That’s just the way we roll.
I’m referring, of course, to the end of this music video by Cascada. In my opinion, it’s all fun and games until she starts throwing the catalog cards around. At that point, I’d throw the tramp out and ban her library privileges indefinately.
Then I’d breakdance.
If you want to watch a library music video of an ENTIRELY different persuasion, you should click here. It’s very cartoon network, i.e. annoying but catchy anyway.
Another great shirt from nerdyshirts.com.
People keep asking where I got the “She blinded me with library science” t-shirt I was sporting the other day(and once last week), so I thought I’d just send out the link (again). They’re made by the creator of the webcomic Questionable Content, Jeph Jacques. You can check the merch out here: http://questionablecontent.net/merch.php, though if you enjoy comics at all, I really recommend QC. It’s my fave, by far (and I was quite the expert in these matters at one point in time).
For other library gear be sure to check out http://www.cafepress.com/buy/librarian, which has lots of options, including a “blinded me with library science” rip-off design. Just remember that Jeph did it first.
Finally, there are a few more items up for grabs on a newish site: http://www.cafepress.com/libraryorbust, and even more at http://www.cafepress.com/curmudgeony/634513
While I’m here, here’s some library humor.
No matter the facts of our past, it seems that every memory carries a hint of melancholy. What are these days we’ve put behind us, what bonds were forged then broken? What then do we become, we strongly forged yet pulled asunder chains? Are these chinks in our armor, then, from gnashing together, from pulling apart, from trying to find that place where we could link together like a magic trick?
When it comes to separation, I’ve never been very proficient. One lucid moment of deja vu and deep inside I’m sure that all of this happens simultaneously. But we organize, we pull things apart here, put them together over there, arrange them by genre and color and place, until the synchronicity is all gone and we’re left with neat little piles, each one tagged and indexed and we wonder why we feel sad when we look upon our great achievement.
It’s natural, maybe inevitable. There’s no reconciliation. Once we’ve made our piles, we’ll never again find their homes, never again be able to separate them out and recreate the synchronous, chaotic jumble that we somehow tumbled out of.
It’s okay. We’ve arranged ourselves into vast libraries, now we get to be librarians: we provide access to some, deny it to others; we give out parts of ourselves and then, almost inevitably, demand them back; we reclassify certain parts as our standards change; and maybe, if we’re very lucky, we find a quiet moment when, alone and lost in the stacks, rustling through pages of memories, we rediscover some beautiful treasure that we had long since forgotten.
Maybe that’s what makes it all worthwhile.
That is over. Now I know how to salute beauty.
– A. Rimbaud (tr. by Louise Varèse)
While I was on a very nice Christmas vacation back in Olympia, I was sent a few interesting library-related stories that I thought I’d link to here for your reading pleasure. Hope everyone had a great holiday and that the new year is off to a good start!
Lock the Library! Teens are rowdy, that’s just the way it is. Hormones or something.
Librarians stake their future on open source. “A group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service has developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run.”
Holiday updates and such will be posted in due course, along with some of the photos I took on my shiny new camera. Stay tuned!
Brownout at the EPA
The agency shuts down five public libraries full of environmental data, and employees and activists question the Bush administration’s motives. (link – salon.com)
According to the story, these closures are not only ethically, but also fiscally irresponsible. So what gives!? Oh, right … our president.
More info available on the PEER website (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility).
procrastination:
to put off cataloguing,
i write a haiku.
*sigh*
and off to work i go …
the project: pick three old-ass books from some boxes provided,
find said books in three different online library catalogs,
make my own records for the books, in both isbd and marc format,
write about the experience, the joys, and the tribulations.
verily, i tribulate. wish me luck.
One thing I’ve begun to notice about graduate school is that it isn’t a Monday thru Friday sort of deal. Or, at least, it isn’t for me. I set my alarm this morning the same I do during the week, and it’s irrelevent that I slept through it and, subsequently, somehow turned it off. The point is that though I didn’t wake up until nearly 10, I meant to wake up at 7 or so. In either case, I woke up, showered, dressed, and walked to school on a cold, rainy, windy Saturday morning. Chances are that I’ll be here all day, working on a project.
