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March
Welcome...
I have been writing a weekly newspaper column since 1987.
For 3 years, it ran in the Greeley Tribune. Since then, it has run in various subsidiaries of the Douglas County News Press. I still have most of my columns in digital format.
For many years, I only gave myself one rule: try to work the word "library" into every piece. My intent was to think in public about just what librarianship means at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st.
March 18, 2010 - expect less in 2011
Annually, the planning cycle of the Douglas County Libraries used to look like this:
* at a spring manager retreat (this year, that meant a day at Louviers) we brainstorm our best, most exciting ideas for the next year, then whittle them down to the few that matter most.
March 11, 2010 - it was 20 years ago today
"It was 20 years ago today
Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play."
I have now held my position as director of Douglas County's libraries for 20 years. It was a different world back then.
The population of Douglas County in 1990 was about 65,000. We checked out 368,492 items a year. Today, we have close to 300,000 people, and check out nearly 8 million items annually.
March 4, 2010 - business is booming at the library
Lately we've been posting little flip camera interviews of our patrons on our website. These are folks that have a library story to tell. Since libraries are in the story telling business, it makes sense to collect a few of our own.
March 19, 2009 - Weed!
Let me start at the hardest spot. Libraries, sometimes, throw books away. We really do.
How could we?! Don't librarians understand the value of the book?
And by book, we mean:
* Your college textbook. You didn't actually read it. The parts you did read, you marked up heavily with a yellow marker, and scores of obscure comments. But that was the year you also met a young woman who gave you a completely different idea of yourself. That's what makes that book valuable to you, so valuable that even though you're convinced that you can't keep it any more, surely it deserves a place at your local library!
* A book published 20 years ago, in a field where things change quickly. It wasn't that long ago that I strolled through a local high school library and found a book published in 1965. It was in the science section. This is an act of profound disservice to young minds.
* A bestseller! Of course, this is from 5 years ago, from an author that had only that one book, and it didn't really make much of an enduring impact.
March 12, 2009 - get your news ... from the library
A few weeks ago I gave a talk up in Golden. Later, a journalism student interviewed me. Was there still a place for the library, he wanted to know, in the age of the Internet?
I told him that I've been asked that by a lot of reporters over the years. But it has a particular poignancy to it now. Before this young man, the last person to ask me worked for the Rocky Mountain News. (The financially troubled Rocky, as surely everyone now knows, recently shut down operations after failure to find a buyer.)
March 5, 2009 - LaRue's Views - brain scientist has stroke of insight
Some years after earning her Ph.D. in neuroanatomy, Jill Bolte Taylor woke up one morning and ... had a stroke. A congenital malformation of the blood vessels in her brain burst, flooding the left hemisphere. She was 37 years old, and home alone at her Boston apartment. She tells the whole story in her book, "My Stroke of Insight."
March 1, 2007 - Screenagers Live Online
I had the pleasure recently to hear a talk by Lee Rainie. He's the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
The folks at Pew do a lot of research, and lately have begun to focus on a group dubbed "screenagers." These are people between the ages of 12 and 20 who spend a lot of time in front of various screens -- TVs, computers, iPods, cellphones, etc.
Below are some of Pew's findings.
Seventy percent of American adults now use the Internet. For teens, it's 93 percent.
March 15, 2007 - Savants Fascinate
I've always been fascinated by "idiots savant" -- people who are, for instance, lightning calculators, or able to tell you, the instant they hear your birth date, what day of the week that was. That's the savant part.
But the "idiot" part means that often these remarkable super-abilities are coupled with disabilities. No doubt some folks with super-abilities learn to hide them. It may also be that such abilities are linked to accidents of biochemistry, and thus are coupled with various kinds of physical or mental impairments.
March 21, 2007 - Steal from the Best
"Stealing from one person is plagiarism. Stealing from many is research."
One of the jobs of leadership is to keep an eye on the competition. Librarians, as I've written before, tend to be very open about what has, and has not, worked for them. So word gets around.
Library experiments fall into a couple of broad divisions. They are interesting, or they are useful.
