, dedication, imagination and creativity.

Later in the day we heard brief presentations on Intergrationskurse (assimilation courses for immigrants) and other programs such as an annual “Professions Day” on which high school students come to the library and talk to professionals about their work, and a cooperative agreement with a museum to provide exposure to other cultures and other religions of the world.

The Cologne library faces a platz (plaza or square) A Volkshochschule, a school offering adult education, and a soon-to-open museum also face the square. The city wants to make this area a kind of cultural center. In keeping with this idea, Hanalore has created a Kulturschaufenster (culture display window) on the ground floor next to the entrance to the library in a space that previously displayed used books for sale. In the window she displays items related to cultural events going on in and around the city.

The library is proud of its Heinrich Böll Archive. Böll was a native of Cologne, and the archive contains items associated with Böll as well as other writers with connections to the city of Cologne. It houses the furnishings from one of the offices in which Böll worked (They were donated to the library by Böll’s son.)as well as letters and other documents. Many of the documents, however, are reproductions or originals housed in other archives.

After saying that satisfied customers tell three people about their experience but dissatisfied customers tell 10 to 12 people about their experience, Hanalore spoke about some of her 50 rules of customer service. She said she would send us her 50 rules after Annie Dourlent, Chef de Service, Coopération - Relations Internales at the BPI, sends her our email addresses.

When a customer asks for books, the Cologne library gives the customer a wish card on which to write as much information as he or she knows about the book and his or her name and contact information. The library will try to obtain the book within three days. If the library thinks the book is not suitable for its collection and the customer has provided contact information, the library will contact the customer and tell the customer that it cannot fulfill his or her wish.

Hanalore pays close attention to customer feedback, and provides a place for customers to provide it. Inside the entrance to the library is a box into which customers can put their Anregungen, Lob, and Kritik (Suggestions, Praise and Complaints).

Management in tough economic times is always more difficult. Hanalore spoke of some prizes her library in Wurzburg awarded to children and young adults when she was operating under a tight budget. These included spending a night at the library, visiting the mayor in her office and taking the children or young adults to places in the city that wouldn’t be accessible to them otherwise. She also partnered with a telephone service provider on an SMS Song Lyrics Contents in which contestants had to write lyrics the length of an SMS text message.

Hanalore’s creativity extends to public relations as well. (She likes to tell politicians that the library lends a book every seven seconds.) In Wurzburg she arranged a promotion with a winery that marketed wine in a bottle with a picture of the library on it. The library received part of the proceeds on the sale of each bottle. She is trying to do something similar with a brewery in Cologne. She ran a promotion with a local bank during the Cologne Marathon with the slogan Laufen Gutes Tun (Running Does Good) through which runners obtained pledges and the library received money for every mile they ran. Among Hanalore’s rules for library public relations are: Surprise—do unexpected things; and Present normal work differently.

Hanalore is putting a café into a space that is now used for paperbooks. She is having the popular magazines moved to the area, and she is having a marketing and design company that has worked for the library design a merchandising display for the paperbacks.

The Cologne library offers e-ausleihe (e-loans) of audiobooks and e-books and it offers free delivery of audiobooks to the blind. The library also is experimenting with e-loan of music but without much success. Vendors want the library to pay per download, but the library would like to negotiate a fixed fee. Either way, the library would have to charge for the service, and older customers prefer checking out CDs to e-loaning music files that will be automatisch zuruckgegeben (automatically given back), and younger customers simply prefer to download music (legally or illegally) from the internet for free. See http://www.onleihe.net.

The library has a very impressive collection of sheet and recorded music. It also has a music room with a grand piano, which it rents for €2.50 an hour. Customers who want to use it to practice or give a recital have to book it at least two weeks in advance.

Another thing the library is experimenting with is connecting users’ profiles with the acquisition tool so that customers automatically get an email telling them that the library has added a new item on a topic of interest to them to its collection.

The Cologne library posts the bestseller list from Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, just as American libraries post the best seller list from The New York Times. The library gives customers the option of “renting” best sellers for €2.00 for two weeks if all copies that circulate for free are checked out. The library acquires the extra copies through an arrangement with its vendor. The number of extra copies the vendor sends depends on the book’s position on the best seller list.

Librarians in the Young Adult Area teach customers how to plan and conduct effective search strategies. The young adults write their search strategy on Suchstrategien (search strategy forms) with the help of the librarians. Was Google nicht findet (What Google doesn’t find) is written on a blackboard behind the information desk in this area.

Library assistants undergo three years of formal training at the Cologne library. During the second year several trainees are chosen to run a branch library where they do everything but provide reference service. During their third year, they serve as mentors to those in the next class who are chosen to run the library.