The project itself is a case study of an (imaginary) public library (except I think that they call them municipal libraries around here). This library has a crapload of things wrong with it, mostly due to the old management, Jerry, who is now out the door. The new management, George, has just received a crapload of money (why is a mystery), from the municipal officials, and know he has to come up with a battle plan for making the library not suck. But him, I mean that we do, and it isn’t particularly difficult except that the professor has a tendancy to be vague about what EXACTLY she wants you to turn in, until you’ve turned it in, and then she’s VERY exact about what she wants. Which is frustrating, to say the least. The last assignment we turned into her was a beautiful work of art, a diagram of how information flows through a library, complete with little people, flipbooks, and I even think it showed a full, synthesized understanding of the ways in which information flow happens. Turns out that she didn’t want synthesized anything, she wanted her buzzwords, verbatim, explicitly listed on the diagram. I’m not bitter, really….
Marianne Bailey, one of my favorite professors from Evergreen, once told me that graduate school was, more or less, nothing but a series of hoops that you have to jump through in order to get your degree. For the most part, I’ve found my experience so far to be much more fulfilling than that, except for this one class, which is characterized perfectly by her analogy. The jumping part isn’t even hard, by itself. Finding out where the hoop is, how high and how wide, and whether or not it’s on fire or coated with acid; that’s the tricky bit. But even if graduate school were just a series of hoops eventually leading to a degree, I’d still be here, though with substantially more gritting of the teeth. Fact is, I’m tired of correcting people when they call me a librarian. Sure, maybe I’m here for other reasons too: education, personal growth, etc. But the name thing, that’s definately the big one.
Jeph has made promises of shirt availability. Shirts that say, “She blinded me with library science”.
Once again, Jeph Jacques is totally my hero.
You can see the shirt in action: here, here, and here.
Aside from the shirt, which is magnificent, what makes me feel ever warmer and fuzzier inside is that Jeph claims he has NEVER had as much demand for a shirt. Hellz yea, librarians represent!
The controversy over the new library in Lawrence, Kansas has been interesting, and it’s certainly been nice to see that, with a few exceptions, opinion has been strongly slanted against Mr. Hirschey’s suppositions of library obsolescence. My own thoughts, as I stated in the comments of the op-ed, go something like this:
Technology is changing rapidly, and therefore so are people’s needs. But the point of a library is not (in my opinion), to do its “library thing” with no consideration to the needs and desires of the community. The fact is that as the world changes, libraries change too, and strong libraries in strong communities will never become obsolete because they will always grow to meet their users’ needs.
That said, if you really feel like the library isn’t serving you, why not get involved? A new library is a great opportunity to voice an opinion on what roles and services you would like the library to provide. How about a large meeting room to host community activities? The Princeton Public Library opened its facilities to host the World Cup and became a great place for community to come together and enjoy the sport (via Tame the Web). Computer instruction in libraries often helps those people in the community who would otherwise have no idea what to do with free technology if you did give it to them at their homes.
What about after-school programs? Summer Reading programs? What about families who love to read and bring their kids in once a week to check out literally hundreds of books?
If none of that appeals to you, and you have other ideas of what you’d like to see, then I guarantee you your library would love to hear from you. In the end, that’s what libraries do: they serve their communities. And hey, some people don’t use libraries, and that’s fine, but we should still look at them in a broader context and see how, as educational and community institutions, they provide a great deal of value to our communities.
Finally, a lot of people say how great libraries were to use when they were growing up. Now that they’re adults they don’t use them anymore. I guarantee though that there are still a lot of kids and families out there that are getting a great deal of value out of the library. Plenty of adults, having grown up and having no children, have no personal need for schools anymore either, but no one questions their roles in the community. Libraries are just as important, because they’re schools where anyone can go, at any time, for any reason. And what could possibly be cooler than that?
Aside from comments left by library supporters around the world, people from Lawrence have written in and voiced their opinions. Lots of them.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/05/not_obsolete/ – Sally writes:
Browsing books in the library can open whole new worlds that might never be found on the Internet. The library has much more to offer than computer access.
