The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy: Our Espresso Book Machine Experience « The Scholarly Kitchen

The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy: Our Espresso Book Machine Experience « The Scholarly Kitchen - a reflection on one academic library's use of an Expresso Book Machine, that gives you the potential of accessing three million digital titles and printing them out quickly on demand. Both that number and the adjective "quickly" come with asterisks, but it's interesting to contemplate what my library (and yours) would look like with one of these on hand.

Automated underground library storage - cool!

Take a look at this YouTube video "The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library: How It Works" to see a way to store books beneath a library and retrieve them on request for patrons. And there's a cool dome to study in! It's another approach to focusing on public space, moving collections out of the center, beyond the removal of physical items and replacing them with digital versions. Very interesting.

SXSW 2011: The Year of the Librarian - The Atlantic

Here's a great post from the blog on The Atlantic's site about the South by Southwest Conference - it features a quote from Justine Grimes that I loved: "'Librarians are the boots on the ground,' Grimes told me. 'We don't care what the tech is, we care about what the user actually needs. That's our mandate.'"

SXSW 2011: The Year of the Librarian - The Atlantic

E-Book Lending Clubs | ALA TechSource

This development fascinates me (both the Amazon decision to allow Kindle users to lend books to one another and the growth of these lending exchanges) - see a list of E-Book Lending Clubs (from ALA TechSource). The downside for libraries is still that you can only lend a title you own once (forever, apparently). Otherwise, I wondered if joining one of these services might be a way to share the Kindle books we've purchased with our patrons (and a larger set of patrons) who might not have Kindles, but would have Kindle apps on their mobile devices, Macs, and PCs. Well, still waiting for the world to change. 8-)