When power goes down

This morning the Lower Mainland was treated to a windstorm, which sadly cause a power outage at City Hall. Computers were down and we were unable to access the catalogue or do research on the internet.

Several questions came up during my short shift whose answers were hampered by the outage:

1) Do you have any horror books/scary stories for 8-10 year olds? I was able to remember that we had some in the 398s (Folk & Fairytale section) - yay!, although I couldn't recall Darren Shan - darn.

2) Line dancing CDs in the kids department. This was very tricky as there we don't have a specific line dance music area, unlike the holiday, classic, and world music sections. This was a bust and very uncomfortable when the patron asked why didn't I know - was I a new librarian?

3) A new Wayne Dyer book. As Horizon was down, I couldn't see any titles by him and I wasn't able to navigate the net to check and note the title. This led into a discussion about why we had power in the library when we were unable to use our computers.

I was working on a book list of strong female main characters in picture books and general fiction. I'm hoping to have a more flushed out list (it initially started as a project on picture books for Ca) that will hopefully be shared within the system.

I found the overflow first chapter paperbacks - replenished the Rainbow Fairies rack and made one young lady and her brother very happy.


News article of the day: Ebooks in high demand at Halifax Libraries http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2012/03/07/ns-ebooks-halifax-libraries.html?cmp=rss

This is very positive news where the system is purchasing all sorts of devices to allow librarians to learn how to use them. There's a lot of devices listed, but to get that kind of experience, the Halifax staff are very lucky!

This is one of the challenges that has come since we offered ebooks for the pubilc. You cannot be an expert for every device out there (even though patrons feel that you should be).

Although I've recieved some training, there are some quirks with each device and you'll see error messages that you won't know what they stand for. A patron brought in his Macbook and we tried to open a book that he downloaded and we didn't get far.

I don't use Apple products and fortunately, we had a member on staff who was familiar. She came down and asked all the quetions I did and it was gratifying that my training was as solid as it can be for that type of device. She had to take note of the error message and contact the patron later.

The article mentioned how costs involved with ebooks are going up and unlike print titles, libraries don't receive a discount. This is very troubling as libraries may need to spend more of the pie on materials and with the popularity of ereaders, will patrons insist on buying more copies to meet their appetites?

Libraries usually purchase a lot of print copies that eventually get weeded when demand goes down, will the library also weed ebooks when demand goes down? Or should libraries even have lots of new titles? It's difficult when people want more for less.

Also related to the issue of cost is how some publishers don't want to sell their titles to libraries. How can we provide access to works in this instance?

This could be problematic for publishers where people illegally share titles and could be a public service conundrum where people are unhappy with their library for beign "unwilling" to acquire certain titles.