I hope that we will never see the day when libraries become obsolete as suggested by Mr. Hirschey. I would ask when he last read a good book. I know where he can find one.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/05/library_defense/ – Betty writes:
For seniors, libraries offer programs, books and videos. I know people who can no longer afford to buy books and magazines so they depend solely on the library for their reading material.
There are many families who cannot afford computers so the computers are an important part of the library, as are the books, videos, programs, art, meeting rooms, speakers and events.
All of the above are benefits and amenities that one cannot find on the Internet. I am an avid user of my computer and the Internet, but I do love a library. So, Mr. Hirschey, I do think we can have the best of both worlds to enrich our lives.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/05/reliable_source/ – Alison writes:
While the Internet may provide a high degree of convenience, it is not a reliable source of information. Blogs, instant messaging and publicly edited sites such as Wikipedia may be a good place to quickly and casually find information, but these are not acceptable references for serious research purposes.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/04/library_value/ – Charles writes:
Mr. Hirschey is absolutely right that digital information is hugely valuable, but this shouldn’t be an either/or choice. Books have a reassuring permanence not found in cyberspace — and they’re easier to write in (sorry, librarians). And they’re portable, and they don’t need batteries. As Mr. Hirschey recommends, let’s do wire Lawrence for 24/7 high-speed Internet access — but let’s not unplug the library.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/oct/04/computerbrary/ – John writes:
I could not agree less with Mark Hirschey’s Take a Stand in which he claims that computers have made book libraries obsolete (Journal-World, Oct. 2). I think people, these days, too often confuse information with wisdom. Admittedly, I’m prejudiced because I built my career and supported my family on skills I learned from reading books borrowed from the public library.
That, to me, constitutes overwhelming library support. As librarians part of our job is to promote library awareness. In the face of folks like Mr. Hirschey, that can be daunting. It’s nice to know that we’re not alone.
With a title like that, I’m sure you’re excited to read on.
My Sony Dream System ™ arrived, and as I had feared it doesn’t have a digital audio connection. Also, it has an integrated dvd-player. WTF!? Okay, so I ordered it and I should have known. But I had thought to myself “NO WAY does a decent receiver in this day and age NOT have an optical port!” Well, I guess you showed me, Sony. FutureShop, for their part, were annoyingly vague in their description of available ports, and had no pictures on the website of the back of the receiver, which you’d think would be the most informative part to show prospective buyers. I thought that true DTS support required a digital audio connection, but somehow mine is still working through my handy red and white connectors. Perhaps my presumptions all this time have been wrong, in which case I blame Theo. Also possible is that the receiver is faking the DTS connection, but I don’t know how that would work exactly, either. In any case, my apartment is tiny and it actually sounds pretty good, so I decided to keep the damn thing, though I’ll try to sell it before I move for the summer. I’ll take a loss, that’s fine. No optical as a temporary situation is okay, but in the long term I simply can’t exist in such a state of squalor.
Did I mention that FutureShop has listed, as a recommended accessory, an optical cable? That’s just tricky, that is. The bastards. Oh yeah, and as a dvd-player it doesn’t have an hdmi port, which seems ludicrous what with television going digital and all. Here’s a link to the system, if you wanna see.
Some guy in Lawrence, Kansas wrote an op-ed piece essentially positing that libraries are worthless and obsolete. The write-up itself is incredibly annoying, but the responses to it have been really interesting. I forwarded the story on to my classmates, since it’s the kind of thing we’re going to have to stand up against soon enough, and we may as well start now. To briefly outline my description here, libraries are NOT worthless and are, in fact, AWESOME. These are facts, and therefore undeniable. So there, Mr Hirschey of Lawrence. I wrote a more eloquent proclamation (if you can imagine such a thing), in the comments proper. I encourage everyone to go and have their say. Lawrence could be a masthead for the library advocacy movement, if enough people took notice. Michael Stephens and the Librarian in Black have both posted verbose rebuttals, which is a start, but I think we really need to steamroll this issue. Their posts are worth reading, in any case.
