Kate Sheehan's Posts

I've been fortunate enough to attend two publishing conferences recently. Digital Book World and Tools of Change both focus on ebooks and the publishing industry, which, like libraries, is experiencing tupheaval as ebooks grow in popularity. As a side note, that growth may be slowing - The Book Industry Study Group and Bowker found that ebook sales for the end of 2011 (but pre-holidays) were growing, but not in the exponential pattern we've come to expect. Both Kelly Gallagher of RR Bowker and Len Vlahos of BISG were quick to point out that we don't know what this change in growth pattern means - it could be nothing, a temporary blip, or it could signal a shift in the ebook market. 

Read More »

Anyone who has watched even a few minutes of one of the disturbing number of hoarding shows on television and immediately felt the urge to clean house will be familiar with the panicky feeling one's own belongings can engender. Librarians on twitter are devotees of Unclutterer and Zen Habits and nothing brings librarians together like talking about weeding. Except, perhaps for collection development. Ownership is a fraught proposition.

Librarians are familiar with the "I loved this book so much I went out and bought it" phenomenon, where readers enjoy a borrowed book enough to make the leap to ownership. Anecdotally, book sellers are now witnessing a similar phenomenon: readers who purchase the print book after enjoying it on their e-readers. The purchase of a physical object makes an intuitive sense to us that license agreements do not. Read More »

 I’ve got robots on the brain lately. Slate.com ran an interesting series about robots replacing even highly educated knowledge workers. No sooner did I finish the last piece (about robots replacing scientists) than I picked up the September 15 issue of Library Journal, featuring a library robot on the cover. Clearly, the robots are coming. Read More »

I am entirely unqualified to comment on San Diego’s restaurant scene. But I spent several days there prior to ALA Midwinter 2011. Fortunately, I had locals to show me around, but it was in San Diego that I really started to doubt Yelp. Like a lot of online-types, I often rely on Yelp to find decent restaurants, though I usually keep a few salt crystals on hand when I skim through the reviews. As someone who spends a lot of time online, sifting through other people’s thoughts and ideas, I felt well equipped to ferret out a reasonably priced and delicious place to eat in a strange city. Read More »

One of my journalistic pet peeves is “my three friends are doing this” masquerading as a trend story. However, it does make a decent jumping-off point for a blog post. I was chatting recently with a library director, who expressed some concern about promoting library ebooks. His feeling was that the infamous 21 steps to download a library ebook was too onerous and would only send the message that libraries were not capable of keeping up with technology. I had just returned from OverDrive’s Digipalooza user-group conference, where librarians gave impassioned talks about their ebook promotions and programs. Digipalooza librarians (an enthusasitic group, to be sure) cited ebook circulation statistics that were climbing ever higher and happy patrons (in their pajamas!) embracing the 21st century library. Read More »

I have long been a fan of NPR’s On The Media. It’s interesting to me both as a citizen who tries for a varied media diet and as a librarian. The show frequently touches on how we consume, process, and access information. Just before ALA, they did a politics-focused piece about the echo chamber that could just as easily apply to answering reference questions, looking for ideas in librarianship, or making decisions about purchasing technology for your library. Read More »

A chance encounter with Equinox COO Grace Dunbar can make conference downtime into the most interesting session of the week. Rather than relying on fate and the hotel bar to ensure a chat with Grace, I asked her if she’d let me interview her for TechSource at this year’s Evergreen conference. In the course of conversation (sometime after she introduced me to pimiento cheese), Grace mentioned that she had worked at Stanford and been involved in the Google Books project. That’s about when I brought my laptop out

KS: What was it like to work with the Google Books Project?

Read More »

I have something to confess to you all. For an embarrassingly long time, I thought the phrase “information wants to be free” (besides being the name of one of my favorite blogs) meant free as in speech, not free as in beer. My apologies in advance to my open source friends who are tired of “types of free” conversations -I’ll try not to mention kittens. But for quite some time, I was under the impression that “information wants to be free” was a rallying cry for access and simplicity, not content you didn’t have to pay for. “Information will out” was the underlying meaning I focused on.

  Read More »

Field trips in New England often revolve around hardship. And candy. As an elementary school student, I learned to make candles like the colonists did when they weren't busy starving to death or learning about corn. As a high school student, I watched a blacksmith (who would not break character to give us directions) sweat and work on a horseshoe for what felt like an eternity to my 16-year-old self. It's tough to be a settler, which is why historical attractions always sell fantastic anachronistic penny candy - it offsets the depression that would set in on the children who just spent three hours making a misshapen candle that will provide about twenty minutes of iffy light. And all that's before anyone bothered to mention the genocide sparked by the bonneted and buckled people all of our towns are named after.
Read More »

In the watered-down simplification of high school life that appears in teen movies (made by adults), libraries are the home of nerds. Jocks exist in the physical realm, while nerds dwell in the landscape of the mind. Anyone who has been to high school (or perhaps seen The Breakfast Club) knows that teenagers don’t live in a world so facile and rigid, but libraries, during and after we’re done with high school, are seen as temples to the intellect. Read More »