Category Archives: Board

Nuke Indigo

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What I mean is “Eliminate Indigo ‘affiliate links.’ ” It can be done! If you don’t like the fact that the library is now a de facto Heather Reisman sales arm, you can block those links from appearing in your browser.

I noticed the affiliate links a few days before they were announced:

‘Chasing the Perfect’ with indigo.ca buy box

Let’s start a few steps back, though. Goldsbie’s piece in Now does a good job situating the TPL Board’s two obnoxious money-raising gestures – ads on due-date slips and shilling for Indigo – as the aftershock of the budget earthquake of two years ago. Except it took that long for the budget to really be reduced, so I guess the fear was simply ahead of its time.

At any rate, we have here a quote from Janet Davis, the lady who once lectured me in that condescending low voice she has (it’s preferable just to get yelled at).

“If people who can afford it start purchasing and not contributing a cent to the collective borrowing,” Davis says, “the demand will decline so you would have fewer people borrowing, fewer users. It would worry me if users declined because a certain slice of that group purchases as opposed to borrowing.”

This doesn’t make any sense. Continue reading →

Twenty questions for Mike Foderick

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Somebody tell him these have been published. And where. Point values as shown.

  1. Off the top of your head, what are the full names of the branches abbveviated thus? PE; BE; GE; LE. (4)

  2. Because of the implications (more like demands) of automated sorters, the collection at which branch had to be tagged in a hurry and at considerable expense? (1)

  3. What exactly happens when you walk into a branch and set the alarm off? Customize your response for YO, BL, RD. (3)

    • (Those codes refer to…?) (1)

  4. Name three titles of the last ten items you borrowed via self-checkout. (3)

  5. Name three architects (not companies – people) responsible for library renovations carried out in the last five years. (3)

  6. Tell us what’s special about a Browsery, and which branches have one. (2)

  7. LA and SLA are abbreviations that expand to…? (2)

  8. Where’s the Tibetan collection located? (1)

  9. Name the third library in this set: High Park, Beaches, and what other? (3)

    • What ties them together? (1)

  10. Name any regular Bookmobile stop reasonably close to where you live. (1)

  11. Printing from microfilm readers costs how much per page? (1)

  12. What’s the threshold for accumulated fines above which the library invokes its caring and sensitive collection agency? (1)

  13. Name all the chairs of the TPL Board in place in each case where the union took strike action in living memory. (2)

  14. Where can I practise the piano at the library? (2)

  15. What’s a floater? (1)

  16. What’s the dusty-book report? (1)

  17. What’s an untrapped hold? (1)

  18. The teen area at CL was formerly called…? (1)

  19. What was the first storefront library branch? (1)

  20. And finally: Name one TPL branch where a homicide took place. (1)

Fun fact! I couldn’t score 100% either. But I’m not the just-re-elected, “fiercely independent” yet City Hall–skullduggery-implicated, accuracy-minded vice-chair of the Toronto Public Library Board.

This just in: Mike Foderick isn’t one of the lobbyists on the TPL Board

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Sounding a few fries short of a Happy Meal, TPL Board vice-chair Mike Foderick today wrote me thus (link added; sic throughout):

Someone brought to my attention that the following quote appears on one of your Web sites: “TPL vice-chair (and lobbyist, though no longer on the official registry) Mike Foderick.”

It seems that you have inaccurate information and I am kindly asking you to correct this error. I am not, nor have I ever been, a lobbyist. This can be confirmed with the City of Toronto or Ontario’s lobbyist registrar.

Somebody had to tell Foderick he’d been written about on the Internet. I heartily and unreservedly correct my implication that Foderick had previously been a lobbyist. That’s one lobbyist we can deduct from the number on the Toronto Public Library Board.