Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Book Review: The New OPL Sourcebook

I checked out The New OPL Sourcebook from the library, hoping it would be helpful to my job. OPL stands for one-person library and well, that's exactly what I am at work! Plus, the author is from Cleveland (yay!) and has a blog that I read semi-regularly so I had high hopes that it would be useful. The first half of the book consisted of an overview of a lot of the basic principles of libraranship and honestly seemed like a retread of grad school for me so I was pretty disappointed. I can see how it would be helpful to someone who hasn't been to library school recently but that's not me. The second half of the book provides all kinds of useful links and reading suggestions on pretty much every topic under the sun. I love to read recommended links because you never know what you'll find and there definitely were some promising links that I still need to check out (and will probably post here) but most of them were for librarians in general and were not specific to one-person libraries. Plus, anytime someone publishes a book with Web links usually means that a number of them are outdated and extinct by the time the book comes out so I am expecting that to be the case once I start checking them out.

Overall, it was an okay read, but I'm glad I didn't purchase it. I'd give it a B-.

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