ALA Seeks Applications for “The American Dream Starts @ Your Library” Mini-grants

In January 2010, the American Library Association (ALA) received a two-year grant of $750,000 from the  Dollar General Literacy Foundation for “The American Dream Starts @ your library.” This funding makes it possible for ALA to fund 70 public libraries in Dollar General communities to develop literacy programs for adult English language learners.
To be eligible for funding, the applicant institution must be a public library, or a public library with a bookmobile providing literacy services for adult English language learners, and must be within 20 miles of a Dollar General Store, distribution center or corporate office. Each funded library will receive a onetime $5,000 grant.

Applications for funding are being accepted online through Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010. Selected applicants will be notified in early April, 2010. To learn more about the American Dream Starts @ your library, the library grants and to apply online, please visit www.americandreamtoolkit.org .

Dollar General is a Partner in the Campaign for America’s Libraries (www.ala.org/@yourlibrary), ALA’s public awareness campaign that promotes the value of libraries and librarians.

In 2007, the American Library Association received a similar grant from Dollar General, the Tennessee-based corporation, for mini-grants aimed at helping public libraries expand literacy services to adult English-language learners. In 2008, ALA funded 34 public libraries in 18 states serving communities from under 850 to more than 1 million. Libraries used these funds to expand multi-lingual print and digital literacy collections, improve technology, build mobile language labs, add literacy programs and services, develop training manuals, produce outreach videos,  and train tutors. For additional information about the funded libraries visit http://www.americandreamtoolkit.org/programs.html.

PLA 2010 Virtual Conference Registration Opens

Registration for the PLA 2010 Virtual Conference is now open. On March 25-26, 2010 the Public Library Association (PLA) will share a condensed, live, and online PLA 13th National Conference with public librarians and public library workers who can’t make the trip to Portland.

The Virtual Conference will include many familiar elements of the live conference, including high-quality educational programming, poster sessions and networking opportunities with colleagues. Each day will feature five live programs – the same programs available to in-person conference attendees. In addition, the Virtual Conference will feature special events such as “Inside the Author’s Studio,” a daily chat with well-known authors.

Confirmed Virtual Conference programs include:

* If You Didn’t Work Here, Would You Come Here?
* Cross-Over Advisory: Adult Books for Teens and Teen Books for Adults
* LITA’s Top Technology Trends
* Marketing as Conversation: How to Interact with Your Community Through Your Website
* S.Y.A.S.S. Save Your After School Sanity
* Cracking the Code: Beyond Dewey: Words vs. Numbers
* Advanced Black Belt Librarians: The Top Ten Security Issues in Public Libraries
* Shortcuts to Greatness or 10 Things That Great Libraries Know and Maybe You Don’t

As PLA finalizes the Virtual Conference schedule, new programs and updated information can be found at here.

PLA is offering both individual registrations and site licenses for the Virtual Conference. The site licenses allow a single location to host the virtual conference for multiple attendees. Cost is determined by number of attendees. Individuals who register to attend PLA 2010 in Portland will automatically receive access to the Virtual Conference as part of their registration.

Register for the PLA 2008 Virtual Conference here. Registration closes on Friday March 19, 2010.

PLA 2010, will be held March 23-27, 2010 in Portland, Ore. For more information, visit www.placonference.org.

Museum as Hub, Library as Hub

I was drawn into the New Museum on New York’s lower east side this morning, because I was curious to see “Museum as Hub: In and Out of Context”. I’m starting a new job on Monday as a Web Librarian at San Jose Public Library (yes!!!) and I was curious to see what kind of “hub” activities going on at the New Museum might be adaptable to the library world, especially since the web is such a great medium for collaboration. In their words, the Museum as Hub “reveals a partnership of arts organizations looking to pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub”—what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York”.

I like this idea of “displacing conversations” from their origin, location, and intended context and rethinking their meaning in a completely different place. For that reason, I was really interested to find a public library project in the exhibition, a piece by Young Whan Bae of Korea. I’ll copy and paste the blurb from the New Museum’s pdf explaining the whole show.

