While we spend our time and budget money on what we think will be the next media  desire, there exists a huge welcoming font for those items for which we no longer deem a need. Operation Medical Libraries has grown exponentially with donations of medical texts from hospitals all over the country with Afghanistan as the ultimate destination.  Decades of war have reduced current Afghan nurses and doctors to instruments of chance–doing the work on the blind.  The devastation of their hospitals is being soothed slightly by this inspired program.  Read the New York Times article here.

As we continue to debate patron-driven coordinated collection development, it would behoove us to address all angles.  This Library Journal article by Ken St. Andre, Collection Development:  Not Ready For Boot Hill makes a very cogent point that depending on what may be requested at the moment will leave big holes in genres and should that be the case?

An alternative to planning and trying to decide what "might" be useful to a particular patronage is to let that group decide what works for them.  An example of that would be the purchase-on-demand programs that are driving resource sharing and collection development programs all over.  Harvard University, however, is ramping that up a notch and letting students, faculty and staff develop library services by proposing services to the school's Library Lab.

"Harvard has a long history of library innovation," notes Stuart Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and faculty director of the Office for Scholarly Communication. "But many of these innovations were brought about by high-level planning efforts. The Library Lab is intended to unleash the entrepreneurship of individual members of the Harvard community, enabling them to experiment with ways of improving library services, and leveraging their creativity with concrete support."

This is a wonderful opportunity to tailor make the institution into what that particular body needs at that point in time lending itself to constant change.  Read the proposal.

The Pearl Street Grill & Brewery (76 Pearl St., Buffalo) will be the place to be on Wednesday, October 6 from 4:30pm–7:30pm for WNYLRC's 44th Annual Meeting of the Membership.  Registration will begin September 1 and more info will be coming your way via e-mail and in your mailbox but we want to make sure your calendar is marked for these festivities!

As our year-long focus on disaster planning and response/recovery continues, the DHP Regional Archivist Heidi Bamford has provided a set of worksheets that you can use to asses your institution's facilities. There are three pages in the set. The first is a brief set of questions that addresses the general conditions of a facility where historical, archival and/or library materials are kept, including a link to an article about assessing risks from the Northeast Document Conservation Center. The second page of the file is a chart with a good-better-best schema that addresses the issues raised in the first facility assessment worksheet. The good-better-best tool will help you evaluate where your facility is today and where you need to be, including moderate options if top conditions cannot be realized for whatever reason (finances, staffing, space, etc). This is a helpful way for an organization to get a big picture look at where they are in terms of what conditions exist that may pose potential threats to collections. Once potential threats and risks are identified, the third page of the file asks the institution to list how facilities may be improved.

To access the worksheets, visit the Disaster Preparedness page on our web site and click on the link for Facility Assessment Tools.