So, you want to put up some video display screens in your library to announce coming events and advertise services. Or perhaps you’ve been tasked with making this happen. Two questions arise: how do you create an attractive, effective display system without the expense of a turnkey, proprietary electronic signage solution; and how do you manage the system once installed?

At Penn State, in 2006, we found ourselves in possession of three 42-inch plasma displays—just enough, as it happened, to cover our main library’s three entrances. Unfortunately, getting them mounted and wired proved so costly that there was virtually nothing left for additional hardware and software. So we used what we already had—we connected each screen to an obsolescing PC, and connected those PCs to our local area network. PowerPoint, for which we have a site license, became our delivery system: one copy on each PC, and one on my Mac, as it fell to me to design and maintain the screens’ content. I edit the slideshow on my desktop and upload it to a directory on our server; from there, a piece of open-source software pushes the file out to the three PCs. A relatively inexpensive NewsPoint plug-in then adds dynamic content to several slides—real-time library instruction schedules and an RSS news headline feed.

We have three basic types of content: perishable—current news, exhibits, events; seasonal/repeatable—calendar-based services, holiday messages; and evergreen—people, facilities, collections, services available any time.

Within that framework, content categories include: Welcome messages, News and Events (including that RSS news feed); Alerts; Exhibits; Collections; Facilities; Services; and People (a faculty/staff spotlight featuring a different library employee each month).

In nearly all cases, content on the screens is tied to identical (though often more detailed) content in another medium. For example, our multilingual welcome screen and various evergreen service promos also appear on the screen savers of our public-use PCS; and all alerts and promotional messages appear also in print.

Some recommendations:

1. Think holistically—People are more likely to remember your message after they’ve seen it three times, so put it out there often and make sure all your versions match visually. Central to our program’s success has been our coordinated approach. Communication packages encompass a range of print and digital media: posters, flyers, postcards, newspaper ads, magazine ads, e-flyers, banners, and display-screen images. When designing these materials I maintain a consistent visual grammar—images, color schemes, type treatments, etc.—throughout so that the electronic and printed materials complement each other.

To facilitate this, I’ve found it best to override PowerPoint’s inherent design constraints by loading full-screen images with all the type and graphic elements included into the slideshow file, relying on the software only to set slide timings and transitions.

2. Think “supplementary” —Remember, unless you have a multi-pane display system that allows selected information to be kept constantly visible, most of your messages will be out of sight most of the time. Don’t expect your electronic displays to replace conventional signage.

3. Simplify and shorten—Consider screen content a “teaser”; keep text to a bare minimum. Our default slide duration is 7 seconds. In practice, we find that patrons rarely stop and read the screens. More typically, they’ll glance in passing, and that’s why we coordinate the look of our print and electronic images—to encourage patrons to stop and read our printed pieces, having previously glimpsed the same visuals on the screens.

When longer messages can’t be avoided, rather than stretching out the slide duration I’ll stretch the message across two or more slides. Sometimes I keep the background constant and have only the text change, similar to a PowerPoint build. At other times, to add visual interest while giving a simple message extra screen time, I’ve used multiple slides to create a rudimentary animation. Here the message remains static while the background moves. Once, for an exhibition featuring historic photographs, I used Photoshop to create a series of background images in which a contemporary street scene match-dissolves into the same view from a 1920s photo.

4. Darker=greener—White space is economical on a print piece, since dark backgrounds use more ink or toner, whereas on a plasma display the more pixels you light up, the more energy you use, and the faster the screen wears out (LED screens employ a different imaging system and use power at a relatively constant rate). Think white (and lively colors) on black.

To see representative samples of our content, minus the slide timings and transitions, please visit our online display gallery. Though we’ll probably move to a purpose-built solution at some future point, our experience to date shows that with the right approach, a quick-and-dirty startup doesn’t need to look that way.

