Libraries across the country are responding to double digit increases in circulation and visits.  Library users are requesting everything from resume writing, improving job skills, filing for unemployment insurance, getting health insurance or heating oil assistance, to starting a home-based business.

Many librarians, as well as the public,  have trouble navigating government web sites to find specific departments that will answer a patron’s question.  Maine State Library reference librarians have familiarity with Maine state government and decided to put that to good use.  The  State Library created its new web feature Maine Answers Tough Times to provide libraries and individuals with a one-stop-shopping resource for state government and non-profit agencies that provide assistance to those effected by the economic collapse.  The State Library is also including a form on each page of Maine Answers Tough Times  for suggestions of other links that people have found helpful or for help with topics that the State Library has not addressed.

This is not the first time in my life that libraries have mobilized to help the communities they serve.  It is also not the first time that they’ve been asked to do much while having their budgets cut.  A recent Boston Globe (March 2009, but can’t remember the date) quoted a library director saying “if we were a business we’d be booming.”  Um….exactly.  A library is somewhat like a business and if any business you knew was as productive as most libraries in this country, would you reduce its funding?

Oh, sure, I know all about spreading the financial pain and sharing the financial burdens of municipal governments.  Although libraries may not be as important as food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, or job agencies, they should be viewed as essential as these social services at this time.

By that I mean, should the Bible, Koran, Torah, Book of Mormon, et al be shelved on the top shelves of library book stacks?  Leave it to the Brits to come up with the most insane library policy I’ve ever heard about.

The Museum, Libraries and Archives Council issued a guidance which suggested placing all “holy books” on the top shelves after a Muslim group complained that the Koran was often found on the bottom shelves of libraries (what, they did a survey?).  Works about Islam are cataloged by the Dewey classification system in 297 which puts it at the end of the 200s (religion) but that doesn’t mean they’re always on the bottom shelves.  That depends on how many materials fit on a shelf, how many shelves per unit, etc.

If all “holy books” are on the top shelves, how are people shorter that 5′7″ supposed to reach them?What does someone do after searching the catalog and finding the Good News Bible catalog number 220.5?  She goes to the shelves and it’s not with the other 220s.  Is there a neon sign pointing the way to salvation?  Many libraries without space problems (all 34 of them) do not use the bottom and/or top shelves as a way of accommodating short people and/or those who cannot bend down without pain.

According to Muslims there is no greater book than the Koran because it is the word of “God.”  As are all the other “holy books.”  Some Muslims want the Koran placed higher than all other books!  Placing them all together on the top shelves flies in the face of logical library order.  Libraries, great places as they are, are not places of worship.  If they were, I’d demand that Shakespeare have a separate room all to himself. 

It is also very troubling that the views of one group determine how a library will operate.  That flies in the face of the principles of librarianship.  Such insidious decisions based on supposed respect for others weasel their way into libraries at their peril.

Justyn Dillingham, the opinions editor of the Arizona University Daily Wildcat, wrote a terrific editorial based on the latest National Endowment for the Arts survey of American reading habits. 

The report found that there was a slight drop since 2002 in the number of people reporting that they read books for pleasure.  (I have had my disagreements with how the survey is conducted and still think it under-represents the reading public.).  Dillingham zeroes in on reading as a solitary habit, a personal experience rather than a public one.

Reading is not like attending a movie, a sporting event, or having a few beers with friends – all things that I like to do.  However, finding the leisure time to do these, let alone read, is a growing frustration for me.  Being surrounded by books because I work in a library only adds to that frustration.

Life seems to be a series of unconnected distractions.  It’s much more difficult to have not only the time but the quiet necessary to read.  I love to travel by air since that gives me a block of time just to read.  But the distractions and noise!

Dillingham states that America finds reading frivolous even though nearly 70% of college graduates read for pleasure, according to the NEA  survey.  He says that you probably surf the Web at work but would think twice before you read books at your desk.  It’s ok to have the TV on during dinner but it’s certainly taboo to read at the dinner table. 

