What do you think about ?

My (minor) pet peeve is the time books spend “in transit” during ILL. I’d love to see some data showing how long ILL books actually take to arrive.

To Royce’s point, public library catalogs should include all of gutenberg.org, as well as other online resources, so a search would return those as well as physical books, with clickable links for direct access to the online resources.

It’s true that public libraries and library systems vary enormously in the resources that are available to them, for both collections and building web sites, but local communities are smart enough to be able to interpret transparent performance data on their local library.

“in the fact that public libraries across the country (and world) each provide vastly different experiences. I can’t help but think that some consistency would do us good, but wow, how can that happen”

I’ve been part of several discussions on this point over the past years, and have always thought the answer lies in what I read about tennis some time ago:

Amateur tennis players win by not making the mistakes their amateur opponents make; professional tennis players win by playing better and hitting winning shots.

I believe many libraries are employing sub-standard practices they could correct if they paid attention to what was normal practice at the majority of libraries — i.e., stop making avoidable mistakes. Nothing heroic, just basic Library 101.

How can that happen? Put together teams of 3 librarians from successful libraries who would visit those libraries that volunteered for an audit and makeover: one and a half days of observation and evaluation, one half day of internal team review and planning, and one day of presenting and planning recommended changes.

Obviously you’d want to make sure a library was ready and willing, and was correctly positioned; you’d want to see some preparatory work, and as follow up, there would be some on-line post evaluation support.

Would many librarians volunteer three days of vacation to do this? I imagine so. Would it be possible to structure it so there wasn’t much travel cost, and could a mechanism be found to fund it? Sure, I bet IMLS would bite.

Could it be organized? Yes. Could it be organized to run efficiently, effectively and without a bureacracy of people who would want to meet to plan it to death? I truly doubt it, sad to say.

The best solution, is to really convince yourself that you only like books available in public domain on the internets.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

For those into audiobooks LibriVox is kinda neat.
http://librivox.org/