I am an opportunist.
I am a creative genius (or part of a creative work team)
I am persistent
I am customer focused
I connect the dots
I am passionate
I am a risk taker

According to my research in preparation for a talk at Inspiration, Innovation, Celebration: An Entrepreneurial Conference for Librarians those are the seven core qualities of an entrepreneur; I learned a good deal about the characteristics and practices of entrepreneurs at my institution’s Center for Entrepreneur Research. Based on what I heard at various presentations delivered at the conference, at least one or more of these characteristics are indeed associated with with the work of librarian entrepreneurs. But for my closing keynote talk I raised a simple question: Is the term librarian entrepreneur an oxymoron? Considering what business and start-up entrepreneurs do how would academic librarians achieve entrepreneur status? I asked quite a few librarians if they could name a librarian entrepreneur. Ninety-eight percent could not. A few named someone entrepreneurial who created a library product or service, but who was not a librarian. If there are librarian entrepreneurs out there why don’t we know who they are?

Part of the confusion comes from the uncertainty about the work of entrepreneurs – and does coming up with an innovative idea make you an entrepreneur? In the classic business sense an entrepreneur is an individual or group that comes up with one big idea and essentially puts all their resources (time, money, energy, etc.) into pursuing it to make it happen with the intent of eventually being profitable. I shared tales of entrepreneurs who had done just that, putting everything they have into a single business idea. Clearly not the sort of thing we do in libraries. I also asked librarians to name any entreprenuer. Virtually all had no trouble answering that question; the most frequently named entrepreneurs were high visible, business people, usually technologists and wealthy (think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs). So the characteristics we associate with entrepreneurs would, for most people, hardly fit a librarian.

So even though I tried to raise some doubts about the viability of the librarian entrepreneur concept, it would be difficult to claim that librarians fail the entrepreneur test with the evidence delivered by the presenters. You can review the ideas that were shared at the conference site, and some of the presentation slides are now available. I liked the opportunism and creativity employed but the folks who developed a digital media center at SMU. Attendees were buzzing about the academic library that included an 18-hole mini-golf course in their library redesign project. At UNC-Greensboro they developed an A-Z journal finder that was eventually sold to a commercial vendor, and returned some profits to the institution. So while academic librarians rarely put everything into a single big idea with a go for broke attitude, there certainly are plenty of examples of projects that demonstrate creativity, innovation and some degree of risk.

I closed the conference with ten tips for aspiring library entrepreneurs, and a few messages about creating an entrepreneurial library from some folks who I think have proven to be particularly successful at doing just that. Those tips, messages and clips from my librarian interviews are embedded in my slides if you want to have a look (the embedded videos will run best on a mac). If you think of yourself as a librarian entrepreneur, share an example of something you’ve accomplished at or beyond your library.

Knowledge@Wharton published their list of the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years. I was struck by the ones that dramatically transformed my work since I first entered the profession in 1978. What didn’t I have then? No computer (#2). No Internet or Web (#1). No email (#4). No cell phone (#3). No GUI (#21). How did we ever manage? Just those few innovations alone have revolutionized and forever altered librarianship. Sorry gaming librarians – video games didn’t even make the list – but social networking did (#20).

At its most basic and fundamental foundations the library is about acquiring, storing, organizing and disseminating information/content. Every one of these functions is radically altered by just these four innovations. It is difficult to even imagine what new and future innovations will change our work in the next 20 or 30 years. Perhaps in just the next 10 years we’ll see as much innovative technology change as we did in the past 30. Electronic ink and foldable computer screens. Personal intelligent assistants. Advanced virtual world simulations. Ubiquitous VoIP integrated into digital technologies. Oh yeah, flying cars! These and other technology innovations stand poised to even more radically change the nature of library work. Well, maybe not the flying cars. There’s much to look forward to in our profession and the ways in which we’ll harness the innovations of the future to better serve our user communities.

When academic librarians talk about Amazon.com the conversation is mostly about their book business or, more recently, the Kindle. But we should perhaps spend more time directing our attention to the person that runs Amazon, Jeff Bezos. When people think of books I don’t doubt that many of them think of Amazon before they think of libraries – if they think of libraries at all. And Amazon is certainly far ahead of libraries in providing a platform that allows customers to add content to their website and engage in conversation with each other. I’m not suggesting that academic librarians should view Amazon as a competitor. After all, we’re not even in the same business. Amazon is an online retailer. Academic libraries are in the learning business. What we should be doing is studying how Bezos has turned Amazon into an innovation machine (although the Fortune article sees Amazon as an “iteration” machine – one that makes lots of small moves and learns quickly from its missteps).

