Friday, April 25, 2003

Friday Notes 2.  An on-line resource for NEILSA Librarians Other LSA blogs: SWILSA House blog at: http://www.swilsa.blogspot.com You should go and see what a really nice day by day post blog looks like. Nice colors & super job Karen. /* DEADLINES & DATES: I'll try to list all the upcoming dates of importance below, you will have to mine for the details.  Upcoming Grant Application Deadlines All IMLS grant and award program deadlines can be viewed at: http://www.imls.gov/grants/dedln/index.htm     County Meetings Scheduled: If your county meeting is not on the schedule please contact NEILSA •    Allamakee County Meeting •    Black Hawk County Meeting - When called - seldom •    Bremer County Meeting - October 3, 2003 @ 7:30 Sumner •    Buchanan County Meeting - October 28,2003 @ 7:00 Independence •    Butler County Meeting  - •    Chickasaw County Meeting •    Clayton County Meeting - October 2,2003 @ 7:30(?) Strawberry Point •    Delaware County Meeting - May 13, 2003 @ 7:00  Edgewood P L •    Dubuque County •    Fayette County Meeting - October 23, 2003 @ 13:00 Hawkeye •    Grundy County Meeting - All meetings start at 9:00 am - 2003 schedule         4/28 @ Dike, 6/28 @ Grundy Center, 10/27 @ Reinbeck •    Howard County Meeting   - •    Winneshiek County Meeting - November 6, 2003 @ 7:00 Decorah Meetings thisa week CE: Special Workshops: One & two hour workshops at Fall & Spring county meetings, item specific workshops.     OTHER CE: You must register with the listed provider.  Usually you will need to submit a "Learning Activity Written Summery" is now available as on online form that you can submit electronically. It may be found at:  http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/for-ia-libraries/continuing-ed/online-learningactivitywrittensummary.htm This is the form to complete if you want continuing education credit for  attending a teleconference and/or watching a videotape of a national  teleconference or a library related continuing education program. Complete details about recertfication are available at http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/for-ia-libraries/continuing-ed/recertification.html     HIRING, EVALUATIONS AND TERMINATION'S WORKSHOP East Central Library is sponsoring this workshop on Wednesday, May 7 from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Marion Public Library, 1095 6th Ave., Marion. Cost is $15 which includes lunch. There will be 5 contact hours. The first half of this workshop will focus on specific practical techniques for getting the best people for your library. Recruiting, advertising and interviewing will be discussed. In the hiring section of the workshop we will discuss deciding what traits and skills are needed for different positions and then some specific questions and techniques for determining which applicants would be a good fit for each position. Employee evaluations and communications designed to enhance employee performances will be discussed with sample evaluation tools used. Handling termination's in a positive way that avoids legal pitfalls will also be discussed. The instructor, Vicki Hibbert, has 10 years of experience as a library director and 10 years experience as a library consultant. As Director of the Clive Public Library she hired the entire staff after the library was founded in 1999. Deadline to register is May 2. Please contact the ECLSA office if you would like to register. Mail check to: East Central Library Services 222 3rd St. SE, Suite 402 Cedar Rapids IA 52401         Self-Directed Learning Opportunities: http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/Certification/alternate.htm ANNOUNCEMENTS: This is a reminder that May 1st is the deadline to submit a commitment form to purchase Spanish or Russian language materials through the OCLC program. There must be 20 or more libraries participating for the program to proceed. For details, copies of supporting materials and the commitment form, please go to: http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/for-ia-libraries/Discounts/iowa-group-spanish-and-russian.htm     In the EYE-OPENER from NWILSA: x (see) Gates Foundation Grants News:            Winnebago Spectrum Suite is on sale now for $1995.00. It has been reduced in price from $4995.00. This is an automated card catalog program like Manchester and Colesburg have. Of course there are more expenses than $1995, but this would buy the software package.  This offer expires on June 30, 2003.     