Walt at Random

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples is still available at Cites & Insights Books. Price: $29.50 plus shipping and handling–or $20 for a PDF ebook version. (It’s also available on bright-white paper with an ISBN at Amazon, also $29.50, ISBN 978-1434085591.)

The 299-page 6×9 trade paperback (x+289 pages) features descriptions and sample posts for a wide range of blogs from 196 public libraries of all sizes, in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.

It’s the first and only broad-range study of its kind, looking at how public library blogs appeared during March 2007-May 2007, with metrics for each blog, information on links to and from library home pages (or, in a few cases, the note that the blog is the library home page) and a sample post for each blog. You can see how blogs measure up for number of posts, length of posts, number of comments (overall and per post) and use of illustrations. You can also look at blogs by specialty, including half a dozen technology blogs, three dozen teen blogs (and one for tweens), one on censorship and four devoted to genealogy–among many more.

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Why should you (or your library) buy this book?

If your library is associated with a library school, it should be a no-brainer: It’s the broadest and most complete study done of how public library blogs actually work and are being used, as opposed to commentaries with a few hand-picked examples.

If your library is considering a blog, this book should help you find blogs from comparable libraries to consider as examples. If your library has a blog and is considering more (or revising the ones you have), this book should help you find interesting examples–the public library blogging community is remarkably diverse!

196 libraries are included in the book:, with extremely diverse service populations (as of 2004 figures):

• Under 1,000 (actually under 400): two libraries
• 1,000 to 2,400: five libraries
• 2,500 to 4,600: eight libraries
• 5,000 to 9,900: 17 libraries
• 10,000 to 15,000: 16 libraries
• 16,000 to 24,000: 20 libraries
• 25,000 to 33,000: 20 libraries
• 34,000 to 46,000: 17 libraries
• 51,000 to 69,000: 17 libraries
• 75,000 to 97,000: 11 libraries
• 100,000 to 137,000: 19 libraries
• 146,000 to 240,000: 21 libraries
• 260,000 to 497,000: 10 libraries
• More than 670,000: 13 libraries

I would quote review excerpts–but there haven’t been any, positive or negative.

Scarcity and continuation:
This book has been out since mid-August 2007. In nine months, it’s sold 68 copies.

Some time after August 2008, one of two things will happen, largely depending on sales for this book and Academic Library Blogs: 232 Examples, although feedback and other factors may come into play:

• It will be replaced by a new book showing how library blogs change from year to year, comparing March-May 2007 with March-May 2008.
• It will go out of print, at least on Amazon, if it isn’t averaging at least one sale a week (which it hasn’t been for the last three months).

In either case, you may have a relatively rare copy.

Here’s this week’s post at PLN Highlights:

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We’re trying something new at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN), and we’d like your feedback.

There are a lot of articles in PLN, many of them related to one another. We try to provide links to related articles, but that may not be enough, particularly when you’re trying to explore a fairly broad topic.

We got trouble… is the first of a possible series of overview articles (or metanarratives, if you prefer). It doesn’t provide examples or advice on its own. Instead, it links to other articles through a series of paragraphs that should provide a little context along the way. At the same time, each article referenced in We got trouble... (some 30 at the moment) has a link back to the overview at or near the top of its Related articles section. (For now, it’s at the top. Once there are more overviews, there will naturally be articles included in more than one overview.)

Does this help? Is it a nuisance? Your feedback–on the Talk page for We got trouble or as email to Walt Crawford (crawford@palinet.org) will help us refine the concept, expand it–or drop it.

Along with the overview, we reworked the material in a couple of fairly long composite articles and some shorter ones into four new articles, each with some introductory material and (we hope) a little better logical flow. Part of that process was to remove a composite-article title that seemed needlessly negative: “Toxicity, fear and problem people.”

The four new articles:

• Problematic and star employees
• Problematic management
• Problematic communication and behavior
• Problematic organizations

You can get to all of these (and more than two dozen other articles, including many specifically related to libraries) from We got trouble…

While working on this restructuring, I added a temporary article, Editing for coherence. That article will go away in mid-June 2008, but for now some of you may find it worth considering.

This post is unusual for Walt at Random in several ways:

• I’m mostly just recommending another post–this one. I don’t have much more to say here (I did comment on the post, and may comment on it later). I rarely do straight “recommendations.”
• The post is on a blog I don’t link to all that often, The Shifted Librarian.
• I am not criticizing, making fun of, or otherwise hassling Jenny Levine. I think this is a good post (and a good conversation following).

Go read it.

And for a whole lot more on technology and balance, consider buying a copy of Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change. (This has been a small commercial. But even if you don’t buy the book, go read Jenny’s post.)

Here’s this week’s post at PLN Highlights–where we try to keep current and future library leaders informed about new material on the PALINET Leadership Network (open to all, free, you’re encouraged to join if you think you are or might eventually be a library leader), but without overloading their aggregator or in box (yes, you can subscribe for email rather than RSS):

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What’s up at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

More than we’ll mention here; a complicated attempt to improve usefulness of some articles is still midstream.

