[Libs-Or] Letters to Libraries Online April 2009

[April Baker]

Letter To Libraries Online
An Electronic Newsletter from the Oregon State Library.......Volume 19, Issue 4, April 2009

Library Board News

STATE LIBRARY BOARD HEARS REQUEST FROM OLA
OLA President Mary Ginnane is asking the State Library Board for support for OLA's new strategic planning process, Vision 2020. The Board will take up the request at their meeting on April 20th at the State Library in Salem. The $10,000 in planning funds requested by OLA would match $5,000 already appropriated by OLA for the new planning process led by Teresa Landers of Corvallis. The Board contributed to earlier planning efforts that produced the Vision 2000 and Vision 2010 plans. The Board will also hear recommendations from the Talking Book and Braille Services Advisory Council to spend interest from the TBABS Endowment Fund to help jumpstart the digital talking book program later this year. The Library of Congress will provide the new players, but a very limited number of new digital books. The major cost for TBABS will be to purchase the blank cartridges that TBABS will use to make copies of books from the NLS database of digital talking books. In other business, the Board will look at a revision to the Library's budget reduction plans requested by the Legislative Fiscal Office. They will also hear a briefing on the 2008 Quality Education Model School Libraries Report. An Open Forum will be held at 2 p.m. where anyone may address the Board on any topic.
State Library News

LIBRARY SERVICES AND TECHNOLOGY ACT GUIDELINES AVAILABLE FOR FFY2010 GRANT CYCLE
Devising a digitization project? Opening an outreach project? The LSTA competitive grant program may be for you. Take a look at the grant guidelines through the LSTA Competitive Grant Program page. A brief three page proposal is due April 10, so apply now. For more information on Oregon's LSTA program, see the Oregon's LSTA Program page. Feel free to check out the proposals from past years, as there may be a project you wish to replicate! We welcome calls to talk over grant ideas, or find out about similar grants that may have been made in previous years. Contact Ann Reed at (503) 378-5027.
OREGON 150 BOOKS IN ACCESSIBLE FORMATS
Talking Book and Braille Services has more than 60 of the State Library's Oregon 150 sesquicentennial book list available in accessible formats. These formats include 4-track cassette, digital download, and Braille. For more information on the titles available and how to check them out, visit the TBABS Sesquicentennial website. These books are ready for checkout to registered individual and institutional accounts. Most titles are available for immediate check out, but some will require a short wait as they are ordered from other regional talking book libraries. Call TBABS at 503-378-5389 or 800-452-0292 for more information.
2008 QEM & SCHOOL LIBRARIES REPORT AVAILABLE
The 2008 Quality Education Model (QEM) final report is now posted on the School Library Services section of the State Library web page. At the request of the School Library Consultant, a contact at the Oregon Department of Education creates a school library staffing and materials expenditures report which is generated from data that school districts submit to the state annually. The Consultant compares this information to the staffing and materials expenditures standards set by the Quality Education Commission to determine which schools had libraries that met QEM. For the 2006-07 school year, 46 of 1,263 schools, or 3.64%, met those standards. That is a drop of 15 schools from last year's results. Beaverton, Neah-Kah-Nie, and Woodburn school districts had a high proportion of their school libraries that met QEM. Hopefully this information, when presented with research that shows the positive impact school librarians make on student learning, will help interested parties make a case for strong school library programs in their districts. For a list of schools that met QEM, see Appendix A in the report. Contact Jennifer Maurer or call 503-378-5011 for more information.

Other Library News

CENTRAL LIBRARY NAMED PORTLAND'S FAVORITE BUILDING
To honor Oregon's sesquicentennial, the Bosco-Milligan Foundation conducted a poll to determine the 150 Most Favorite Buildings in Portland. Getting the most votes, not surprisingly, was the Central Library, a building beloved by generations of Portlanders since it was built in 1913. The Georgian-style building was designed by A.E. Doyle who also designed the second most favorite building, the old U.S. Bank Building, built in 1916. In the early 1990s the Central Library saw extensive renovations and improvements to bring it up to the standards of a modern library. In the past it has been reported that the Central Library gets more annual foot traffic than any other building in the state, including the Rose Garden.
OREGON POET HONORED BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Mary Szybist, an assistant professor of English at Lewis and Clark College, was selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan to receive a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. Szybist was only one of two poets selected for the honor nationwide. She will receive a $10,000 fellowship, and she gave a reading at the Library of Congress in February. She plans to give another reading this fall at Lewis and Clark College that will be sponsored by the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress and the Oregon Center of the Book at the State Library. Szybist is the author of Granted (2003) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
NORTHWEST CENTRAL IS NEW AND IMPROVED
Thanks to an LSTA grant from the Oregon State Library, Northwest Central has been given a brand new look by the professionals at Insite Web Publishing. When you visit Northwest Central you'll find lots of ways to learn. Click the Events tab to find online and in-person trainings, conferences, and meetings. The Resources tab is your gateway to tutorials, presentations, handouts, web links and more. Try out the Speakers tab to find a local expert to invite to your library. Click the Join Now button to become a member of this community of learners. Post your events to the calendar and share your ideas and learning tools. Handouts and presentations from the 2009 Oregon Library Association Conference will be posted to Northwest Central to prevent printout waste. Type "OLA 2009" into the search box or browse the topic categories to see conference presentations. This community-driven continuing education website serves Oregon, Washington and beyond. It's currently supported by Portland Community College Library. Questions or comments can be sent to admin at nwcentral.org or the Northwest Central Advisory Group member nearest you.
FREE HEALTH REFERENCE TRAINING 
"An Ounce of Prevention: Health Reference Basics" will be broadcast on April 16 from 9:00 am - 10:30 am. This webcast is part of the Soaring to Excellence 2009 - Back to Basics training series. Staff from Oregon libraries may participate in this webcast at no charge. This training series is a staff development opportunity in the best sense of the term. It gives staff a solid framework for problem-solving in today's complex library environment and they are cost-effective ways for staff to stay current and informed on libraries' use of technology. You and your staff can maximize these opportunities by bringing a group of interested staff together to watch; organize discussions about the impact of the shows' content on your library; call, fax, or email questions to the panelists during the program-it's interactive! And, follow up with a discussion on what next steps your library can take. For more information go to BCR.
These webcasts are made available through the Bibliographic Center for Research (BCR) and the College of DuPage. BCR membership for all Oregon libraries is paid for through the Oregon State Library with LSTA funds. DVDs of this webcast and previous webcasts are available via ILL from the Oregon State Library.