I once saw a man reading a book while eating alone at a restaurant.  He certainly seemed quite content and very absorbed in his book.  He did not rush through his meal.  I find it very difficult to eat alone in public unless I have something to read.  I guess that means that if you have a book or a magazine, you’ll never eat alone. 

Dillingham really hits his stride when he quotes Harold Bloom’s dictum that reading requires us to “look inward” and we often find that difficult, painful. or unimaginable.  Reading fiction, especially, forces us to examine ourselves, our family, our relationships, the world.  The fractured time of life and the noise associated with it aren’t conducive to reading for self-examination, says Dillingham.

Take a walk on the wild side for a change.  Read a book, think about it, and discuss it with your friends.    Hope you still have friends after that advice.

Having known a librarian who held an Oscar contest and event in the libraries he worked in, I wasn’t totally surprised to read about the Chlotrudis Awards given in Boston.  Librarian Michael Colford started bestowing the award in 1995 because of his distaste for the movie Forrest Gump and “it seemed like (they) made their nominations from a pool of six to eight films….”

Only films released on less than 1,000 screens nationally during their first four weeks are eligible for a Chlotrudis.  Films only shown at festivals and films that go straight to DVD are not eligible.  Sometimes, film actors and actresses attend the awards show but the audience are mainly dues-paying members and the greater Boston film community.  There’s also an award called Body of Work which somewhat corresponds to Hollywood’s lifetime achievement award.

Last year’s Chlotrudis Award went to the film Once and the Buried Treasure Award was presented to 12:08 East of Bucharest.  I did see Once, a very effective film about two amateur musicians in Dublin who get together to write and perform their songs.  An odd sort of romance develops between the man and woman and the songs are even okay – the kind of songs written by people who have a hard time expressing themselves otherwise.  But, 12:08 East of Bucharest ?  Missed that one but Netflix has it and I’ll probably give it a shot.

Oh, and the name Chlotrudis?  It’s a combination of the names of Colford’s cats, Chloe and Gertrude.  All together now:  awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

We librarians always talk about family literacy because we know it’s a “good thing.”  Sure it’s a good thing but do we really know how good it is?

We do now.  The Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network has published a paper entitled The Social Costs of Low Literacy Skills.  The authors of the study found that low rates of literacy among adults places great burdens on society as well as the individuals involved.

People are less likely to vote and volunteer – two important pillars of society.  They are also unable to participate in activities that increase skills and learning.

Low literacy rates are very likely to lead to higher health care costs that communities have to bear.  This is on top of the costs of those who are dependent on government assistance.

A child’s ability and willingness to learn are strongly influenced by the mother’s education and literacy level.  Literacy gaps are often passed on between generations.

This 45 page document contains many approaches to increase literacy.  It was once thought that there wasn’t much that could be done to improve literacy among adults or to ensure that a child’s literacy progress wasn’t undone at home. 

Libraries are mentioned only once in this report which is a shame.  They are the only public arena where both parents and adults can come for materials to bring home that help parents with their learning and help parents reinforce their children’s literacy attainment at school.

When we perform Google searches how do we know that Google has searched in every database on the Internet to come up with suggested matches for what we’re looking for?  The easy answer is that Google can’t do that and we are presented only with hits for Web pages that Google knows about.   Considering that this past summer Google added the one trillionth address to its list of Web pages, wouldn’t one think that’s far and away enough?

That’s where the Deep Web or the Invisible Web comes into play.  Chris Sherman and Gary Price wrote a terrific book in 2001, The Invisible Web, that covered dozens and dozens of information sources that search engines haven’t found.  There have been a few more books on this topic since then but I wish Sherman & Price would update their book. 

Most of the Web pages in the Deep Web are from associations, businesses, libraries, universities and government agencies.  The amazing amount of information, statistics, data, etc. that can be found within these is enormous.

 There are some great developments in deeper searching that have popped up recently.  Kosmix (www.kosmix.com) started out as a search engine for health and travel information.  It has since developed a platform for a universal search engine that snags data from a lots of sources – Flickr, Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, and others. 