For the last year or so there’s been a fair amount of chatter about innovation in the library world, on blogs and at conferences. That’s good because as a profession we need to drive innovation in our libraries. What sometimes concerns me is that some of what I hear about innovation sounds like a mixed bag of platitudes. Perhaps just understanding innovation is part of our challenge. I prefer a description of innovation from an article titled “Innovation in Organizations in Crisis” in the fall 2007 issue of Design Management Review. According to the authors, Cherkasky and Slobin, innovation is finding new ways of creating value and bringing them to life. Simple and elegant. It’s not about inventing something new and it’s not about making big changes at your library at a pace that makes heads spin. Here’s what Bezos has to say about innovation in the BusinessWeek article:

Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.” That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with “what do my customers need?” Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.

I commend you to read these three articles; your libraries have them if you can’t find them online just yet. We can learn about innovation from the thought leaders of business. Some of our best successes – considerable innovations for academic libraries such virtual reference, cafes in the library and self-service automated operations – had their roots as innovative business products. Given that the ACRL conference is in Seattle (Amazon’s HQ) in 2009 I was hoping that Bezos would be an invited speaker. ACRL recently released the keynote and invited speakers, and while it looks like a great lineup, Bezos is not among them. Releasing the Kindle was a significant innovation for Amazon, and a major risk for Bezos. Innovation or iteration, there are lessons academic librarians can learn from Bezos about ways to lead in the learning business?

BTW, thanks for some good comments to some recent posts. While I still think some of you are misunderstanding me when I use “leaders” and “library directors” (or library deans or whatever you like to call it) interchangeably, I appreciate it when you share your views. But not everyone leaves a comment. Some bloggers prefer to put their response into their own posting. ACRLog readers may not catch those so here are two I recommend to you: “But What If I Don’t Want it All?” over at Academic Librarian and “Teaching Technology/ies” over at info-mational.

1) What is LibraryThing for Libraries and why did you all decide it would enhance your catalog?

Candace Lebel: LibraryThing is an online book cataloging resource for individuals to keep track of their personal book collections and share that information with others. Users can organize and search their collections by adding descriptive “tags” to each book. LibraryThing allows users to network socially by reviewing books, exploring similarly tagged books, sharing books, and participating in discussion boards. We’d felt that we weren’t moving quickly enough toward incorporating Web 2.0 tools into our online catalog and were impressed with the ease and speed of implementation of LibraryThing for Libraries.

Alexandra Chappell: As a LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) library, we do not have a conventional user account with LibraryThing. Rather, we send LibraryThing a list of our books with ISBNs and they send us back a piece of code that we paste into the footer of our OPAC code. When you do a search in our OPAC, LTFL matches the ISBNs for books in our OPAC
with ISBNs for books in LibraryThing and then inserts tags and similar books suggestions (from LibraryThing) into the display of the bibliographic record.

One of our goals is to improve our OPAC and to explore/implement next generation opac ideas. When we heard about LTFL, we thought it would be a great way for us to test out a Web 2.0 idea, without having to make a huge change to the catalog. LTFL was a quick and easy way for us to incorporate tags and book suggestions into our catalogs without having
to start from scratch by building it locally over time.

2) Does including LT tags confuse users? Is it easier or harder to teach students how catalogs work when LC headings are supplemented by user-generated tags? In general, how have students and faculty responded?

Alexandra Chappell: I don’t think that including LT tags is confusing–I think it provides another way for users to explore our catalog, and that the language of tags is generally less confusing than that of LCSH. However, I’m really not sure how much either gets used. To be honest, I believe that many of our users don’t even notice the LCSH when they search the catalog on their own (let alone the LT tags). My reason for thinking this is that every time I’m working with a student on the reference desk and I point out the LCSH and explain that they can tell us what the book is about, they are amazed and astounded by how useful this is.

I will say, however, that there are librarians on our staff who were concerned that our users would think that the LT tags are authoritative and created/added by our librarians. We tried to alleviate their concerns by changing the language of the label to read “LibraryThing tags.”

We do not currently have a formal way to collect feedback, but the little feedback we have received has been positive.

