Do you listen to books?  I do.  Anywhere and anytime.  I am very particular about the books I download on my MP3 player.  It dawned on me one day, that I can not listen to some books because of the narrator’s voice or style.   Why is that? 

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The SALS staff is surrounded by books.  There are new books being processed, books being sorted for the delivery and Advanced Reader Copies.   I asked the SALS staff to share with me their favorite book, their worst book and their guilty pleasure book read this year.  The question that seemed to be the easiest to answer was worst book.   Included in this category: “Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown,  “Fool” by Christopher Moore and the refrain - life is too short to finish reading a bad book.

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The Albany Public Library will no longer use the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC).  Libraries throughout the country are rethinking DDC.  A recent survey listed some reasons libraries should abandon the DDC.  Some of the results were:  Patrons may have trouble understanding the online catalog,  some patrons feel intimidated by the DDC and some patrons like to go straight to the shelves and they find that the DDC doesn’t pull topics together as well as the bookstore model (which, by the way has 52 categories for nonfiction).

When serving our communities, does better signage help? Does the bookstore model serve the customer better?  Do libraries use the DDC for library staff? 

Happy Holidays

Sara