PENDLETON PUBLIC LIBRARY RECEIVES NATIONAL GRANT
The International City/County Management Association announced grant awards of $500,000 to nine cities, towns, and counties to support new projects developed by local governments that utilize public libraries to address critical local needs and provide services that strengthen their communities. The Public Library Innovation Grants are funded through ICMA's partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Pendleton Public Library Wired for Safety project will ride the crest of increased teen energy in the library and throughout the community. Using a mix of technology (a city-wide wireless network and other enhancements) and expanded services (programs for teens and community safety involvement programs), the project will partner the strength and security of local law enforcement with the empowering culture of the public library to create an environment for accessing information that is comfortable and welcoming for a diverse demographic mix of citizens. The project will pool both human and financial resources from the City of Pendleton police department, public library, facilities department, and additional grant funds to achieve the goals of the project.


P.S. (From the State Librarian)

The book world saw its own version of March Madness last month as the two e-book giants, Amazon and Sony, went head to head. 
Amazon took an early lead in the contest by announcing the Kindle 2, a great improvement over the original Kindle e-book reader. Not only does it have a much better design, but it can read to you with what I find to be a very listenable synthesized voice (check out Jeff Bezos' demo). It also keeps your place in the book or newspaper or magazine so you can combine reading and listening, something car commuters will appreciate, I'm sure. Amazon already led Sony in the number of books available in its e-book store (240,000 versus less than 100,000), but that was about to change.
In basketball, when you're behind, it sometimes helps to bring in a big man. Think Shaq or the Trail Blazers' Greg Oden. On March 18th, Sony brought in a big man. Google. Sony announced a deal with Google that would make about a half million pre-1923 public domain books that Google has digitized available for free from the Sony Reader store. With that announcement their inventory instantly became twice as big as Amazon's.
Never mind that most of these public domain books will be unappealing to the average reader. Sony is hoping that consumers will opt for their Reader over the Kindle based on the size of their inventory and the availability of free books.
And this might just be the first manifestation of an ongoing business relationship between Google and Sony that could eventually bring hundreds of thousands of in-copyright but out-of-print books to the Sony store, as Google implements the settlement it reached with two publishers associations last fall. The settlement allows Google to sell access to these more recent books, so long as it shares the proceeds with publishers and authors. These books, collectively, have much greater sales potential than the public domain books. They won't be free.
And where does this leave libraries? Well the irony, of course, is that the 500,000 public domain titles that Google is making available to Sony (for an undisclosed price) came from the academic research libraries that partnered with Google several years ago. So will the next batch of in-copyright books, if Sony manages to get them as well. And for now, libraries are left on the outside looking in. Both the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader are proprietary devices that have little practical application in libraries, given their cost of ownership and restrictions on their use. 
Maybe it's time that libraries band together and develop an affordable e-book reader that we can begin to build our own post-Gutenberg business around. And while we are at it, we can quit giving away our assets, and possibly our future, to giant corporations. - Jim Scheppke

Contacts at the Oregon State Library

Technical Assistance: 503-932-1004.

Library Development: 503-378-2525, MaryKay Dahlgreen, Jennifer Maurer, Darci Hanning, Ann Reed, Mary Mayberry, Katie Anderson.

Talking Book and Braille Services: 503-378-5389, Susan Westin.

Government Research and Electronic Services: 503-378-5030, Robert Hulshof-Schmidt.

State Librarian: 503-378-4367, Jim Scheppke.

LTLO Editor: 503-378-2464, April Baker.
Letter to Libraries Online is published monthly by the Oregon State Library. Editorial office: LTLO, Oregon State Library, 250 Winter St. NE, Salem, Oregon 97301-3950, 503-378-2464, editor: April Baker
Letter to Libraries Online is available free of charge and is available only in electronic form on the publications page at the Oregon State Library's homepage: http://www.oregon.gov/OSL. Opinions expressed in the articles are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Oregon State Library. News items or articles should be sent to April Baker, or mailed to LTLO, Oregon State Library, 250 Winter St. NE, Salem, Oregon 97301-3950.
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April Baker
Administrative Services Coordinator
Oregon State Library
250 Winter St. NE
Salem, OR 97301-3950
Phone: 503.378.2464
Fax: 503.585.8059 
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