Entries Tagged 'libraries' ↓

This has been hiding out on Ning for long enough, thought I’d share.

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The Seattle Times has an interesting interview with Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect who designed the much-lauded Seattle Central Library. He mentions his thoughts on the “book spiral”, saying:

… one of the points of a library was that there are accidents and that you find yourself in areas where you didn’t expect to be and where you kind of look at books that are not necessarily the books that you’re aiming for. So it was to create a kind of almost arbitrariness — or to create a kind of walking experience, an almost kind of urban walk … a kind of Rotterdam, a very efficient, direct aiming for limited destinations.

Check it out.

Miss Conduct of the Boston Globe Magazine explores how libraries might be allowing the idea of what it means to be public to disrupt what their mission is as a library.

But I do think we have the right to pick up a new Alexander McCall Smith or study for an exam without feeling threatened–and a large, unwashed, clearly unstable man is threatening to a woman, or an elderly person, or a person with children who need protection. In their zeal to remain “public,” are libraries in fact driving away significant segments of the public they are meant to serve? Are they emphasizing “public” at the expense of “library”?

Surely there’s a middle ground, but where do we toe the line? Thoughts?

On one of my recent flights home I had the fortune to sit next to an interesting woman who happened to be in marketing. We got to talking about libraries a bit, and she sympathized that if people only knew the breadth and depth of the services their libraries offered, they would want to move in. Given her field, it’s no surprise that her advice was, “You guys need to get in touch with us.” It’s true. In my experience, libraries like to market themselves, and it probably works to some extent. Marketing is not our specialty, though, and our efforts at marketing are probably akin to the results we might get if we gave a marketing expert a book and asked them to catalog it (sure, it sounds easy until I ask you what the 245 MARC field is for, and then you’re baffled). Maybe it’s time libraries went to the experts for their marketing.

Wyoming Libraries are there already, and their campaign is awesome. It’s intelligent, sassy, and multi-modal. They have a library mud flap girl, a library Eiffel Tower billboard, and two radio spots. From the site:

Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.

Libraries offer more than many people realize, and we want to reach out beyond our regular users to let people know this. The new statewide marketing campaign is designed to increase understanding, use and support of Wyoming libraries.

I don’t know about you, but their campaign makes me want to move to Wyoming and use a library. I’d love to know how effective the campaign has been so far in bringing new users into the library, but that’s always a dodgey statistic at best, and I imagine it will take some time before any valid results can be analyzed.

In the meantime, I need to find myself some of those mud flaps …

In the grand tradition.

There once was a library lad
who wanted to graduate, bad.
He wrote every essay,
but oh what a mess, eh?
There always were more to be had.

It’s not entirely accurate because at this point the end is certainly in sight (I’ll be HOME in about a month), but there is still plenty of residual “this-will-never-end” feeling to last me for awhile.

On the upswing, things are going well with my application process, and I have a videoconference interview coming up … on my birthday. After the phone interview, this is another first for me, so it’s exciting but I’m a little nervous about it as well. Maybe one day they’ll even want to meet me.

To wrap up, I’d like to drop in part of what I wrote over at La Casa today, because sometimes even I can appreciate my own writing, and because where I stand on creating comics is also where I stand on creating any content; perhaps most topically, it’s where I stand on self-creation, on developing one’s self as a human being, as an artist (of any kind), as a friend, as a lover, and as a professional. The idea is that we create something of worth and offer it to the world; ideally, something unique that we’ve learned, through introspection and hard work, how to offer.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey - no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.

We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.

We start with a dream …