New LINKS of interest: 100 books for every pre-schooler, from the Chicago Public Library.: http://www.chipublib.org/008subject/003cya/kinder.html Deb Tobias  -  ECLS Consultant Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children Recommendations from those who know http://www.nea.org/readacross/resources/catalist.html http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2003/nf20030422_3395_db028.htm Laura Bush, Your Country Needs You [BusinessWeek] This is the summary of an interesting study about the Internet and how people use it; very pertinent to rural libraries. http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/ reports.asp?Report=88&Section=ReportLevel1&Field=Level1ID&ID=378 In 2000, the State Library of Florida commissioned a report on the economic benefits from public libraries in Florida. Here's the url: http://dlis.dos.state.fl.us/bld/finalreport/ Thanks to our State Librarian for this link YOU WROTE: snippets from your e-mails: Dear Iowa Library Community This is an official legislative alert regarding HF691, the "Reinvention" bill, which will greatly impact municipal funding and in turn impact library funding. Please call, fax, or email your representatives now to tell them that this bill will have a devastating effect on local libraries. Following is information from the League of Cities website regarding this legislation. "Legislators refer to the State budget balancing proposals of the Public Strategies Group as the "Reinvention" bill. This bill, with cuts totaling approximately $128 million, is expected to be filed on 4/21/03 and quickly taken up by the House Appropriations Committee. A draft version of the bill shows $70 million in the cuts coming from cities and counties by eliminating the personal property tax replacement credit and franchise tax payment, and acceleration of phase out of the machinery & equipment replacement credit. The mandate eliminations or flexibility improvements, such as removing the $5 cap from parking fines, won't begin to replace the lost revenue. Legislators are reluctantly supporting the bill, with excuses ranging from "we have no choice" to "cities haven't experienced the budget constraints the State has" to blaming the cuts on the governor's consultants. - The State DOES have choices, ranging from revenue enhancements (tobacco taxes, Internet sales taxes, combined corporate reporting, and keeping the cash reserve at 5% instead of increasing to 10%, for example) to alternative cuts, including an across-the-board cut. - They are considering an annual bond payment for an economic development package in the approximate amount of the $70 million being cut from cities and counties. Who is paying for what? - They must recognize that eliminating $70 million will result in serious personnel and service cuts now, and property tax increases in the future. - They must address rollback NOW to avoid ADDITIONAL erosion of tax base; the combined effect of permanent cuts and rollback is devastating." Our message is simple, "If you pass these cuts, libraries will be hurt. City and county budgets have already been certified and if the cuts go through now the local governments will have to level massive cuts that will be focused, in many         cases, on libraries." Libraries are the heart of Iowa communities and a source of pride, education, and economic development. Do not support this legislation. This needs your immediate attention. Thank you. Dawn Hayslett Governmental Affairs Iowa Library Association FEEDBACK:     Survey Question: IF you could receive a 20% discount on all ALA Graphics products in the May 2003 catalog,  products in the May Catalog include Teen Read Week (the TRW focus this year is on Poetry) and ALA's new releases for READ posters, would you be interested? When you respond please send replies to Ken at davenport@neilsa.org or use the "comments" link at the bottom of the blog     REPLIES - Gates Foundation Grants News:  Good Morning! In today's EYE-OPENER, I want to share my trip to Seattle last week, where I joined 6 colleagues from our State Library and other LSAs at the Gates Foundation headquarters. We had the opportunity to learn more about the Foundation's U.S. Library Program. And we met staffers from every Foundation Department: from Logistics, to On-Site Training, to Technical Support, to Publications Depts and beyond. As you know by now, the Gates library computers will be rolling into Iowa in early June, with implementation beginning in Southwest Iowa and continuing counter-clockwise around the state. (That puts Northwest libraries at the tail end, but we're patient people:-) In an effort to summarize our time in Seattle, here are some highlights: (A) Foundation staff will call local libraries prior to the on-site trainers going out, to check on the local progress of Internet and networking connections. Ideally all local wiring, cabling, and networking should be in place before the trainers arrive. However, if connectivity is NOT ready for whatever reason, on-site training can still happen using the trainers own laptop computers. (B) As stressed at the BYCA workshops in February, you should--at the very least--unbox the computers, check the shipping list, make sure all equipment has arrived and is in good shape, nothing broken, have the furniture in place, etc. This allows the trainers to spend more time on software instead of on set-up. (C) You'll be thrilled with the set of publications and manuals coming with your PCs: Quick Software