Jezmynne Westcott: I’d like to add that I don’t think our users will find the tags confusing. So many popular web applications have some element of tagging, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and, of course, LibraryThing, that our users will recognize a tag cloud and understand its purpose and functionality.

3) I notice Blais has a “similar books” feature – is that generated by LT? (In any case, it rocks.)

Candace Lebel: Glad you like it. Yes, the “similar books” feature in Blais comes to us from LibraryThing.

Alexandra Chappell: Yeah, it is cool, isn’t it? Definitely gets a positive response from users.

Jezmynne Westcott: Delightful! I get lost in it, and I use it to find new novels to read.

4) Are there any privacy issues to consider when using a social networking system like LT?

Candace Lebel: I don’t think so. The tags themselves don’t give any indication of their creator; we’ve chosen to only show the ten most popular tags for any given title; and the tags used for LTFL are vetted by LT before we get them.

5) How hard is it to implement? Are there things about it that have been frustrating? Are there changes you’d like to see?

Candace Lebel: It is incredibly easy to implement LTFL. The most frustrating part is the lack of time I have to play with it. There are “look-and-feel” customizations I would make if I had the time. I do wish that it had a real-time link to our catalog. As it is now I must send a list of ISBNs of our holdings to LT and then remember to update it every so often as new material is added. If there was a real-time connection, that wouldn’t be necessary.

Alexandra Chappell: In general, I think LTFL is great. There are some changes that I would like to see.

–I’d like to be able to show tags for books in our collection that do not have ISBNs. We have a lot of books in our collection that were published before the existence of ISBNs but that are popular enough to exist in LT in a later edition. For example, a 1904 edition of Emma in our collection will not show any tags because it does not have an ISBN, but there are tags for the title Emma within LT. I would like to see a way for our older copies to have tags display as well. LT says they are working on a way to link books by LCCN and OCLC numbers, which could help fix this problem.

–I would like our local users to be able to add tags. I really like being able to take advantage of the huge user population of LT, but would like to be able to add local flavor to the tags as well.

–I’d like to be able to search the tags from our OPAC search box. Currently you can only search for a tag while in the Tag Browser, which is an intermediate page you get taken to when you click on a tag in our OPAC.

I’d like to be able search for more than one tag at once. Currently you can only search for one tag at a time–no Boolean searching in the Tag Browser.

Jezmynne Westcott: I’d like to include LCSH in the tag clouds!

6) In view of the recent LC report and the growing move toward open source software for catalogs, do you have any thoughts on how social cataloging might fit into the mix?

Jezmynne Westcott: I prefer something like “Catalog, 2.0″ over “social cataloging” as I think, with the exchange and sharing of MARC records across libraries for years now, we’ve already been “socially cataloging.” But getting back to your question, I think this will become more commonplace. 2.0 concepts like tagging, community reviews, and rating items involves the user and gives them a feeling of engagement and ownership with the content. Isn’t this what we want? Our users to feel engaged in our resources? Feel ownership of our community collections? I would love to see library catalogs with streams of discussions and comments about the materials, like you see with online forums. I would love to see the rating of books and tagging of items to pair natural language descriptors to the LCSH. As a web user, I’ve come to expect these things in the sites I use, and I feel our users should
expect them from us, as well. Additionally, with the movement towards defining “active” collections in a local setting and other collections in page-able repositories, the context the community provides will prove helpful for us and them in determining what is useful and valuable.

Thanks for indulging my curiosity! By the way, I love so many things about the way your catalog is laid out. It’s much more user friendly than the catalog at my own library, in spite of our efforts.

Candace Lebel: Thanks! It’s a work-in-progress so keep checking back.

Alexandra Chappell: Thanks for the compliment!

Jezmynne Westcott: I say, try some things out! Gather a few interested people at your place of employ, look at some options, and try on some wrappers like LTFL or others. There are some really cool things out there! Or, chuck it all and migrate! : )

Final comments: If you’re curious and want to keep up with all things LibraryThing, their blog can help (there are actually two, but you can use a combined blog feed to follow both). LT is always up to something. One of the newest innovations is LibraryThing Local, where you can see bookstores and libraries in a particular area and find out what events are on tap. Is your library there yet?