Das Kölnische Leben
From the library we walked to a restaurant not far from the Dom (cathedral) and the Hauptbanhof (main rain station), where we drank Kölsch, the local beer, and ate typical Rhineland food. Some librarians ordered wurst (sausage) that was two to three feet long. They were served plates of cabbage and fried potatoes. The sausages were served on long wooden planks placed in the middle of the table. Others ate the local version of sauerbraten. The sauce was slightly sweet and made with raisins. A bowl or apple sauce was served on the side.

Self-Perceptions and Coping Skills

2009-10-12T02:45:00.000-07:00

La Vie a Paris
An undertaking such as this exchange tests one’s self-perceptions and coping skills. Am I really so patient? Am I really so adaptable? What can I do to keep from becoming frustrated?

I have been here nearly five days and I am beginning to believe that finally I have settled in. Stay tuned. Yesterday was a liberating day. I got my stipend. I got my Bpi badge. And I bought a French cell phone. As the French would say, maintenant je suis branché. Now I am connected.

And this morning I discovered that the adapter I thought I could not use in France works in the old electrical outlets in the apartment, but not the new. Now I can use my computer and charge my cell phone at the same time. Hooray!

My apartment does not have internet access, and I have learned how dependent on the internet I have become. How easy it would be to compare la superficie (area) of Paris and Queens, find the correct spelling of a French word or the conjugation of a French verb if I could only “google it.” But I think I’ve learned how to cope. I have begun to work on documents such as emails and blog entries on my laptop in my apartment in the evening and copy the documents onto a flash drive. If and when I get internet access at the office today, I will send the emails and post the blog entries. If I don’t, I will go to the library this evening and attempt to use wifi. When I was at the library on Monday, the wifi was not working.

Following this plan, of course, requires that I accept the constraint of time. I may have to use the internet for research today, make corrections tonight, and not send certain emails or post certain blog entries until tomorrow. The alternative is to write these documents at the library, which means using a French keyboard. I can’t tell you how frustrating this is for someone who prides himself on his typing speed. I have been telling myself that it makes no sense for me to learn the French keyboard since I will be here only a month. I think I will set learning it as a personal goal instead.

Last night after work I stopped at a patisserie recommended by a colleague. I bought one piece of tarte d’abricot (apricot tart) one piece of tart du pêche et pistache (peach and pistachio tart). Heaven! Will there be more when I get off work tonight?

Bibliothèque Publique d'Information

2009-10-12T02:40:00.000-07:00

Bibliothèconomique
The National Centre d’Art et Cultures Georges Pompidou was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. It was opened in 1977 and renovated between 1998 and 2000. The Bibliotheque Public d’Information (BPI) occupies two and a half floors of the Centre Pompidou. It shares the building with the Musée National d’Art Moderne. The Centre Pompidou also includes an Institute of Musical/Acoustic Research and Coordination (IRCAM), which is housed in a separate building.

The BPI was one of the first libraries in France with open stacks. It is a national research library; its collection does not circulate. It is an agency of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

The BPI uses the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system, which was adapted from the Dewey Decimal System, and like Dewey organizes all fields of knowledge into a hierarchy of 10 classes. At the BPI the subject areas are color coded. Even the book trucks match each subject area’s color.

The BPI is very popular with students, who come because the university libraries are very crowded. The library would like to attract a broader audience, but crowding is a problem here, too. The BPI has a capacity of 2,134 persons. When it reaches capacity, people wait outside along the Rue du Renard and one person is admitted for each person who leaves. According to a recent survey, 70% of visitors wait 20 minutes or less, but the wait can be up to an hour and a half. And once inside, visitors have to wait in line again if they want to use one of the library’s 50 public access computers.

The BPI does not question its popularity, but constantly questions its purpose. It is undertaking a comprehensive review known as BPI 2012. Among other questions, it is asking if it should try to appeal to a different or wider audience and if so, how.

Directly inside the library is an accueil (information desk) staffed by two librarians. Behind the desk an attractive and recently installed display announces to visitors that it is the place where they can get renseignements (information) about employ- ment, health, housing, culture, leisure and other practical advice.

The press area offers 150 daily general inform- ation newspapers and 250 magazines from all over the world in print or on microfilm CD Rom or online. The library also maintains its own press database of selected French press articles on current cultural and social events.

Part of the library’s mission to provide access to everybody is to make access easier for disabled people. The library has five private study areas for blind or visually impaired people equipped with machines to read, write and print in Braille. They also have text scanners that transform written text into spoken words as well as text enlargers and tape recorders and microphones. For the hard of hearing, a onscreen video loop describes the library in sign language. Users must book these areas in advance. They are busy from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. Users don't come later because they worry that motorists won't see them after dark.

