If you’re like most libraries today, you’re struggling to keep up with the need for more constant and more targeted communication. It seems that we’re always introducing new services, events, and projects in order to remain relevant to our user community – but how do we find time to communicate with all of our stakeholders? And how do we stay on top of all of the latest and greatest modes of communication? If we only had more staff.

When my placement at Coutts began I was also starting a course on collection development. Prior to the class and placement, my knowledge of the role of book vendors and approval plans in building a library’s collection was sketchy at best. The course and placement were an interesting juxtaposition because of the different perspectives they offered. On one hand, the professor for my collection development class provided us with a cautionary viewpoint alerting us to the temptation to surrender our skills and knowledge in collection development to book vendors. On the other hand, my time at Coutts provided me with insights into the importance that book vendors and approval plans can play in building a library’s collection.

Pollution in libraries has always been an issue for library patrons and staff alike. Research on major library pollutants goes back to 1916, when an analysis of dust collected in a vacuum cleaner from the bookshelves of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Library in Troy, NY, was conducted. The analysis under the microscope showed human hair, wool, cotton, fly wings, leather, iron, aluminum, calcium, silicon, and a very high content of carbon and nitrogen. But the most striking finding in that study was the presence of a bacterium which came probably from the sneezing and coughing of library patrons. This organism survived under the same conditions as those causing diphtheria, cholera, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis – all deadly diseases at that time. In modern libraries the pollution issue is more complex.

Your integrated library system is like the plumbing in your home: you don’t think about it much when it is working well, but when it stops working or becomes obsolete, you are faced with some difficult challenges. Good maintenance practices, forethought, and planning can keep the trials and tribulations to a minimum.

We are part of a consortium of six small public libraries in southwestern Ontario, the Saugeen Library Consortium. The consortium was formed in 2007 after our ILS, Winnebago Spectrum, was “orphaned”: Spectrum was bought by Follett, and Follett informed us that they would no longer be supplying updates or support for the program. For small rural libraries like ours, this was a huge problem, since our budgets are already very tight, with no spare funds for the enormous cost that a new ILS can represent.

Organizational change is good. It is also difficult, and getting it right is important. What is the biggest threat to successful organizational change? What typically stands in the way? The answer is easy: it’s me. Me. The Chief Librarian, CEO, Senior Administrator, person in charge.

We used to say it’s not about what you know (knowledge), but your ability to find out about what you don’t know (information literacy). Now we are back to an old standard: it’s not what you know, but who you know.

More and more we get information from other people. Quality is something libraries are concerned about. Our users expect us to provide access to the best resources. Of course, what we really mean by this is quality books, films, websites, and other information sources. Quality is about stuff.

We’re in a very exciting time for academic libraries. The web is changing everything about the way we do business – reference, instruction, cataloguing, liaison, outreach, even the way we hold conferences. However, the changes that the web is causing have not fully taken hold yet, so the profession is in a period of profound transition.

We need to embrace new possibilities to remain relevant to students in the future, but we can’t fully abandon what we’ve been doing for fear of not meeting the needs of the students we have to support today. We can see the movement to e-books, for example, but students still very much need the print books we currently have in our collections, so the transition has to be carefully managed.

Traditionally, the word “library” conjures thoughts of books, study and silence. The role of the library has changed over time and in response to the growing needs of educational institutions and library users. More and more, ‘traditional’ libraries that have focused on collections are transforming into ‘academic learning centres’ with a broader focus — people. And so while libraries remain spaces for quiet concentrated study, they are also active spaces driving teaching, learning and research. Herein lays the challenge — a challenge that many libraries that have undergone this transformation are experiencing.

I was a starry-eyed student at the McGill Library School in the early ’90s. I happily learned to catalogue (I aced that Dewey test, by the way), puzzled over the notion of collections development, and embraced my inner techie as I built databases and conducted timed Boolean searches on what was a fairly new internet. Not once during that period did the reality of what it really meant to work in a public setting that is a library ever set in.

On Thursday, 13 November 2008, the landscape of the Cranbrook Public Library in British Columbia “literally” changed when three book benches were unveiled. Their arrival culminated months of work to revitalize the grounds around the west and south sides of the library. When public art meets public convenience to place a positive mark on a community.