5 #blogjune

Obviously 5 stands for Ranganathan's five laws of library science. A while back, the Library Society of the World was doing its thing and making stuff and having conversations and I got inspired to pull together the results of some of all this into a wee poster of the Five Laws as told by Lolcat (in, of course, Comic Sans). Ever since then, I've never been able to find it when I want it [now have found it again but Blogger won't let me upload it; will edit this parenthetical with a link once I'm home with more tools], but I do have a printout on my pinboard, right above my Cult of Done Manifesto. (The other day -- our office walls are made of glass -- I caught a student looking in and reading it. "Gee," I thought in amusement, "that makes me look professional." I left it there of course, but haven't quite brought myself to add next to it my entry to the LSW colouring contest.) Anyway, "Every book its reader" has been giving me thinky thoughts of late regarding, in particular, books written in languages other than English. We do teach other languages of course, and have students from other countries, so sometimes such books are useful in our collection. But sometimes we get offered donations which I think are more useful on our disposals table for students to just take away (and luckily often the donator agrees) and sometimes there are books that (if it weren't for multiple complicating factors) rather than move them to storage I'd love to be able to send them to a library whose users all read the appropriate language and the books would be made far better use of than they can ever be here.