The BPI has an autoformation (self-learning) area with 120 audio-equipped work stations where visitors can learn any of 172 language and dialects, including some rare languages for which the BPI produced materials. The range of other subjects areas covered is wide. Visitors can even study the code de la route (rules of the road) if they are preparing to get their permit de conduire (driver’s license).

The library is very well outfitted electronically. In one area there are 16 televisions with headsets where visitors can listen to American, Chinese, Arabic, British, German, Spanish or Portuguese news channels. There are 40 work areas in the music room where visitors can listen not only to musique enregistrée (recorded music), but also document parlé such audiobooks, speeches and archival material. The music room also equipped with two headset-equipped pianos for public use.

In addition to télévision du monde, presse and autoformation, the first floor includes these UDC subject areas: sciences documentaries; philosophie, psychologie; religions, sciences socials; sciences and médicine. In addition to musique and documents parlé, the second floor include the subject areas: arts, cinéma, sports, loisir; langues, literatures and géographie, histoire.

La Vie à Paris
In many ways all of Paris is a work of art. On Saturday evening I ventured into the subway for the first time. There are many cool things about it – like the escalator with Plexiglas sides so you can see the moving parts. Many of the stations are decorated so as to “make an echo (faire un echo)” as the French would say, of what is going on above. The Arts et Métiers (Arts and Crafts) station, for example, is copper clad. At Chatelet I passed a man playing Middle Eastern music on a stringed instrument. A few steps further I happened upon an eight-piece ensemble, including bass, playing what sounded to me like Balkan music.

Just west of the Centre Pompidou is the Place Igor Stravinsky with a fanciful fountain created by French artists Jean Tinguely and Nike de St-Phalle.

I had lunch on Monday with two library colleagues. They had blue cheese quiche. I had penne au saumon. It was delicious. Add that to my culinary adventures, which, so far, include a sandwich du jambon de paye et emmenthal, a crepe complete and a gallette libanaise, which is like the bread you get in Indian restaurants rolled like a crepe. Mine was filled with sausage and a cheese much like feta. To make the crepe complete, the cook broke an egg onto a crepe after he flipped it and as it continued to cook. When the egg was set, he put grated cheese and a slice of ham on top and folded the crepe into quarters.

There was a suicide at the Centre Pompidou yesterday. Not the first, I’m told. A man jumped from the fifth floor to his death. It was the day after Nuit Blanche. It was rainy and it was Monday.

I Loved This Book

2009-07-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

Netherland by Joseph O"Neill

It is a story of Hans van den Broek, a European expatriate in New York City. It is a story about cricket. It is a story about a man whose wife has decamped for London where he later reconciles with her. It is a story about Chuck Ramkissoon, a West Indian émigré, dreamer, entrepreneur, and sometime underworld habitué, and so many other New Yorkers who in this book are represented by the residents of the Chelsea Hotel, where Hans lives, and by the cricket teams on which Hans plays. It is a story about the New York City Hans learned by playing cricket, and I have learned as a public librarian – a city that is home to a generation of strivers, both immigrants and expatriate, from the West Indies, South Asia, East Asia and every other part of the world. It is, as Dwight Garner, the reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, said, “the most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.” I loved this book.

Secrets in the Attic

2008-04-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

A customer came in yesterday and asked for Secrets in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. By the time I found the book, she was gone. When she returned when we opened today, I told her I found the book she was looking for. Her response: "I couldn't wait all day."

Another customer came in when we opened and complained that the newspapers weren't on the shelf already. A colleague tried to explain that the staff had arrived just before he had. He was not satisfied with this answer.

The day can only get better.

Now It's Beginning to Make Sense

2008-04-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

I understand the need for a Dewey number, but I still don't understand the need for a database control number, a barcode and an international standard book number (ISBN).

The Dewey number helps you find a book by subject, author's last name and shelf location, but it seems to me that one number ought to suffice for the other three (the database control number, the barcode and the ISBN). With the new ILS system, I hope we'll be able to use only one, probably the barcode, instead of all three.

To add consternation to confusion, we also file books by category (fiction, non-fiction), genre (mystery, romance, health, fitness, test prep, career), format (large print, small print), popularity (best sellers), publication date (new releases), age (adult, teen, ychildren), location (North America, Europe, Asia)and size (paperback and trade paperback.

After library school and three years' professional experience, the system is still not clear to me. I guess you can't comprehend it until you've served in the trenches. Working at Bay Terrace, maybe now I will understand.