Guides, Web Guides, The Computer Companion, and more. These manuals will be great for staff and public use. (D) Actual training happens in 3 tiers: Tier 1 was the BYCA workshops in February. Tier 2 happens on-site from June through September, with an overview of the software including Office Suite, etc. Tier 3 is meant as a follow-up to address specific staff needs (as expressed in your training needs assessment surveys from February) (E) Additional training for those libraries receiving content servers: 13 classes available, offered at the 2 granted training lab locations in Council Bluffs and/or West Union. There are essentially 3 Gates Foundation supported uses for the content servers: as resource sharing, or as a web server, or as a security/ISA server. Foundation technicians strongly suggest that libraries pick just one use. (F) And, in the coming months, there's even more classes available at the Foundation headquarters in Seattle. These Seattle-based classes include: IT = Information Technology, Public Library Training Strategies, The Combo Class (combines the first 2; can follow 1 track exclusively or mix-and-match) Class for Council Bluffs and West Union as granted training labs; Class for 100K libraries (believing Cedar Rapids P.L. is the only qualifier in Iowa) Obviously, there's lots of layers to the U.S. Library Program. So we'll all watch and learn as it unfolds around Iowa in the coming months:-)     END PLATE: Long Announcements, Supporting Documents, & other "stuff" ------------------------------------------------------ The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act) became law on October 26, 2001, largely in response to the events of September 11, 2001. This law amended over 15 federal statutes, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other statutes that govern criminal procedure, computer fraud and abuse, foreign intelligence, wiretapping, immigration, and the privacy of student records. These amendments broadly expand the powers of federal law enforcement agencies investigating cases involving foreign intelligence and international terrorism, and grant greater authority to the Federal Bureau of Investigations and other law enforcement agencies to gain access to business records when investigating terrorist activities. Business records could include medical records, educational records and library records either in paper or electronic format. The new law contains no requirement of "particularity," which means an entire library database may be seized, not just individual patron records. The USA PATRIOT Act also expands the laws governing wiretaps and "trap and trace" phone devices to Internet and electronic communications. Collectively, these enhanced search and surveillance powers pose the greatest challenge to privacy and confidentiality in the library. In addition to granting broad powers to law enforcement agencies, the USA PATRIOT Act amendments also impose a "gag order" on all warrants issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The "gag order" prevents the library and all library staff from disclosing to any other party, including the patron whose records are the subject of the search warrant, that the library was served with a warrant or that records were produced in accordance with the warrant. The existence of the "gag order" does not mean that libraries and librarians served with such a search warrant cannot consult with their legal counsel concerning the warrant. A library and its employees can still seek legal advice concerning the warrant and request that the library's legal counsel be present during the actual search provided for by the warrant. To: Intellectual Freedom Action News <ifaction@ala1.ala.org>; You have been sent this message from dwood@ala.org as a courtesy of the Washington Post - http://www.washingtonpost.com To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54029-2003Apr18.html Burn a Country's Past and You Torch Its Future By Robert Darnton It happened here, too. The British burned our national library in 1814. It wasn't much of a library, to be sure -- just a collection of about 3,000 volumes assembled for the use of senators and representatives in the new capitol being built in the wilderness of Washington, D.C. But in destroying it, the British invaders struck at the heart of what would develop into a national identity. Do libraries really matter for a nation's sense of its self? Evidently Iraqis felt the destruction of their national library, archives and museum in the past week as a loss of their connection to a collective past, something like a national memory. When asked to explain what the National Museum of Iraq had meant to him, a security guard answered, in tears, "It was beautiful. The museum is civilization." Even some of the looters are reportedly beginning to return what they had carried off, as if in response to a need to heal a self-inflicted wound. The great collections in Baghdad bore testimony to the beginnings of