Weekly reader

Still Here
"Sometime last year, the New York Public Library (NYPL) retired its pneumatic-tube system, which had been used to request books for more than a century. This change was made without ceremony or fanfare; I learned of it unexpectedly, when I walked into the catalog room prepared to deliver a call slip to a clerk behind a large wooden desk, only to find a notice directing me elsewhere. For a few moments, I stood there, unmoored, before moving along as instructed. That pneumatic call system had changed little since the library’s open-ing in 1911." --Mark Lamster, Metropolis Magazine, 7/20/12

Opening Ceremonies
"A lot has changed since I first started working at the Little College on the Prairie. When I arrived, one of my first tasks was to explain to the community how to use the online catalog, which arrived a month or two before I did. Searching involved typing commands and search words into one of a handful of terminals that were surrounded by the card catalog that we weren’t quite ready to dispose of. A few years later, we were able to search for articles through those terminals with their beady yellow characters. The library filled with the chatter of dot matrix printers. We dabbled in CD-ROM-based databases until the Web became the standard means of delivery. It’s a long way from the days when the H. W. Wilson indexes and Psychological Abstracts filled the shelves near the reference desk." -- Barbara Fister, Library Babel Fish, 7/18/12

 Tweet Summertime

"For our public librarian colleagues it is a busy summer reading with and taking care of all the children out of school for the summer.  For us school librarian folks, summer can be an opportunity to re-charge through professional learning.  At my school district’s Summer Conference, one of our keynote speakers was Angela Maiers, @AngelaMaiers,  who passionately spoke about the power of social media in today’s world.  Because of a session with her, I was pecked by the Twitter bird, and have become an avid fan.  If you haven’t already been pecked, as literally millions have, maybe I can entice you to join the Twitter universe with some ideas and information I’ve learned from my favorite tweets and tweeters."-- Debra Marshall, ALSC Blog, 7/14/12

6 Ways to Drive More Pinterest Engagement
"Are you engaging your fans on Pinterest? Pinterest has been growing at an amazing pace. Recently, comScore reported that Pinterest grew by 4377% since May 2011. This is because people like to be engaged with images. The good thing about Pinterest is that every new post is an image around which a lot of engagement can be driven. So there’s great potential to drive a lot of engagement on this social media network." -- Mitt Ray, Social Media Examiner, 7/17/12