When the little cloud of tobacco smoke was on the computer yesterday, a customer asked on behalf of another customer when she was going to be done. On her way out of the library she assured me that she always obeys the rules and then said to her inquirer, "Thanks for sticking your nose where it don't belong." Today she wouldn't get off the express computer even though another customer was waiting to use the computer and was worried about her mother-in-law with whom she'd left her children in the playground nearby. Do as I say, not as I do.

A Hindu House Blessing

2008-04-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

A Hindu priest blessed a colleague's son's and his wife's new house. After the house blessing, the priest asked if anyone was going to work. When the colleague told the priest she was going to work, he told her to bring some of the food and share it with her c0-workers. She passed around a plate of Red Delicious apple wedges and some pastry made with chickpea flour, slivered almonds and honey. It was very good.

der Fahrradfahrer

2008-04-23T14:08:00.001-07:00

I bought a "Pla-Dry" T-shirt to wear to work every day. The shirt was designed for golf but is ideal for cycling. It keeps me dry all the way to work. When I arrive, I put on over the T-shirt the freshly ironed and folded shirt I bring with me, and I'm ready for work. The only inconvenience is that I have to wash the T-Shirt every night. But it's fast drying.

After cycling to work I have been stopping at the playground behind the library to catch my breath. Today I was gingerly approached by two uniformed park district employees. They told me that only adults accompanying children are allowed in the playground, and they escorted me out. To be treated like a suspected pedofile was, to say the least, unnerving.

Parents and guardians, not park district employees, are responsible for protecting the children they bring to the playground from any pedophilia threat, real or imagined. It is a sad state of affairs when private citizens cannot use a public park unless he or she is accompanying a child.

This incident is sad commentary on the state of affairs in this country today. I believe the government, by exploiting the public's fear of terrorist attacks since 9/11 for its own nefarious ends, has brought us to the sad state of affairs. But then again I like to blame everything that's not right with this country on George Bush. Yeah, Goerge did it.

This episode also is sad commentary on the kind of neighborhood Bay Terrace is. It is a neighborhood where riding a bicycle is considered aberrant behaviour and where any behavior considered aberrant is reported to the authorities. I don't feel so welcome here anymore.

Route In, Route Out

2008-04-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

Seeing how much time it takes to route books in and route them out has been a revelation. The new ILS system will free up a lot of librarians' time.

Still impressed at the level of customer service at Bay Terrace. I don't know if it's the exception or the rule. Today I called several customers who hadn't picked up the books to tell them we would continue to hold them until next Thursday and would return them next Friday. I also called Steinway to ask the librarian to send us a paperback. Paperbacks are officially non-requestable.

Bay Terrace by Bicycle

2008-04-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

My friend John picked up my bicycle at the bike shop yesterday, and I rode it to work for the first time today. It's a 1992 or 1993 aluminum Trek, which I had converted to a commuter. It now has pedals instead of cleats, and a rack on the back. It's a thing of beauty. The most beautiful thing about it is that by cycling I have cut my commuting time by two-thirds -- 30 minutes instead of an hour and a half.

Today I learned how to route in books, more knowledge that will become obsolete when we get the new ILS system, which will do the routing in automatically. One young lade must have had a field day putting in online requests. Today we received for her: College Girls, The Meaning of Wife, How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls and Wasted. Didn't somebody say once you are what you read? I did. I did. She sounds like a party girl to me.

I also for the first time in my life as a librarian pushed a book truck. Can you believe it? Three years a librarian before I ever pushed a book truck.

There are a few anachronistic things about the QBPL (or Qbippel, if you prefer) system that make me laugh. Men have to wear ties. That's an anachronism that doesn't make me laugh, but let's not go there. When books requested by male children or your adults come in to the requesting library,they are addressed to "Master" whoever.

Found two more books I want to read: Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum and How the Garcia Girld Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. Where am I ever going to find the time, especially now that I'll no longer be spending three hours a day on the subway and bus.

A Day at Bay Terrace

2008-04-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

A customer called to request The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar. Too bad, because the customer service supervisor wanted to read it. The customer lost her library card but doesn't want to get a new one; she wants to use her New York Public Library Card. She was told that with the new RFID system this cannot do this. She sounded pouty. If she can't use her NYPL card, she doesn't want the book. Hey, if you're going to play the game, you've got to follow the rules.

A customer who didn't have her library card number or the bar code number called to renew a book. I had to use her name to find her borrower record.

A customer came in to request The Linnet Bird for a friend who was with her. "And I put some eye cream in your bag," the friend said. "It helps with the puffiness." "You're gonna love it. You're gonna love it," the said. "You know Linda? She read it in three days. Three days. She couldn't put it down." The customer didn't know how to spell "linnet," and neither did I. I looked it up on the Barnes & Noble website, which is more forgiving than DRA. "Oh thanks, the friend said. "I'll just buy it."