“In his ongoing, utopian Library Project Young Whan Bae transforms used shipping containers into public amenities. With a goal of manifesting art as progressive social alternatives, Bae creates a self- sustaining system in which resources and funding from each commissioned library generate an additional library in a rural area lacking in public resources. Part of the artist’s larger “Rainbow” series, which includes Homeless Project (2000), a handbook for homeless citizens of Seoul, Tomorrow offers information and recreation to a remote community in which the notion of communion has been weakened by mobilization and displacement. Bae’s library is conceived to be a core medium that can resuscitate, reactivate, or catalyze a sense of communion in local communities. In his presentation for the New Museum, Bae presents furniture prototypes in corrugated cardboard and handmade scale models representing the modular system he adapts for each library location. Utilizing the official cultural space of the museum to promote and potentially actualize a small- town library demonstrates the artist’s purposeful quest for an art with social function.”

What DOES that mean, to bring an idea like this out of Korea and into New York City?  Can this display, at the museum “hub” be useful to the New York Public Library as something to consider, or is it just a neat-o thing to look at in an art context?  If you wanted to create your library as a hub, connecting international ideas, thoughts, and trends to your location for the sake of experiment, how could you improve on what they are doing in the education department at the New Museum?

Deconstructivist Architecture: Would it Work at Your Library?

Librarians are all familiar with Rem Koolhaas’s groundbreaking deconstructivist masterpiece library in Seattle. While in Boston for ALA Midwinter meeting, I decided to take a look at another piece of deconstructivist architecture that got a lot of press in recent years. I visited the Frank Gehry structure known as the Stata Center or ‘Building 32′ at MIT. The Stata Center does not enjoy the same reputation that the Seattle Public Library has, in fact some call it a complete disaster and there has been a legal battle about construction issues.

The quote below is by Nikos Salingaros ( a really interesting dude); I lifted it from the Wikipedia entry on Building 32.

“An architecture that reverses structural algorithms so as to create disorder—the same algorithms that in an infinitely more detailed application generate living form—ceases to be architecture. Deconstructivist buildings are the most visible symbols of actual deconstruction. The randomness they embody is the antithesis of nature’s organized complexity… Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony.”

If I’m reading that quote correctly, Salingaros is saying that a deconstructivist building is a rejection of order and natural self-organizing principles. If I start thinking of one kind of building program that I’d hope would be harmonious with natural order, it’d be a library! Order is really a big piece of what we do in libraries, we organize and contextualize information and knowledge. I wonder if Salingaros would criticize the Seattle Public Library the same way? Aside from the known construction issues with the Stata Center, what might happen if Gehry approached a library the same way?

Well… Gehry did build a library, it is at Princeton University and it looks pretty awesome. I’ll have to visit that one another time… I wonder how the users of the Princeton library feel about their building, and if it is also “the antithesis of nature’s organized complexity”?

Behind the Clock at Boston Public Library

I just got a great tour behind-the-scenes at Boston Public Library. Here’s a few less frequently shared photos of the fun stuff hiding back in the dark and dusty corners.

First, have a Hudsucker Proxy moment and take a looksee behind the clock in the courtyard. When young patrons misbehave, I’m told they are stuck in this little closet and forced to spend the night…

Below, you can see the front side of the clock glowing in the beautiful courtyard. Look carefully and you’ll see the silhouette of a rowdy child, banished to the clocktower til morning…

There was some fun signage backstage as well. Check this one out- beware of those ‘armed doors’- they can be quite dangerous. Love the red FAIL stamp too!

Also prime finds: the graffiti. At first glance below, you think the pic just says FIRE. Look closer to find ‘joy’, ‘pain’, and ‘death’. Just another day at the library.

Here’s a nice drawing of a farm…

And who knows what is going on here!

