I had the honor of being given one of this years Knower Awards from the Philadelphia Chapter of the Special Library Association. [you can read about it here]

At the Conference the opening session was given by Mary Matalin and James Carville. They spoke mostly on how the diminishing number of media outlets is actually causing a rise in independent news sources, but not a rise in more news stories. Most of the news outlets are covering the same stories rather than causing more coverage of new events. Towards the end, James Carville spoke passionately about the need for more action to help Louisiana. He wrote an article for the Times-Picayune [link] as well as a longer version that appeared on CNN [link].

Mr. Carville makes some good points but I would illuminate them here. I’ll leave that to others, as that is not the point of this blog. But his comments were further illuminated in a session I attended where Drs. Ivor van Heerden and Stephen Nelson spoke on the geological problems associated with New Orleans as well as how they were ignored by the Army Corps of Engineers. Their slide decks have not been put online yet, but Dr. van Heerden has written a book (which I just began reading) which discusses many of the same issues. It is called The Storm and so far seems pretty good. An interesting New York Times article can be found here as well.

All in all, it was fascinating to go to SLA. It was also timely (although the conference was planned over a year ago) that it was held in New Orleans as the gulf is once again embroiled in another disaster. And even then, more drama ensued.

eBooks. The wave of the future. The end to publishing as we know it.

Blah, blah, blah.

I didn’t believe it when it first started in the late 90′s with the first eBooks. I was working at a Library that bought 6 of them and loaded them with genre related materials (one was SciFi, the other Mystery, etc.) and made them available to check out. We had a long procedure for checking them in and out (making sure there was this cord and that cord and the stylus…). And as I recall from distant days I think I only saw them checked out a handful of times. After a year or so, they were not requested and that was the end of that.

Fast forward 10 years to today. Technology has improved, people are more tech savvy (maybe? we hope?) and eBooks have taken off. [They have even been made fun of as seen in this comic] I’ve seen people on the train reading from their kindle or iPad. I’ve been a little envious, but I am not an early adopter kind of person. So when my Grandpa hinted that I might be getting an eBook reader for graduation (“Every new Librarian ought to know how to use one” he said) I hopped on the web to see which ones my local public library offered.

Turns out, they don’t.

In fact none of the Libraries in the consortium (3 counties with a total of 22 Libraries) do. So I sent a suggestion. They use overdrive for their audiobooks, so why not add eBooks to the repertoire? Money. The response was as follows:

“[The Libraries] made a decision to keep the focus to audiobooks at this time because the budget for the collections we purchase for use with this service is very limited and [we] don’t want to dilute the value we are providing in audio content, and no additional funds for ebook format have been made available.”

I can respect the funding issue, especially given the budget cuts that surround us. But I don’t think adding eBooks to the collection would dilute the audio collection. Certainly it would if you gut the audio section, but this is about collection management. Everyone knows that not every audiobook you buy (or every print book for that matter) is sought after. I have seen some audiobooks that have only been checked out 3 or 4 times in the course of a year. The same goes for printed books. So for a Library to say they don’t want to damage the audio content collection seems a little of base to me. Further more, it alienates the “new” reader who might not have used the Library before.

Maybe the new reader is used to purchasing books from Amazon or some other vendor and reading them on their new eBook reader. What if you offered them to check it out FOR FREE at the public library. Just as simple as purchasing it online, and you can count it as a book circulation just like those audiobooks. Why not?

How can Libraries provide what their patrons want if they aren’t willing to take a risk and offer it? Who knows, they might find eBooks check out more than audiobooks. But if you don’t offer it you’ll never know. As for me, this Librarian who is pretty darn inclined to use his public library, now has one less reason to.

Beginning in early August, “Adventures of a Guybrarian” will no longer be published in the United States. This week I was offered and accepted a position as the Librarian at the Hsinchu International School in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

For those of my readers who are at this moment thinking, “Is he crazy?!” I can assure you that, yes I am. No, not really. Many of you might not know that from November 2007-2008 I lived in Taipei, Taiwan and studied Mandarin Chinese. Since that time I have sought a way to merge my two loves of Libraries and Chinese together. This job affords me that chance.

The school is an English-taught school so I wont use my Chinese during the day, but maybe I will as some of the younger students are still learning English. The staff and students are from all over the world, and this excites me.

I will be responsible for cataloging a processing a backlog of books that were ordered by the previous Librarian who was only there last year for a couple of months. I’ll also be responsible for developing the rest of the collection and helping provide the materials the teachers need for their curriculum.

The city is an hour southwest of Taipei where i lived before. A few of my friends from Taipei are now in Hsinchu so I hope to reconnect with hem. I’ll also make occasional forays into Taipei and of course explore more of Taiwan than I did before.

Hsinchu is known as the Silicon Valley of Asia so it is modern and there are a number of foreigners there. I am sure I wont have any problem settling in.

I will be returning in October to present as part of a panel at the Pennsylvania Library Association Annual Conference and am quite excited to do that.

As always you can contact me by commenting or sending me a message on twitter.