Did a stint in the children's room this afternoon. After school three Asian boys came running in to play geography computer games. A boy asked for a book on science projects. Another asked for books on sound and light waves. A girl asked for two pencils with erasers. It must be that is is so quiet because it's such a beautiful day.

I made my first cultural gaffe and got my first exposure to the underside of life at Bay Terrace today. I asked another employee, who was born in Korea, if she were Chinese, and I was warned by one of the pages to keep my eye on a customer and to make sure he stayed away from children because he is suspected of being a pedofile.

A customer asked where the reference librarian was. I told him she was in training. "Why does she need training," he asked, "she's been here 25 years."

The Itinerant Librarian

2008-04-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

Today is day seven at the Bay Terrace Community Library. In February I applied for the newly created job of roaming community library manager; I was offered and accepted the job of roaming assistant community library manager. I started on March 31. Since Ouleye Doumouya, who was named roaming community library manager, is on the team that planned and until July will be giving new integrated library system (ILS)training, I don't think the roaming team will get up and running any time soon.

In the meantime I have been assigned to Bay Terrace, where I'm getting some OJT as a community library librarian, and, I hope, as an assistant community library manager. So far I have been getting to know the ins and outs of the old ILS, knowledge, which, of course, will become obsolete in July. But I'm also seeing first-hand how a community library works and how service at the community libraries differs from service at Central. It's much more personal. I do things I would never do at Central. I go to the shelf to find books customers want. I put reserves on books not yet on the shelf. I override the SAM system to let customers stay on the computers longer than an hour. I call other community libraries to ask that books be put aside for customers who want to go get them. I let kids use the library's telephones to call home.

Because I am less busy, I feel in a way like I'm on vacation. I know it won't last forever, and I should enjoy it while it lasts, but I know before long I will become anxious for more activity and greater responsibility.

The End of the Beginning!

2007-12-21T18:23:00.000-08:00

My favorite exercises were posting image generators, creating a customized search engine, exploring Technorati, posting to a Wiki and putting a podcast on my blog because they were new and, therefore, more exciting than the other exercises. There were many take-aways, but none that suprised me. I expected to and wanted to learn more about Web 2.0 applications, and the program allowed me to do it. In fact, I don't think I would have done it without the program. To complete this kind of program requires direction, discipline and focus. I could provide the discipline and focus, but not the direction. The plethora of Web 2.0 applications is daunting. What to learn? Where to start? The program gave me answers to those questions.

The program has affected my lifelong learning goals. After completing the program I am better equipped to realize them. One of my lifelong learning goals has been to remain current with Web technology. With what I have learned, I will be able to do that. By taking this program I not only learned about Web technology, I learned how to learn about Web technology.

With regard to the program's format and concept, I say if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You could make a few tweaks here and there, but overall I think the format and concept are fine.

Audiobooks

2007-12-21T12:58:00.000-08:00

Can you believe it? As an Information Services librarian I often get asked at the Information or Telephone Reference Desk about audio- books, and I direct customers to the Digital Media tab, but until today I had never downloaded an audiobook.

I bought an MP3 player a few months ago. I recently was given a pair of Bose QuietComfort 3 noise-cancelling headphones. Now all
I need is a bus ride.

And the bus ride is coming right up. On Monday I'm going by bus to Boston for Christmas. Before I go, I downloaded two or audiobooks from Queens Library: The Camel Club by David Baldacci and The Fifth Horseman by James Patterson. Now with my MP3 Player, by noise- cancelling headphones, my audiobooks and my bus ticket, I won't even miss the Acela train --much.

Podcasts

2007-12-21T11:55:00.001-08:00

G-r-r-r-r-r! Or should I say A-r-r-r-r-r-gh! There are only two days, nine hours and 33 minutes to the 23 1/2 Things deadline (see my Thursday, December 13, 2007 Image Generator post), and I'm trying to put a podcast on my blog. I found Promonet and applied for access so I can get some podcast HTML to put in my HTML/Javascript widget page element (I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about), and a got the following response. "Thank you for applying to IODA Promonet! Your request for access to IODA Promonet has been received. We will contact you within two business days with your sign in information if you are approved, or to request more information to process your application."

Will my blog be graced by a podcast by the deadline? As I've said before, stay tuned. I will not be deterred.

Check out LibVibe on the right. Yes, as you can see perserverence pays off. So doesn't a little help from your friends. When I told Stacey (see my Tuesday, December 18, 2007 Wiki Wiki post) about my problem, she recommended LibVibe, a great weekly podcast about library matters. I visited the LibVibe website, where Marv Kaminsky graciously and clearly explains how to put his podcast on your blog.