So why I am bringing this up now? Because of a recent article in the New York Times that speaks volumes about the importance of paying attention to trends, and how this can encourage librarians to be forward thinking and perhaps even stimulate their innovation. Yesterday the Times reported about youth participation in virtual worlds. While librarians have focused their attention on Second Life, which the article says has “enjoyed intense media attention in the last year but fallen far short of breathless expectations,” perhaps what we should be watching is what the article describes as the “web playgrounds of the very young.” Forget Second Life. Perhaps we need to learn about sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz in order to better understand the role that online role-playing games and virtual social scenes play in the lives of people who will be our students in the next decade. One expert estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today. If those numbers keep growing I think we can at least anticipate a new generation of learners with expectations for interaction in virtual worlds. One day they’re constructing a virtual fuzzy friend in a web-based world, and the next they’ll be looking for electronic resources on virtual library shelves while seeking guidance from a friendly librarian avatar.

Folks, do I need to remind you the world in which we live is changing rapidly? My post is not intended to encourage you to rush out to create your avatar or to join Webkinz. I haven’t done either yet, although now that my university may be offering some programs in Second Life I may finally have a reason to visit and explore that virtual world. The goal of my post, as I did on that STE program, is to encourage you to make a stronger commitment, call it a resolution if you will, to spend more time and energy in 2008 on your personal trendspotting mission. No one can spot all the important trends – and only a few will be the ones to which we need pay attention – but there are resources one can follow to increase the opportunities for spotting the right trends.

And certainly no one has the time to try every Web 2.0 tool or software utility, test every new plug-in or application or visit every new virtual site. But there is a tremendous professional advantage to at least knowing about these things as opposed to being completely in the dark about them. I will never visit Webkinz, but I should know about it and understand what happens there. In the end academic librarianship is largely about making a difference in the lives of those we serve. If we fail to grasp their world and what is relevant in their lives – if we fail to understand them and the trends that define their existence – then our ability to make a difference is vastly minimized. Here at ACRLog we will do our best in 2008 to spot and discuss those trends we think are highly relevant to the work and future of academic librarians and their libraries. We look forward to your participation in the conversation.

What most frustrates me in a general sense is the degree to which in libraries our human capital and our financial resources are tied into commercial software that rarely meets our needs well. That is old news. The issue is how to break free of the inertia that keeps us in a technologically paralyzed state….

What if, in the U.S., 50 ARL libraries, 20 large public libraries, 20 medium-sized academic libraries, and 20 Oberlin group libraries anted up one full-time technology position for collaborative open source development. That’s 110 developers working on library applications with robust, quickly-implemented current Web technology…. Instead of being technology followers, I venture to say that libraries might once again become leaders….

Yes, we’d need to establish sound open source management protocols and we’d have to guard against forks and splintering of effort that might undermine the best possible outcomes. But I keep thinking about how successful Linux has been, with developers around the world. Surely librarians and library technologists could evolve a collaborative environment where we’d “play nice” and produce good results for all.

I think it’s great to see a library director (and board chair of PALINET, an OCLC regional service provider) talking about this sort of thing. And it’s not just talk: he pays Andrew Nagy, in part, to lead the development of the exciting VuFind open source OPAC project.

It seems that Lucia has bought into the idea that open source development can disperse effort and expenses fairly and efficiently. For that reason, open source is an excellent model, especially for academic libraries, who have enough money to pay really good programmers, but not enough money to pay them to duplicate each other’s effort. In general, Lucia’s vision makes so much sense to me that I view something like a commitment to shared software development among academic libraries as all but inevitable.

Many technology companies already work this way to some degree. For instance, the software described in the excellent post, A Day Without Open Source—Linux, Apache, Bind, Firefox—exists in part because Google, IBM, Sun, and thousands of other large and small companies encourage their developers to help maintain and improve open source code. And it’s not just code: W3C, which maintains open Web standards, is organized into committees, and those committee are composed primarily of employees at for-profit companies. We’re starting to see that same sort of encouragement for open standards and software echoed in libraries, most of it centered around code4lib.

