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Archive for the ‘Advocacy’ Category

The campaign to assess public library outcomes got a tremendous boost by Library Journal’s Director Summit held last month in Columbus, Ohio. It’s heartening to see library leaders getting serious about making outcome assessment integral to the management of U.S. public libraries! The excitement and determination are necessary for making progress on this front. And [...]

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This week Chase Bank sent an email to its customers saying that one of their vendor’s computer systems were hacked. The bank stated that they: …are confident that the information that was retrieved [i.e., stolen] included some Chase customer e-mail addresses, but did not include any customer account or financial information. Based on everything we [...]

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In the book John Adams author David McCullough writes about Adams’ legal defense of British soldiers on trial for murder in 1770. In his argument to the Massachusettes jury Adams said: Facts are stubborn things. And whatever our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and [...]

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A new OCLC membership report, Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community, is hot off the…er…PDF-Maker! The report is formatted more like a magazine than a study, with key findings summarized in a myriad of graphical illustrations. So, I must confess that I have rather neglected the narrative so far. But from browsing mostly through [...]

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Now that I am no longer distracted by the subject of last week’s entry I can get to the intended topic for my first 2011 blog entry. I should say, though, that I won’t be turning over any kind of new leaf for the new year. For now I’m sticking with the theme I’ve dwelt [...]

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Last June the final report from an IMLS-funded study of public library summer reading programs, The Dominican Study: Public Library Summer Programs Close the Reading Gap, was published. The “reading gap” refers to the cumulative loss in proficiency that has been observed in students who struggle with reading.  The gap is cumulative because the “summer [...]

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The second phase of OCLC’s national library advocacy project debuted last year as the “GeekTheLibrary” campaign. The campaign is cool, chic, hip, flashy, geeky, and so on. Pretty ambitious to try to coin new slang! For sure I’m not a good judge of communication campaigns, but I wish them success on this one. When it [...]

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Sugar High

It’s very simple. Government agencies that issue distorted information in a time of crisis lose credibility and end up appearing incompetent. Even federal bureaucracies eventually learn this. Take the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster for example. Last week CBS News reported that the U.S. Department of the Interior misrepresented findings from the independent scientific assessments [...]

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I have implied this in other entries in this blog, but I might as well say it outright: The library and information science profession needs to come to terms with the issue of standards for (i.e., rules of) evidence for performance, statistical, and advocacy research data. There, now I’ve said it. I recently read the [...]

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In spite of their evolution over the last few decades, accelerated most recently due to the Googlization of information, public libraries have been amazingly impervious to change in the arena of performance measurement. I found the following observations about  library measures in the early history of American libraries: There is no branch of library economy [...]

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