My trip to New Jersey to see Abigail was fantastic. It was a slice of heaven, spread over a little less than two days, and that’s even considering the fact that I was suffering from some flu symptoms. Ain’t no disease was gonna get me down! The wedding itself was very sweet, and got us talking about how we want to do OUR wedding, which was fun in itself. If you’d told me a year ago that I would be making wedding plans in Jersey, I’d have given you my quizzical eyebrow look. Now it makes all the sense in the world, except for the Jersey part, of course. We’re looking at July of 2008, which will be right around our second anniversary, so it seems like a good time. Mark your calendars, etc.
I just finished watching season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which took me all of … oh, three days to get through. Maybe two. Much to my homework’s chagrin. But hey, once you start watching Buffy, it’s all over. I was powerless to resist its spell. It’s my first time through the series, as well, and a journey I began with Tim back when we were living together in Olympia. I’ll get through the rest of the series before the end of the year, and will finally be able to call myself a fulfilled and cultured individual. Until then, I have seasons 1 and 2 of Deadwood to keep me occupied, as well as, oh yeah, schoolwork.
Go figure. On one last note, the Pharmaprix up the street has Orangina for sale for $1.99 CAD per 1.75L, which makes me the happiest and orangest guy in the province, at least until Oct 13th or so, or until they run out. I bought four, which wasn’t nearly enough, but a guy only has so many arms. Until later, then: stake em if you got em.
Today I can feel the first gusts of winter, flush with cold, though I’m sure that it’s a meager herald of the coming ice age. I’m a rain-baby, you see, born and having lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, I know fancy words like “rainshadow” and I’m used to more green than white, even in the winter. Granted I spent quite a bit of my youth in eastern Washington, where there is a real winter, including temperates well below zero and snow up to your belly-button, at times. But it’s been awhile since then and from what I’ve been told the winter here will be make eastern Washington seem a tropical paradise. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it.
Tomorrow marks the end of my first two weeks of classes. They’ve been going well so far. My classmates are – so far in my experience without exception – intelligent and interesting people, and though I wouldn’t say that I’ve made any “fast friends”, I’ve made some nice connections and shared some good conversations and conspiratorial smiles. We’re all in this together, after all, for the next two years, which means plenty of time to conspire, work, and share this experience called grad school.
The GLIS at McGill is modeled to resemble real-life work in a lot of ways. It’s considered a professional degree, so the studies rest much more on the practical than the theoretical, which I think is reasonable and very useful. The graded work in most of my classes is based almost entirely on group projects. Much as a real work environment, you have a project, people to work with (or you work on your own), and a completion date. Much as a real work environment, you generally have multiple ongoing projects at the same time, and you have to schedule the projects around other aspects of the job, in this case lectures and labs (which one could equate at work to time at the reference desk, or cataloguing, or other daily tasks). This is a good model for me because even though I’ve gotten much better at working in groups over the last couple years than I used to be, I consider it an essential part of effective library practice and it remains an area where I feel like I could still grow and learn. Working with people is always the most difficult, and most rewarding, part of the job.
I have some exams as well, and term tests, and individual projects to work on. I have plenty to work on, indeed. I’m not too stressed. Yet. Give me a couple weeks.
I’m working on creating a bibliographic database with a partner in a program called InMagic. We create fields – author, title, keywords, etc – decide how we want these fields to be searchable – term search, word search, both, or neither – and then enter records using the field information. We also have to identify our purpose and audience, and pick a subject, which for us is French Poetry. So far it’s been the most daunting of the projects assigned, though hopefully once we put some elbow grease into it then it won’t seem so insurmountable. For the moment, I’m just having trouble wrapping my brain around it.
Other projects involve creating a diagram describing how information flows within a library, which I’m working with two other people on, as well as creating original card- and MARC-format descriptive bibliographies for three books and comparing my records to records for the same books entered in other libraries. Like I said, I’m quite busy.
If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out my Flickr photos (I added some new ones on Sunday and now there is a link over to the right), and check back here when you can. I’m going to make an effort, now that my life here in Montreal is solidly underway, to be more bloggerish. No, really!
Every time I think about starting a webcomic again, of one sort or another, I go and look at the great webcomics that are already out there and I despair a little. I try to think of what I could create in the "write what you know" sphere, and every once in awhile I think, "Well, maybe I should create a library webcomic. There aren't many out there yet, after all."
