NOTE: March is a fully booked month for me, what with article deadlines, speaking engagements, and a visit from my son, so I'm not sure when I'll publish the next issue.
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TELLING PEOPLE WHAT LIBRARIES DO
by Marylaine Block
As I've mentioned, my subscribers, and visitors to all my different web sites, are a varied lot. About half of the ones I know about are librarians, but the other half is composed of techies, teachers, students, scientists, government workers and such. What that means is that I seem to be a kind of information guru to people who don't know much about libraries. A lot of the e-mail questions people send me can easily be answered at any library, but THEY DON'T KNOW THAT.
Because I created a page of advice on finding out of print books -- http://marylaine.com/bookbyte/getbooks.html -- I often get questions from people who are having difficulty finding books or stories because all they remember is the plot. I send them to their libraries, which are bound to have subject indexes to novels, short stories, and children's literature, such as Fiction Catalog, Short Story Index and Bookfinder.
They ask me how they can get the full text of articles they find out about in sources like Medline, and I tell them that their library almost certainly has databases of full-text newspaper, magazine and journal articles that they can access from the library's web site. They're amazed. I tell them that their librarians can get articles and books on interlibrary loan for them, and they're astonished.
People ask me how they can find the value of old books in their attics, not realizing their library has valuation guides like Bookman's Price Index. People ask me where they can find reviews of certain kinds of books, say romance novels or children's books or new work in anthropology, and I tell them to visit their libraries where they can read reviewing sources like Library Journal, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and Choice, or to look for reviews in the full-text article databases on their library's web site.
Because my BookBytes site -- http://marylaine.com/bookbyte/ -- contains annotated lists of "books too good to put down," hopeful authors often write me asking how to get published. Good heavens! Do they really not know, or at least assume the existence of, basic tools of the trade that any library will stock, like Writer, Writers' Digest, Writers' Market? Has it really not occurred to people who want to write books that libraries are full of books on all topics, including how to write and get published?
I've been asked for advice on how to start a small library for a church or social welfare agency, and I tell them to visit their libraries, which buy professional library literature for the librarians' own use, and may well have books on that topic, as well as on how to catalog and manage the collection once it exists.
I've had inquiries about doing genealogy research, even from someone in Salt Lake City, home to the incredible Mormon genealogy collection! I've sent them to their local libraries and historical societies; often they had no idea their libraries had extensive collections of local history and genealogy, as well as backfiles and clippings files for local newspapers.
So, if you're one of my non-librarian readers, I suggest you visit your library's web page today and find out what services it's offering you, both online and in person. Some of them are even answering people's questions by online chat.
If you are a librarian, though, I want you to think about this: in spite of all the time and effort we have spent on marketing, too many people have no idea at all about what libraries can do for them. I think the time has come to look for some new outreach strategies.
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NOTE: I have a new My Word's Worth column, "Winter at the Cardinal Cafe," at http://marylaine.com/myword/cardinal.html
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COOL QUOTE
The technologies behind the Internet - everything from the microprocessors in each web server to the open-ended protocols that govern the data itself - have been brilliantly engineered to handle dramatic increases in scale, but they are indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the task of creating higher-level order. There is, of course, a neurological equivalent of the Web's ratio of growth to order, but it's nothing you'd want to emulate. It's called a brain tumor.
Steven Johnson. Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner, 2001.
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You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2002.
[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]