what much of the world views as civilization. Some of its treasures were 7,000 years old, and they provided evidence about the earliest and perhaps the greatest achievement in human history, the invention of writing, somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates 5,000 years ago. True, the damage may have been less than was feared at first, and archaeologists can study other clay tablets dug up from the ruins of the world's first libraries, the Sumerian temples of ancient Mesopotamia. But nothing remains of Iraq's National Library, which was burned to the ground along with the Ministry for Religious Affairs and its priceless collection of Korans, some of them more than a thousand years old. The library burned by the British in the War of 1812 was four years old. Yet its loss was a national trauma, or at least so it seemed to Thomas Jefferson, who had a powerful sense of what libraries could contribute to the civic spirit of the nation. Already, in 1791, he had deplored the damage inflicted by the Revolutionary War on the historical record of America. In a letter to Ebenezer Hazard, who was about to publish two volumes of state papers from the colonial archives, he wrote: "Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices. The late war has done the work of centuries in this business. The lost cannot be recovered, but let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident." As soon as he learned of the loss of Congress's first library, Jefferson offered to sell it his own, which was twice as big, a magnificent collection of 6,487 volumes that would be valued conservatively at $23,950. The proposal provoked some partisan oratory about the "finery and philosophical nonsense" -- much of it French -- that Jefferson had collected, and it passed Congress by a margin of only four votes. But the Library of Congress stands today as the embodiment of our national memory. Imagine a horde of vandals burning it and the National Archives while an alien army guarded the FBI headquarters and the Treasury Department, and you may have some notion of how Iraqis felt when American troops erected a protective cordon around the ministries of oil and of the interior while permitting looters to demolish the National Library and ransack the National Museum. As many have remarked, the Mongol invasion of 1258 resulted in less damage to Iraqi civilization than the American invasion of 2003. Jefferson was right. National libraries and museums provide the material from which national identities are built. There are other sources, too -- myths, ceremonies and the other forms of culture studied by anthropologists. But complex societies have been through so much that their history requires constant reassessment. Destroy the documents, and you will damage the collective memory, the sense of self that derives from the ties that bind a people to their ancestors. Libraries and museums are not temples for ancestor worship, but they are crucial for the task of knowing who you are by knowing who you were. That kind of knowledge must be continuously reworked. Destroy the possibility of replenishing it, and you can strangle a civilization. The most famous case is the ancient library of Alexandria, one that supposedly aspired to include every book in the world -- that is, the Hellenistic world from the third century B.C. -- and whose destruction signaled the end of the world of antiquity. Difficult as it is to disentangle the facts from the myths surrounding the library's history, a few points seem clear: No, Mark Antony did not woo Cleopatra by giving her the rival library of Pergamum, nor did the collection in Alexandria at its zenith reach 900,000 papyrus rolls, although it represented the greatest stock of learning available anywhere in the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar did not burn it to the ground in 47 B.C., and the Muslims did not finish it off in a fit of fanaticism after conquering Alexandria in 642. It probably had disintegrated long before that, not from violence but from the rotting of the papyrus. In short, the library of Alexandria did not come to a dramatic end in a way comparable to the National Library in Baghdad. But burning and looting has marked the history of libraries at crucial turning points, beginning with the sack of Athens in 86 B.C., when the Romans carried off the remains of Aristotle's library, the greatest in Greece and the model for the library of Alexandria. In the latest study of the Alexandrian library, Luciano Canfora invokes a series of catastrophes -- Athens, Rome, Pergamum, Antioch, Constantinople -- and concludes sadly: "By the middle of the fourth century, even Rome was virtually devoid of books. . . . Surveying this series of foundations, refoundations and disasters, we follow a thread that links together the various, and mostly vain, efforts of the Hellenistic-Roman world to preserve its books." The loss of the books meant the loss of a civilization. Classicists have been able to