And then, out of the blue, that big old meanie Jeph comes along and gives Marten a library job. And the worst part is that if I gripe about it, Jeph will just tell me that I have an attitude problem. Sigh. Oh well, I'm looking forward to Jeph's take on library humor, though he should know that most academic libraries primarily use the LC classification system rather than Dewey, for most of their collections.
I mean, duh!
On the evening of July 27th, the Deleting Online Predators Act passed in the House with 410-15-7; otherwise known as a ridiculously gigantic margin. The bill, which is incredibly vague, threatens once again federal internet subsidies for schools and libraries unless they take measures to block social networking sites and chatrooms. The goal is to block children, specifically; adults should still be able to ask permission to access the sites.
How many times are we going to try and put walls around the internet? How long will it take us to realize that our kids are smarter than we are and that the only way to really protect them is to be there, paying attention to their lives, and getting involved.
Though advocates for the bill constantly mentioned MySpace, the bill is broad enough that any site that allows "communication among users" could be blocked. In the Web2.0 world, this could mean pretty much every site out there, before too long. Blogs, forums, chat, IM, Skype, Amazon, Ebay, Livejournal, and online games are all at risk. Why not just outlaw the internet for anyone under 18 years of age, or better yet, 21, and see how much we've shot ourselves in the foot when, in less than a generation, we don't have any web innovators anymore.
From Library Journal:
"This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students' ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs," said ALA president Leslie Burger. "Under DOPA, people who use library and school computers as their primary conduits to the Internet will be unfairly blocked from accessing some of the web's most powerful emerging technologies and learning applications. As libraries are already required to block content that is "harmful to minors" under the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA is redundant and unnecessary legislation."
DOPA is in the senate now, and it needs to be stopped. Please make your voice heard on this one, or else it's another Patriot Act in the making.
ZDNet has a great rundown on DOPA if you want the background skinny.
(via geekaresexy)
I've been giving it some thought, and from here on out the "Dancing Librarian" exlibrius category will be a little more strict with its content. I'm going to try and narrow it down to be more pertinent, library-related information. One of the reasons I moved to ahniwa.com was so that I wouldn't feel guilty when I didn't post library-related news. Even so, I'd like to offer that more specific content, unadulterated, for those readers who might not be too interested in my other ramblings and much more frequent linkish posts.
That said, I'm also going to make more of an effort to keep up on my library-related reading (I'm 976 posts behind in my "library" bloglines right now), and in turn write more that directly concerns libraries and librarians as well.
My friend Jason sent me the link to a story on American Patriots, in which librarians receive a very pronounced mention. Well, we are pretty darned kick-ass, after all! From the Common Dreams NewsCenter:
But the librarians have not just been lobbying to change the Patriot Act, they've been on the front lines of exposing its abuses. When four Connecticut librarians challenged an attempt by the FBI to use a National Security Letter to obtain records of who was reading what in that state, the Justice Department slapped a gag order on them. But the 64,000-member ALA and its Freedom to Read Foundation stood up for the librarians, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Association of American Publishers and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression to make a federal case of the issue. In May, after the FBI dropped its defense of the gag order–and shortly before it withdrew its demand for the records–a federal appeals court declared that order moot, and the librarians were at last free to speak out. Peter Chase, director of the Plainville, Connecticut, public library, explained that he and his fellow librarians decided to fight because of their frustration at receiving the National Security Letter even as "the government was telling Congress that it didn't use the Patriot Act against libraries and that no one's rights had been violated. I felt that I just could not be part of this fraud being foisted on our nation.
There once was a librarian,
who referenced as well as one can.
While helping a student,
he said it would have been prudent,
if you'd shown up with some sort of plan.
(unfortunately based on numerous true stories)
In a flash of intuition I decided to visit the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation website to see if they had proclaimed yet their awardees of the 2006-2007 fellowships. I hadn't heard anything, which the realistic side of me said was probably bad news, but I usually muzzle that side of me and throw it in a dark closet (where it is, I think, quite content). The optimist in me held out hope, as is its wont, and honestly didn't take it too poorly when it read, from the "press release" issued just today (hence a flash of intuition), that I was not awarded fantastic monies to ease my way through graduate school. Reading on, the Foundation provided brief bios of some of the "winners", and I let out an exasperated sigh. How was I, who had led a non-heroic life of quiet if passionate academia and subtle, local public service, how was I to compete with these "heroes" of service and scholarship?