YouTube

2007-12-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

OK, my YouTube post might be a little premature, but not by much. Nevertheless, as an avid cyclist, I believe this video captures my feelings as I approach the end of 23 1/2 Things, the Queens Library Learning 2.0 project.

I like YouTube because its easily searchable. And besides, it's great fun. Sure I believe there are applications for YouTube in libraries, especially since younger customers are more inclined to use video than print sources.

Crossing the Finish Line

2007-12-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 Awards

2007-12-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 Awards

I decided to create this post on Google Docs. No time like the present to use what I've learned. Right? By doing this I also learned that your headline is not automatically posted as a headline in the default font. You have to edit your post, cut the headline from the body of the post and paste it into the title box.

Yelp.com a city guide that boasts "Real People Real Reviews" looks interesting. I'm a Bostonian, but I've lived in several cities. I realized recently that I have spent most of my adult live in Chicago, so that's the city I'll explore.

I did searches on "theatre" and "theater." The results were almost identical, but they were listed in different orders, and for some reason the Art Institute of Chicago topped both lists. I was happy to see that the lists include legitimate theatres and indie movie houses as well as chain movie theatres. And the reviews are pretty accurate. I'm pleased to have been introduced to this site, and I will refer to it for information about New York City as well as information about other cities when I'm making travel plans.

Yelp.com encourages you to find or write reviews. It lets you bookmark sites. It also gives you lists of events this week and event updates and lets you list events you plan to attend (Beware of stockers). As a social networking site, it encourages you to add friends and invite friends to become "yelpers."

I think this would be a valid site to use for answers -- or at least leads to answers -- to questions from customers about attractions in New York as well as other cities. Most of this kind of information is subjective, anyway, so why not get it from a local source. Just remember to cite your source.

Google Docs Revisited

2007-12-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

I posted my Google Docs entry from Google Docs. When I checked my blog, my post wasn't there. I logged out of my blog and logged back in and behold. There it was, sans headline. Google Docs asks if you also want to publish your headlline, but it doesn't provide a box to put the headline in. I assume you just have to put the headline in the same text box as the rest of the post and Google Docs or Blogger publishes the headline in the same font as other headlines automatically. Now I'll go back and email my document to myself. Just for the hell of it.

Google Docs

2007-12-20T13:01:00.000-08:00

This is my Google Docs doc. Above the tool bar are five tabs, an Edit tab, an Insert tab, a Revisions tab, a Share tab and a Publish tab. The Edit toolbar doesn't look to very different from the MicroSoft Word tool bar. It has separate font and edit icons insted of a single edit icon. It has a qoutes icon, which Word does not have. It has a Remove Fomatting icon a Style dropdown menu and a Change dropdown menu, which Word does not have. I will have to explore these further.

Clicking the Insert tab brings you to the Insert toolbar, which is really pretty cool. It includes the following links: Image, Ling, Comment, Table,a Bookmark, Special Character, and a Separator dropdown menu. I clicked on Special Characters, but I couldn't find the em dash I wanted to insert. Special Characters has umlauts, however. I like that. It will make it easier for me to write in German.

So Revisions Tab brings you to a list of all the revisions that have been made. It numbers the revisions and tells you who made them. It also lets you compare revisions. You just put a checkmark beside the revisions you want to compare. You click on the Share tab to invite people to collaborate on your document or to view it. You use the Publish tab to post your document to your blog, which is what I'm going to do now. Here goes.

Facebook Redux

2007-12-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

Books I Read appears to be a handy way to keep track of books you’ve read and books you want to read, and to share information about these books with your friends. It also appears to provide a handy reader advisory service. To me LibGuides looks the way a library catalog should look and provides subject searches the way a library catalog should provide them. The Virtual Librarian service appears to be too undeveloped to be of much use, but I think Brad Czerniak might be on to something. I like the idea that it could actually become a very reliable Ask-a-Librarian service. MyFlickr will be a great addition to my Facebook profile. I hope I can also add it to my blog. I’m going to try. So stay tuned. As with MyFlickr, I see Slideshare as a much more useful addition to a blog than to a Facebook account. If truth be told, I’m not crazy about Facebook or MySpace. I think library accounts on such social networking sites might be useful to creating of the library but not the best way to provide library services. I checked out the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, Ryerson University and Hennepin County Public Library catalogs. Interesting. Didn’t stay long enough to learn many of the features and benefits and to see what advantages they have over the tandard catalogs. Tagging perhaps. Times awasting. Deadlines and commitments. Gotta go. Ciao, or Tschuss as my German friends say.

Wiki Wiki

2007-12-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

Ok, this was almost too easy. Who needs Tips and Zips when you've got Barb Conkin and Stacey Wacknov?

