Tribune TV Guide

As kids, this was the first thing we’d look for as soon as the Sunday newspaper arrived (that and the funnies of course):

Overpriced E-Books No Bargain for Students

I missed this article on ways to save money on college textbooks when it first came out. Most of it your average college student would know by heart after the first quarter or semester -- they'd know it that is, if they wanted to avoid bankruptcy. But what really caught my eye was this final warning from 'textbooks advocate' Nicole Allen about e-books:

The one option Allen warned students against buying was e-book versions of texts. A number of publishers offer online books for purchase, she noted, but they are one-year rentals.

By and large, the e-books are available only through an Internet connection, and many restrict the number of pages you can print at one time.

In this case, the calculus e-book cost $100, about $40 more than Chegg's rental and only about $20 less than buying a used hard copy. And you have nothing to resell. [Kristof, Kathy M., "Turning the Page on Pricey Textbooks", Chicago Tribune (9/4/2009):1,29.]

Basically they're saying, why should you rent it for a limited time when for just $20 more it can be yours forever? I think this kind of calculation is absolutely de rigueur not only for students but for institutions thinking of investing in these potentially ephemeral yet costly products.

Tribune Launches Much Improved Site Redesign

It's 2009 and the Chicago Tribune has only now figured out what it takes to design a website. Still, you have to hand it to them, it's a vast improvement over the previous iteration. They even went back to the old letterhead.

Innovation Good and Bad

Aaron Schmidt rightfully quotes himself with pride from an article in the Chicago Tribune:

"There's a lot of dead wood in libraries, and I think there's a lot of administrations that are kind of just biding their time for retirement and don’t feel like putting forth a lot of effort," he said. "I think there’s a general culture of resistance to change. That needs to go away."

He's right of course but I think the problem is a bit more complicated.

"Dead wood" after all is an easy enough concept to grasp: You're either dead or you're not.

But if you go back and survey the record, you'll find that almost as common as the resistance to new ideas has been the lack of resistance to bad ideas. I mean, it's not as if we've been sitting around all these years doing nothing.

All you have to do is look at the very subject of the article that Aaron is referring to, namely, IM in libraries.

For years, we had no IM in libraries. Instead we had "Chat Reference" using quite pricey applications that promised such wonders as "page pushing" and "co-browsing". All I can say is: Où sont les Neiges d'antan?

It'd be an interesting (if painful) exercise to go through the library literature of the past 10-15 years and catalog the initiatives that failed, were abandoned or never quite got off the ground.

I don't bring this up as some sort of argument against change -- I mean, me? Rather it's healthy in understanding how true and meaningful change can occur, to acknowledge or at least to be aware of the boo-boos of the past. On occasion, the same dynamic can still be at work today.

No Outside Influence in Hiring of Branch Library Managers

Columnist Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune has raised a fracas because CPL Commissioner Mary Demsey wasn't nice enough to him when he suggested a possible hire for Branch Library Manager.

He quotes on his blog the offending email from Demsey:

You suggest that outside individuals should be allowed to influence the city's hiring processes. You are wrong.

...

Your suggestions that outside influences such as community mobilization or aldermanic input should be involved in the particular situation about which you write are absolutely inappropriate.

Zorn of all people should realize how sensitive an issue this is. Opening up hiring decisions of people supposed to run branch libraries to outside pressure groups _is_ inappropriate.

You can imagine what a can of worms this would open up -- here in the city of Chicago.

It's not surprising then that Commissioner Demsey is so adamant in her reply. She's got 50 aldermen and a mayor who'd love to do the same thing (and that's just the elected officials).

UPDATE: Note, this might be the dumbest hiring decision ever made but if that's your 'beef' then argue it as such.

The notion that you're going to have outside pressure groups involved in the hiring of library branch managers is an administrative nightmare.

Props to the Chicago Public Schools

 From the Chicago Tribune:

After-school tutoring, better-trained teachers and new classroom assessments in Chicago public schools helped drive an "extraordinary" increase in state scores that improved the fortunes of nearly every city elementary school last year, district officials said.

This is just one year's results and from year to year there are enough changes in the way the test is given to make drawing longer-term conclusions problematic. That said, anyone familiar with our school system knows how hard everyone works -- particularly the teachers!

These results are a great credit to their efforts.

Keep It Fields!

 As anyone familiar with Chicago knows, changing the name of "Marshall Fields" to "Macy's" by Federated Department Stores is a sore subject around here.

Now the Chicago Tribune reports:

Wall Street is concerned that the loss this fall of some longstanding retail names such as Field's in the changeover of some 400 stores to Macy's by parent company Federated Department Stores Inc. has hurt sales at some locations.

Apparently they didn't get as much business as they anticipated over the Christmas holiday. And why would they? It was the name that brought people in -- and Federated went and changed that. So now they've fired the store manager but it's hard to see how that'll help. They've really driven the entire chain into the ground.