libraries

An Exciting Look into the Thrilling Life of a Library Director

I’ve been busy the last . . . half year? I have no idea. I’ve lost track, really. I’m at the point where I don’t know what day it is, or what week it is. All I know is I’ve got my life written down on my Google Calendar, and as long as I look at what’s coming up in the next few hours, I’ve been able to stay on top of things. (More or less.) I keep thinking this busy-ness is going to ebb soon, but I keep being consistently wrong. (Some of that can be seen by how

Texas Bound for the Texas Library Association

I’ll be heading off for Fort Worth the week after next, off to speak at the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. I’m excited for this for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s the obvious “getting a chance to talk to a bunch of librarians.” I might be a tad biased, but librarians are, on the whole, awesome. They’re well-read, open-minded, and fierce supporters of reading and learning. If the world were full of more librarians, it would be a better place. But this is also going to be an in person conference, and that makes me happy for

Libraries Boycotting eBooks

I’m not sure how much knowledge of this has spread outside library land, but inside library land, one of the biggest pieces of news in the last while has been centered around Macmillan Publishing’s decision to change the way it sells eBooks to public libraries. Publishers have come up with a number of wonky ways to handle the way they sell eBooks to libraries. Some of them have done it by charging libraries more for the product, or by restricting the number of checkouts a library can let an eBook circulate for. The basic concern on the part of publishers

Bringing Board Games to the Library

When I was down at ALA this summer, I attended a session focused on board gaming and libraries. As an academic librarian, I’ve often looked with envy at the fun activities public libraries get to run from time to time. Movie nights. Festivals. Board games. So much of what I do is focused purely on the academic side of reading. Research. Information evaluation, etc. We do a few things more slanted toward fun, but I’d never really considered board games as a good fit for the library. But while I was at that session, I suddenly found myself questioning that

Three Days of Retreats

I’ve got three days of library retreats in front of me. That might sound like it’ll be tons of fun to some of you. “Retreat” always used to bring to mind lots of fun images. Perhaps canoeing down a river, or maybe trekking across the fields somewhere picturesque. (In fact, the first retreat I ever had in Maine involved going orienteering, which was a whole lot of fun.) I’m not going to say these retreats (one of which is two days, and one of which is one day) will be no fun at all. I’ve got friends who will be