After reading #16 Wiki Me This, I went to other participants' blogs to see how they did it. On Barb's Blog I learned about LISwiki, and decided that was the place for me to post anything I know. I remembered the employee satisfaction surveys report I wrote for my library management class and copied and pasted it to LISwiki. I asked the Information Services librarians if any of them could help me post a link to my wiki post in my blog. Stacey Wacknov, who started with Queens Library just yesterday, showed me how to do it. I copied and pasted the URL into my blog. Stacey performed a little HTML magic, and voila.

My LISwiki Post

Library 2.0

2007-12-18T12:04:00.001-08:00

With Web 2.0, the Web 1s a shared virtual space rather than a network of websites and search engines. It’s a platform on which programmers write constantly updated software that is loosely connected with other Web applications. Web 2.0 sites offer novel as well as remixed content. They embody simplicity, interactivity and self-service. Users are always online, constantly connected to one another and to the Web. How will libraries thrive in the Web 2.0 world, where customers expect easy access to virtually everything? They need to focus on providing everything and on eliminating barriers like clumsy search interfaces that exist between customers and their information needs. Librarians must educate their customers when necessary, but as Rick Anderson says, if a library’s services can’t be used without training, there’s something wrong with the services. Libraries need to find new ways to bring their services to customers. This means integrating library services into their customers’ daily life patterns.

Technorati — and Top Favorited Blogs

2007-12-14T17:51:00.001-08:00

Technorati makes it easier and more intuitive to search, discover and organize the blogosphere. The interface is clean and uncluttered. The search results page is very readable and the results are easy to sort. I like the Discovery section, which organizes the blogosphere in much the same way a Sunday newspaper is organized. I like the fact that Dave Sifry said Technorati created this section to “make serendipitous discovery of interesting stuff easier and more intuitive.” It’s easy to organize your favorites on Technorati and to learn about your favorite bloggers and their blogs. I like the fact that there are two home pages — a signed-in version and a signed-out version. On the signed-out version I can see the Discover section, learn about bloggers, find out what people are searching for and tag my favorite blogs. On the signed-in version I can see the latest posts from my favorite blogs and search Technorati in blog posts, in blog tags or in the blog directory.

Tag You're It!

2007-12-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

Now I think I can really cover some ground in my attempt to catch-up. I'm already somewhat familiar with de.licio.us. I have a personal de.licio.us account. I've tagged the bookmarks for my bank, credit card, 401(k) and other retirement plan account to make it easy to find and search them. I've done the same with my travel, cycling and German study bookmarks. The Information Services Division at the Central Library also has a de.licio.us account. The librarians add bookmarks to sites on which they find authoritative answers to customers' questions. They then tag the sites in whatever way makes it easy for them to retrieve them. We've had a link to the account put on the Telephone Reference computer toolbars. Now it's time to become familiar with technorati.

Roll Your Own

2007-12-14T15:46:00.001-08:00

I'm an avid cyclist, and riding is how I spend much of my free time when the temperature is above 29 degrees Fahrenheit and the streets are dry. Creating a customized metasearch engine that lets me search all my favorite cycling sites at the same time is really pretty great. I'm in a mad rush to finish the 23 1/2 things by the deadline (see yesterday's post) and I'm on a bit of a roll (no pun intended, so I can't take the time now to add all the sites I want to add, but I will return to it after December 24. Another really cool thing to do would be to add my blog to the search box, because this would allow be to search it. But I can't decide if I want to add it to the search box I already created or create a separate search box. Decisions. Decisions.

Image Generators

2007-12-13T09:03:00.000-08:00

Chocolate is the best antidote for frustration. After an ounce or two, I'm ready to proceed.

OK. Image generators are pretty cool. So what's next? Actually, I had some difficulty with the Generator Blog. Don't know why, but I tried without success to customize the countdown timer and put it on my blog. A colleague then told me about blingyblob.com. I don't like the countdown timer from that site as much, but I had no trouble customizing it and putting it on my blog. Sure wish I could get rid of the ©BliggyBlob.com line though.

I always liked the story about the guy who named his blog "So Much Ego, So Little Time." When I first heard about blogs, I thought, "Who cares?" In many ways, I still think blogs are only another way to put more junk out there on the Internet, but now I'm beginning to perceive their worth. In a very democratic way bloggers, by copying and pasting URLs of other blogs into their own blogs and other means, are deciding which blogs are worth reading and which deserve to be ignored.

I don't expect my blog's url to be widely copied and pasted. If I haven't had much profound to say in 60 years, I don't believe I don't think I'll begin now. The more I work on it, the more I think I'm building it for myself. Posting to my blog will be like putting entries in a journal — a journal that's open for anyone to read. But pity those who decide to read it.