piece together pictures of antiquity by picking through the remains, but we probably know only a small fraction of what we might have known, had the libraries survived. The obliteration of civilizations cannot be confined to the remote past, where we can deplore it at a safe distance and in an elegiac mode: To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome. Vandals hack away at cultures all the time. They are doing so today in the jungles of Central America and Southeast Asia. Vast stretches of civilization disappeared irrevocably a few years ago when the libraries of Sarajevo and Bucharest went up in smoke. And the Khmer Rouge may have wiped out much of what can be known about Cambodia's civilization when they destroyed most of the contents of the National Library in Phnom Penh. That in fact was the goal of Pol Pot's army, to obliterate the past and start anew at what they called "Year Zero." Not content with burning the books (at least 80 percent perished), they also killed the librarians (only three of 60 survived). The most valuable books were inscribed on palm leaves. Since the leaves decay in tropical humidity, they had to be recopied every few years by Buddhist monks. But the Khmer Rouge also destroyed the monks, so there was no one left to save what remained of the library. Perhaps the Cambodians can overcome the trauma by turning it to their advantage, as if to say, "Very well, we shall begin again at ground zero, and now we will build something new." Fresh energy of that kind was generated by some of the destruction of the French Revolution. The Bastille was not merely stormed but dismantled, and its stones were sold off as relics of despotism, remnants of a culture to be replaced by a new political order. Something of the sort could happen in Iraq -- but how? How will the Iraqis fuse a national identity out of the diverse cultures that have come apart with the destruction that has robbed them of their common past? Few people appreciate the fragility of civilizations and the fragmentary character of our knowledge about them. Most students believe that what they read in history books corresponds to what humanity lived through in the past, as if we have recovered all the facts and assembled them in the correct order, as if we have it under control, got it down in black on white, and packaged it securely between a textbook's covers. That illusion quickly dissipates for anyone who has worked in libraries and archives. You pick up a scent in a published source, find a reference in a catalogue, follow a paper trail through boxes of manuscripts -- but what do you discover in the end? Only a few fragments that somehow survived as evidence of what other human beings experienced in other times and places. How much has disappeared under char and rubble? We do not even know the extent of our ignorance. Imperfect as they are, therefore, libraries and archives, museums and excavations, scraps of paper and shards of pottery provide all we can consult in order to reconstruct the worlds we have lost. The loss of a library or a museum can mean the loss of contact with a vital strain of humanity. That is what has happened in Baghdad. But when confronted with the loss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared to be unperturbed: "We've seen looting in this country," he explained at a Pentagon briefing. "We've seen riots at soccer games in various countries around the world." Next question. Robert Darnton is the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University. The fine print stuff blogs - Friday Notes 2 AT -  http://radio.weblogs.com/0108327/ NOTICE – DISCLAIMER - pick one, any one will do. MY disclaimer: Basically my opinions are my own, shared by no one else (sometimes), and are not the opinions of my agency, my board, my co-workers, my parents, siblings, relatives, my dogs or most any other know life form.  Except, of course, those very bright concerned, sensitive, perceptive &, in general, well educated, widely read and cultured individuals who wish to share this peculiar road to ruin, as well as a couple of down & out drugged out beatniks from the good old days. OK?  The "Prime Directive" applies. Edited by: Ken Davenport - NEILSA Consultant davenport@neilsa.org COPYLEFT NOTICE 2002: THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt © COPYRIGHT Please note: material found on the web should be assumed to be under copyright and is presented here for purposes of education and research only. NOTE: If credited [via ???] or [from so & so] it is their material and not covered by my "Copyleft" notice.  Ken SOURCE: {Consultant} D:CorelwpdocsFridayNotes0425.wpd  August 2, 2002 BOILER PLATE FOOTNOTES: 1. WARNING: I will be able to give you about a 5 working day warning on deadlines (by e-mail, less otherwise) I have 10 days to reply, if I miss the deadline, well I won't miss, if you miss  ... I'll send it in late but ... 12:00:07 PM    comment []

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