One concern I have about Lucia’s statement is that he may be applying standard software development thinking to open source development. As Eric Raymond has documented in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming, there are fundamental differences. For one thing, forking can be incredibly useful: Firefox is a fork of Mozilla. For another, many believe that open source works in part because people tend to work hardest on projects that excite them, such as transgressive technologies that place them in direct opposition to entrenched organizations like Microsoft and the Recording Industry Association of America. It may be hard to find programmers who are excited by the sorts of projects that committees of library directors would vote to approve and fund.

Another concern I have is, while it’s great that PALINET is partnering with LibLime to support Koha, what about OCLC? When do we get to see the code for the software that we pay OCLC to support for us? As Karen Schneider points out, “If we built a 66,000-member association, it would look an awful lot like ALA.” I strongly suspect that if we build a huge new technology cooperative for libraries, it’s going to wind up looking an awful lot like OCLC. Only the new one might not feature people with the talent and success of Karen Calhoun, Roy Tennant, Andrew Pace, Lorcan Dempsey, etc.

My hope is that Joe Lucia and the folks in the preceding sentence are working to change OCLC from within. It isn’t that OCLC is evil, but there are reasons that LibraryThing’s Tim Spalding tried to talk Tennant out of going to OCLC, why the Library of Congress’s Dan Chudnov joked that Tennant’s move to OCLC made him his mortal enemy, and why it made sense for Tennant to explain his move. Some of the concerns expressed in Steve Oberg’s “OCLC: the Microsoft of the Library World?” and “Answers to Roy Tennant’s questions” ring true, as do some of his readers’ comments: OCLC is a monopoly and a vendor.

It would be helpful, at least when it comes to creating and sharing open source code, if OCLC could play a role similar to the one played by the Apache or Mozilla Foundations. Having a superstructure like Lucia talks about could be a good thing, though ultimately it may not matter whether it’s OCLC, another organization, or simply a commitment by academic library directors to hire more programmers. The members of code4lib and oss4lib are already doing their part. It will be interesting to see how many of Lucia’s fellow library directors are as motivated as he is to make sure libraries again become technology leaders.

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open.

So let us do just that: let us build the Open Library.

It’s a little far from complete, to say the least, and the building won’t be easy, but it’s an interesting concept. Basically, if I understand it, it’s a wiki platform for combining information about books from various sources to create a single, open source, publicly-built and publicly-modified catalog of books past and present. It’s sort of like Google Book Search, only it isn’t owned and controlled by a mega-corporation. It’s a little like Library Thing, but more ambitious in its goals. (Library Thing is excited.) It’s a little like OCLC’s Open WorldCat only it’s . . . open. In the free web version of WorldCat, the public can find books and add reviews, but only libraries that pay for the not-open Worldcat are included and they must subscribe to the First Search version to underwrite the free version.

Will librarians embrace this new project? Will book lovers? Library Thing has over 2 million unique records, WorldCat has 85 million, and Google won’t say. The Open Library demo has apparently around half a million records so far, but to be fair it’s only been open for a few days. It remains to be seen how it will catch up and become as complete as it would like to be.

What’s really interesting to me about these visions of a complete and public library is that they make three very interesting assumptions: first, that books are an irreplaceable cultural resource; second, that ideally they should be available to all, without charge; and third, the best catalog includes everything ever published. There’s a touching belief here that books and democracy are somehow interconnected, and that everyone should have access to books – all books. It’s a little ironic, when so many communities are deciding they really can’t afford a public library anymore.

Still, optimism about a DIY Internet-based library catalog abounds. Over at BoingBoing Rich Prelinger says “I have a hunch that it’s going to be the primary way many if not most people access books, and I see it becoming an always-open window on the desk of every librarian.”

We shall see . . .

Some readers may have attended the panel I gave with colleagues Meg Burger and Susan Avery at the ACRL National Conference in Baltimore where we were able to give people a sneak-peak at our not-yet-released “Explore the Undergrad Library” commercial that we produced with the Housing unit. So many people asked for the link when it was posted and asked that we share it more broadly. For a variety of reasons, we can’t put it on YouTube or other similar site, but it is now online from the Housing website and will be sent to all first-year undergraduate students as part of a DVD introducing academic and students services on campus (view Windows Media Player or view Quicktime).

Anyone else have something like this they are willing to share? Use the comments and tell ACRLog about it!