Edgar Allan Poe in Boston @ BPL

If you’re in Boston for ALA Midwinter Meeting, swing by the Boston Public Library in Copley Square and check out “The Raven in the Frog Pond – Edgar Allan Poe and The City of Boston,” an exhibition that uses items from the library’s collection, the American Antiquarian Society, Susan Jaffe Tane, and M. Thomas Inge, to examine Poe’s complicated relationship with the city of his birth

The exhibition runs December 17, 2009-to March 31, 2010 and can be found in the Cheverus Room, Third Floor, McKim Building,Copley Square Entrance.

Exhibit Hours:
Monday: 9-5
Tuesday: 9 -7
Wednesday: 9-5
Thursday: 9 -7
Friday: 9-5
Saturday: 9-5
Sunday: 1-5

More information here.

The Chinatown Storefront Library

It has been quite a first day at ALA Midwinter Meeting. I just saw Bill Clinton and Martha Coakley in my hotel (entirely by accident- quite a surprise), I managed to see a really fun holography exhibit at the MIT Museum, and I walked a very, very long way around Boston on an unseasonably mild day. The highlight of the day was finally getting a chance to see the Chinatown Storefront Library though.

Its lucky I got to check out this innovative little storefront today because this will be its last weekend in operation. The Storefront library is (was) an agile, flexible, library space designed to act as an advocacy effort and publicity piece supporting the creation of a Chinatown branch of Boston Public Library. It was a very successful project, and it will be exciting to see what its effect will be. No doubt the community will miss it greatly. I met Leslie and Sam Davol of
Below, Simmons LIS students Adam Robinson and Sharon Tomasulo show off their customer service skills…

Below, the children’s book ‘pod’. Furniture and program for the space was done by a team of Harvard design students.

Below, the popular newspaper reading room…

Below, the Drawing Lab, by artist Deborah Putnoi

Kudos to the Boston Street Lab and everyone who participated in this innovative project that boldly rethought public library service from the ground up. Other libraries should look to the discoveries made here and consider their own service models closely.

Build your library identity around knowledge- not books

Just arrived in Boston today for the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2010. I picked up a great book on the way here, a book that will keep me thinking as I wander around ‘all things library’ for the next few days. My new book is about Geigy, a chemical company based in Switzerland and the story of how their art & design department created a unique, flexible visual vocabulary that defined a corporate image for the company from 1940-1970. The book is beautiful and the design is breathtaking, but what is most fascinating to me is the that a constantly changing art department full of rotating faces managed to produce a consistent, fresh, but totally solid brand identity for 30 years. Even more amazing, they created an identity for a CHEMICAL company, based on ABSTRACT imagery. This is no small feat. But think of how simple the logic is: chemical products are basically abstract, they can be perceived in whatever manner they are presented. Abstract imagery is the logical way to communicate with the consumer.

Geigy’s identity is an interesting one to consider as public libraries examine what their role is for their patrons and what kind of image a library might want to project to represent itself in its community. Libraries also traffic in the abstract, but rarely do we take the leap to build an identity that way. I’d say nearly 3 out of every 4 public library brand identities is built around an image of a book. Think of logos featuring pages being turned, a glow radiating from within a leaflet, or some other abstracted version of a bound volume. Public libraries find themselves in a weird place as books are only one facet of a complex relationship between communities and the information they require. What if libraries defined themselves with more abstract imagery that represents knowledge exchange itself rather than the formats in which it is delivered? This would undoubtedly be a step in the right direction if we wish to encourage a clearer understanding of what actually happens in libraries.

LibraryThing iPhone App

Found via the CALIX listeserv, and via the LA Times article “Can Local Books iPhone app be a literary UrbanSpoon?”, check out the new LibraryThing iPhone app.

Write to the PLA Blog during ALA Midwinter Meeting!

Its conference time again, folks! The ALA Midwinter Meeting is going on Boston, MA from January 15-19th.

This is a great opportunity for you to do some writing for your favorite blog: The PLA Blog!

We would love to have you share your conference stories, pictures and videos here. Send us a message or a comment on this post and we’ll get you set up!