It then creates sort of a customized web page that breaks your search into segments.  I searched for the topic “Burma” and Kosmix returned more information than I knew was available.  Everything from reference, media, news & blogs, to ethnic groups, history, shopping, and books.  Sources included Wikipedia, BBC & CNN, Shopping.com, Flickr, SeeqPod, the blog Backtype, and Slideshare.net.  Yes, my search did uncover Burma Shave but the other riches outshone it.  And, yes, Kosmix is one of those Mountain View, CA companies.

Another Deep Web crawler is DeepPeep (www.deeppeep.org) which is being developed by a professor at the University of Utah.  When I entered my search term, “Burma,” I received 143 documents.  I initially thought the search was totally off the wall but when I investigated each retrieved document I discovered what DeepPeep is trying to do.

I had also told DeepPeep to search in “all domains” rather than the more selective subjects airfare, book, rental, job, or biology.  Therefore, I hit the mother lode of stuff.  One of the first hits was for horse jobs and, sure enough, Burma is one of the countries listed in the horse-jobs.biz web site.  I couldn’t figure out how the Hotel Oscar in Athens could be related to Burma but a very close look at the bottom of its home page listed links to other hotels.  What russiamaritime.com had to do with Burma (and just who knew there was a russiamaritme.com?) was also easily discovered.  This is really deep web searching and totally fascinating for those of us who love to bounce around the web discovering Web databases.

So, is there one search engine that does it all?  Obviously, no.  It’s great to have multiple search engines which create search strategies so differently.  It makes searchers think harder about how to formulate their keyword strategies.  Now, if I could just whittle down my favorite search engines to a five or six from several dozens.

Is it just a coincidence that I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a few days before I read about the death of author, Christopher Nolan?  Maybe, but I love the serendipity of discovering two unrelated things.  Must be why I’m a librarian.

Both the subject of the movie, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and the author, Nolan,  published books under extremely difficult conditions.  Bauby, at age 43, became totally paralyzed except for his left eyelid and Nolan, from birth, was mute and a quadriplegic. 

If anyone needs uplift and reminders that, current world news notwithstanding, life is much richer than we can imagine, these two men certainly provide them.  Nolan’s poetry is word-dazzling and his autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock, was a best-seller here and in the UK and won the Whitbread Prize.  Bauby had been editor-in-chief of Elle when he suffered a cerebro-vascular incident and went from living la bonne vie to living only in his mind.

Bauby’s memoir, titled the same as the movie, is more concerned with space and freedom (or the lack of it) and memory.  He dictated it to his therapist by blinking his eye when she said the correct letter. Nolan’s book is more concerned with time than space and is as inventive as his poetry.  He “wrote” it using a stick attached to his head with which he hit the keys of a typewriter.

Bauby died two days after his book was published; Nolan died twenty-two years after his autobiography came out.

I thought  Maine had so very little funding for public library renovation and construction until a colleague from Illinois emailed me that his state distributed just barely more.  While Illinois has a progressive public library system structure that Maine does not have,  that state suffers from the same Death Valley of construction funding as Maine and other states.

The mechanism to get federal dollars for library construction to local libraries exists.  The Library Services and Technology Act, a grants program administered by the Institute of Museums and Library Services, is the kind of program which passes federal money to state libraries.  It used to be called the Library Services and Construction Act, how about that?  Of course, that act was plagued by far too many arguments over which programs to support or not and the value of those programs.  What was important to Nebraska might not have much impact in Rhode Island.

Why can’t a new LSCA or a Library Construction Act be created to solely address federal funding of public library construction?  State library agencies would create an evaluation team to score project submissions from the fields.  The Maine State Library is already doing  exactly this with its New Century Grants for renovation and construction.  New Century is a bond issue voted on by Maine voters that dedicates money for state cultural agencies.  Alas, the amount that the Maine State Library awarded to 16 libraries was just shy of $500,000.  Can’t buy many bricks or much mortar with that kind of money. 

Is anyone in Washington listening?