We’re officially beginning the migration of our catalog from a 13-year old in-house server whose performance can only be called "less than satisfactory"–I’d use stronger language considering what I’ve heard about the device’s past history both at the technical and political level, but I’ve only been here a couple of months (not even) and speaking ill of those no longer employed at MCNY seems rude–to a spanking new CMS account at SirsiDynix’s off-site servers. A proxy server will be brought online soon after and all operations should (I hope) be finished by the last week in August which would give us about a week to field test the new systems before classes begin after Labor Day.
At any rate, as I think about these things, it strikes me yet again just how much of our modern libraries’ livelihoods depends on resources we take for granted. Electricity is one. We don’t think about it much but so very much of our work depends on it being readily handy at the touch of a button or the flick of a switch. As an example of this we were emplored by the college president some weeks ago to please turn our desktop PCs off when we left the office at night. Doing so, she said, would save us roughly thirty thousand dollars a year in wasted energy. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of electric power.
We don’t, granted, need electricity to run our libraries. But it makes everything infinitely easier. I mean, we don’t need XML or MARC or JPEG2000 or a million of the other modern tools we (all right, I ) use on a nearly daily basis. A case in point that’s been making the rounds has been the BBC’s recent story of the Bibliomulas, the book-carrying mules who are led through the mountains of Venezuela to promote reading to the country’s rural population. By the reporter’s account, people there seem to approve. People like to read, and they’re just happy that they haven’t been forgotten about.
Of course, in rural Venezuela, electricity is an option, and an expensive one at that. And I confess that I worry when I realize that I’m paying ConEd twice as much this year for power as I did last year without using twice as much of the stuff. And when I note that I note a major difference between the library here and the one I left at the Academy . . . MCNY doesn’t have a card catalog. A lot of libraries built after the 1980s don’t have them, either. Which means that electricity isn’t really an option anymore, it really is a necessity and we really do need it. I can’t pack our reserve and reference collection on the backs of mules to take them to students who might live in Brooklyn, Queens or upper Manhattan. The simple truth is that once power gets to be a certain price we’re screwed.
I’m not suggesting this is imminent but I do wonder sometimes if we librarians are as smart as we like to think we are (meaning smarter than me.)
At any rate, we’re migrating the catalog. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
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