Sarah the Librarian

My first week back from maternity leave and I'm already getting philosophical ... One of the big projects I was working on before my maternity leave was a patron survey on technology. The survey ran while I was on leave and we just got the reports back from the group that created the survey for us. And my reactions are so mixed ... On the one hand, it's great we were able to collect so much detailed data on our patrons' use of library technology. There's all sorts of fascinating data (such as 85.8%  of our patrons feel public library internet access is either important or very important to the community) that we can now easily share with the Board and other stakeholders. On the other hand, there's some pretty strong evidence that this was not a representative sample of our community and is likely missing representation from the heaviest users of library technology. While I love the level of detail of the data collected, it made the survey really  long. Colle...

A few things I've been reading lately that I didn't want to pass without comment: The suicide of Aaron Swartz made the regular news, but LJ  and Jessamyn West have a nice collection of information about the Internet activist who worked so hard for increased access to information online. His aggressive prosecution for intending to freely distribute JSTOR content online has been widely listed as a contributing factor to his untimely demise. Interestingly enough,  JSTOR recently announced that they're opening their collection to the public on a limited basis. So why was the government still pursuing such harsh sentencing for him? There's also been a lot of talk about feminism and the sneaky ways that's it's still hard to be successful as a woman at work. Hi Miss Julie had some interesting things to say about how big flashy things often championed by male librarians are what tend to get recognition in librarianship, while the less flashy, practical everyd...