RSS Feeds and Readers

2007-12-12T13:16:00.000-08:00

I think RSS Feeds and Readers are Things #8 and 9, but I began to become familiar with them out of order. Of all the 23 1/2 things, RSS Feeds and Readers are the things I am most interested in. I'm something of a news junkie, so I can appreciate how RSS Feeds and Readers allow me to keep up with the news. Having news brought to my attention as it becomes news is so much more efficient than having to to search my news sources to to see if there have been any new developments. My colleagues and I tried using Bloglines but had problems with it. One of them recommended Google Reader, and that's what most of us are using.

I get RSS feeds from the following library blogs:

http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/

http://freerangelibrarian.com/

http://annoyedlibrarian.blogspot.com/

http://www.resourceshelf.com/

Posting Photos from Flickr

2007-12-12T11:55:00.001-08:00

DSC00011
Originally uploaded by bibliotechguy

This is the photo of my library management class.

Creating a blog post that describes how I posted photos from my Flickr account to my blog will, I hope, help me to learn better by reinforcing what I learned and maybe help others learn how to post photos from Flickr to their blogs.

To post photos from Flickr you have to give Flickr permission to access your blog. My blog is on Blogger, and Blogger is part of Google, so I logged on to Google and granted Flickr permission to access my blog. I had already put on Flickr the photo I wanted to upload. It is a photo of my library management class that Ron Wan had Jerry Nichols take before he left for Beijing. After I granted Flickr permission to access me blog, all I had to do was select the picture and click the Blog This link above the photo.

RSS Feeds

2007-11-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

OK, I tried Bloglines, but it didn’t work. I requested a verification email, but never received it. I tried again. Still no verification email. I checked with colleagues, who said they don’t like bloglines. They think it’s meschugge. They use Google Reader or Live Journal instead.

I have a Google Reader account. I really like it. When I subscribed Google Reader made it very easy for me to choose the news feeds I wanted. Since then I’ve added a number of feeds. Google Reader also makes it easy for meto organize and categorize my feeds.

I’m now in the habit of checking my RSS reader every day. I scan the entries. If something interests me, I click on it and read the headline. If the headline interests me, I click again and open the whole story.

With my journalism background and my quaint belief in journalistic objectivity, I still like to think that readers in the print age could get opposing points of view from their major news source. If they get all their news through RSS feeds, most people, I fear, will subscribe only to feeds from sources that agree with their point of view. They won’t get opposing viewpoints. If this happens, these readers will be less informed than they were when they were reading a daily metropolitan newspaper. If they get their news through RSS feeds, they should be sure to subscribe to feeds that provide opposing viewpoints as well as to feeds that present a point of view that coincides with their own.

Posting to My Blog

2007-11-08T13:42:00.000-08:00

I learned how to sign in and post to my blog today. That may sound easy to you. But guess what, you're not technologically impaired like me. This needn't be so painful. But no pain, no gain, they say. Hey look, I'm learning by doing. It really is as easy as every technologicly literate person says it is.

Actually, I'm making great strides. Yesterday the Information Services librarians and I set up a del.icio.us account. We'll add websites that we find while researching customers' chat and telephone reference questions. I can hardly wait to see how some of the librarians will tag those sites. I can just imagine. Stay tuned.

2007-10-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

The 71/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners
1. Begin with the End in Mind
2. Accept Responsibility for Your Own Learning
3. View Problems as Challenges
4. Have Confidence in Yourself as a Competent, Effective Learner
5. Create your own Learning Toolbox
6. Use Technology to Your Advantage
7. Teach and Mentor Others
8. Play

Begin with the End in Mind
Beginning with the end in mind is easy of you establish realistic goals. Break a project down to its components parts and achievement of each component part becomes a realistic goal.

Accept Responsibility for Your Own Learning
An important part of accepting responsibility for your own learning is recognizing your own learning style.

View Problems as Challenges
Ask what you can learn or what have I learned from every problem you encounter.
View every obstacle as a learning opportunity.

Have Confidence in Yourself as a Competent, Effective Learner.
You can learn well if you remember your learning style and adopt learning techniques that complement your learning style. And remember, the words you use to describe yourself will soon become reality. Don’t say it or think it unless you want it to be true.

Create your own Learning Toolbox
Put in your toolbox tools useful to learners with your learning style.

Use Technology to Your Advantage.
Embrace technology. Don’t view it as a series of obstacles to be overcome, but rather as a set of tools to make your life easier.

Teach and Mentor Others.
If you don’t know this already, experience will show you that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.

Play
Hooray!