The new Jack Kent Cooke Scholars include:
I mean, check out those buzzwords: "traveling the world", "college basketball star", "Peace Corps volunteer" (twice), "teaching music to village children", "NASA", "Mars Exploration Program", and "NASA flight surgeon".
I understand, certainly, that scholarships are meant to be given to outstanding scholars in their field. I guess that I am, nonetheless, a little off-put in feeling like the Foundation is awarding some sort of glamorous scholarship heroism rather than those of us in a more perhaps salt-of-the-earth type job, if one that still has incredible educational and social consequence. This leads me, in turn, to wonder if any of the awardees are going to graduate school to study library science. I'd love to know, but, ignorant, I'd be willing to wager that none are.
Maybe I'm just a little bitter that libraries and librarians are an undervalued commodity in our society's educational and community landscapes, despite their incredible worth and potential. That, and I was honestly pretty excited that they might just up and give me $30k a year, both years, to get my master's degree. Can't blame a guy for a little disappointment there. I always felt I could use a few more loans, anyway ….
I would, though, sincerely like to congratulate the seventy-seven recipients of the Fellowship. Way to be, and good luck with your space exploration medicinal music-teaching photography peace corps type stuff. Me, I'd rather be a librarian. Even a poor one.
Wired has an interesting article on crowdsourcing.
Jeff Howe describes the term on his new crowdsourcing blog as:
Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.
It seems to me that a lot of what a librarian does has already been crowdsourced, to some extent. Information is out there, and people everywhere are trying to organize it and index it and make it searchable. Will we go the way of the stock photographer? I’d wager that librarians do still and always will serve an important role in information management. The more information provided, the more is needed someone to help determine what is credible, what is biased, and most importantly what is relevant to a specific person’s goals.
Tricks of the Trade is a site that allows specialists to submit snippets of wisdom that would otherwise probably never be heard beyond their field. From mothering to bartending to fighting off viscious dogs (also known as traveling, evidently), there’s something here to interest everyone, and I quickly got sucked in and read them all.
I was gratified to see this trick from a “Researcher”, if a bit saddened that this is considered a trick of the trade and not common knowledge.
If you need an obscure, out-of-print, or otherwise difficult to locate book or article, check with your local public library. It’s a little-known fact that the vast majority of libraries belong to a resource-sharing program that will allow you to get a book mailed from across the country. It takes a little time and you often have a limited borrowing window, but it’s an amazing resource.
Meredith has posted an excellent article on libraries using social networking software. It’s one of my favorite library subjects these days, and she’s really written some great thoughts and included some great links. I’m looking forward to reading her book. I particularly appreciate the distinction she makes between libraries simply being on these networks, and libraries actually using these networks.
A lot of libraries have started building presence in MySpace and Facebook by creating profiles. And I honestly think this is a really good idea though unfortunately most libraries are doing it really badly. When you decide to put up a library profile on MySpace or Facebook, what is your goal? If it’s to look cool or to make students more aware of the library, don’t bother. A profile that offers nothing but a picture of the library, a blog post or two and a cutesy thing about how we won’t shush you just looks cheesy. I think there is a big difference between “being where our patrons are” and “being USEFUL to our patrons where they are.” I think some of the libraries in MySpace and Facebook have put a profile up, but they have not tried to make it useful to their patrons at all. Just putting up a profile does not make the library seem cool, nor does it make the library more visible.
I have seen two ways that libraries have used MySpace and Facebook effectively. The first is to get feedback from students. The second is to create a library portal within MySpace and/or Facebook (or whatever social networking software inevitably will come next).
Being on MySpace as an end to itself is pointless. Using MySpace as an information or communication gateway to connect with your patronage in a place where they already are and are comfortable is, for me, the entire idea behind library 2.0. She includes some links to libraries and library systems who are using MySpace in practical and active ways. You should definately go check them out.