Jackson County Library

Being the up-to-date librarians you are, I am sure you've already heard about the Jackson County Library's closing.
NPR covered it this morning. Listen to the story from Jeff Brady. National media is great for raising national attention.

Of course I, in my rose-colored-glasses world, wish the national media would pay attention when things are going great and we're serving more people than ever before in more ways than ever before...but I guess headlines like LIBRARY THREATENED TO CLOSE sells more papers/attracts more listeners than LIBRARY CREATES SMARTER CITIZENRY. Which headline inspires you to read it?

Incidentally, the Jackson County Library created a nice calculator page on their site to help you put a dollar value on their services. I am sure they would be happy to share the back-end of their coding with your library's Webmaster, should you want to implement a tool like this on YOUR site.

Their blog is also well worth reading. Especially see the "My Library" stories from library users.

I hope our National Advocacy project with the Gates Foundation can help raise awareness about the importance of library funding, with both consumers and elected officials. That's the idea, anyway. Did I mention I am the project manager for this, on the OCLC side?

Side note: As part of our project, we actually talked to State Librarian of Oregon, Jim Scheppke.