Meanwhile, three new articles since the last post here may be related–and at least two of them should really get feedback and discussion:

• The May 2008 PLN Challenge asks “What’s the biggest thing you’re doing now to position your library for 2020?” Three responses appear here; you’re encouraged to add your own responses (at the end of the current article or on the Talk page–or, if you have a lot to say, by linking to a separate article).
• Jamie LaRue believes that there really will be a need for a lot of new leaders in the next few years. “Your reputation is a recruitment strategy” discusses the demographic shift and what it means for recruiting new talent and retaining your best.
• Glen Holt focuses squarely on the negative, connecting current and future increases in energy costs to some recent library budget problems and asserting that energy costs will make paper so expensive that fiction paperbacks will cost $25 to $50. “Too expensive to ignore” is a controversial essay, enough so that I felt compelled to question some of the assumptions on the talk page. Read the essay; think about it. Add your own reactions–on the talk page, starting some topics in the Forums, or as separate articles.

Otherwise…well, we need your feedback, we encourage you to mention PLN to other current and future library leaders, and now it’s back to restructuring a group of articles. A temporary article discusses that process, for any of you that are sufficiently process-oriented to be interested. (If nothing else, the changes in article links from red to blue–and, at some point, blue to red–show progress on the project. A red link means the article doesn’t exist yet–or was deleted.)

Thanks for using PLN.

Cites & Insights 8:6, June 2008, is now available for downloading.

The 28-page issue is PDF, as usual, but (since My Back Pages is missing) all segments are also available as HTML separates at the Cites & Insights homepage.

The issue consists of:

• Bibs & Blather: Quick Updates: Limits and Slouching - A brief reminder of a timely essay, and a progress report about where things stand on the possible 2007-2008 liblogs project.
• Perspective: On Wikis and Transparency - Transparency is great, as long as you’re aware of it. MediaWiki makes your wiki (and most other wikis) very transparent to outsiders. A good thing, but do pay attention.
• ©3 Perspective: DRM and ISP Surcharges - Comments on the slow death (?) of DRM for purchased audio downloads–and the latest plan to assure Big Media of ongoing profitability.
• Perspective: On Semantics, Reality, Learning and Rockstars - “Reality” in this case: When is a book not a book? Discover the connections between these four mini-perspectives and win yourself a virtual candy bar!
• Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 2 - Selected excerpts and comments on issues past, another part of the centenary celebration.

This week’s post at PLN Highlights, repeated here for your edification…

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What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network?

• In Looking in the mirror, Peter Bromberg offers a dozen questions you should ask new employees to help gain a clearer picture of your own library–and five questions to ask yourself about where you are and where you’re going. Steven J. Bell asks “are you where you want to be professionally?” and suggests that you define your own signature statement–and Barbara Kelly expands the “signature statement” idea to suggest stepping back and making sure your library has a clear, authentic, understandable and real signature statement of its own.
• Service and policy complements the existing Service attitudes roundup (primarily non-library notes), offering notes from several library writers. Barbara Kelly notes ways she’s been delighted by deviations from policy–that might not be deviations at all, but rather flexible, service-oriented policies. Tyler Rousseau takes on the “teach them to fish” attitude in reference services, suggesting that sometimes “just give them the ichhyo…” might be the best course of action. “Karen K.” offers some lessons in customer service and Walt Crawford offers examples of unusually good customer service and the remarkable effects of being just a little more helpful.
• Jeff Scott adds the perspective of a rural public library director to the discussion in Directors, leaders and work-life balance. You’ll be seeing new additions to other existing articles (especially the sets of notes from non-library sources); this one happened a little faster than most.

Your contributions and feedback help make PLN work. Let us know how we’re doing.

I’ve probably seen the announcement and comments on at least half a dozen blogs by now.

For the One Big Library Unconference, that is. To be held June 27, 2008, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto. Organized by York University Libraries.

Here’s the blurb:

“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”

The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries. It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group.

The first paragraph is in quotes–but with no source or link.

The list of participants already includes a bunch of people I know (at least virtually) and respect: John Dupuis, David Fiander, Amanda Etches-Johnson, John Miedema, Connie Crosby, William Denton, probably others.

I’m sure it will be an excellent day. I wouldn’t be going even if money and time allowed: It’s directly opposite my travel day for ALA Annual in Anaheim. (Well, hey, it’s a Canadian conference. Why should they care about ALA’s schedule?)

And there’s something about it that bothers me. Namely, the premise as stated in that first paragraph.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it as a reality or as a desirable future. I don’t think of Harvard College Library as a branch of The ARL Library, much less Mountain View Public Library, Harvard College Library, NYPL, Hewlett-Packard Corporate Libraries and the Poy Sippi Public Library as all being branches of One Big Library.

I think of all these as distinctive and distinctly local institutions–institutions which, being libraries, are really good at sharing and should get even better at it. But sharing is quite different than being a branch of a whole.

John Miedema’s attending, so I’m assuming the “slow library” perspective–a distinctly local view, where a library is distinctly part of its community–will be represented. I hope so, at least. That’s certainly not the thrust of the unconference description.

Semantics? Maybe–but, as I discuss in an upcoming C&I perspective, semantics–the study of meaning in communication–is to a great extent what makes us human.

So, to all my friends up north, hope you have a great unconference (I’ve never been to one, and that should change), but you can put me down as disagreeing with the anonymous writer of those quoted sentences.

This week’s post at PLN Highlights–the notification mechanism for the PALINET Leadership Network, which you really should join (if you’re not already a member). It’s free, it’s loaded with material, it needs your participation

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What’s up at PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

• “Directors, leaders and work-life balance” offers diverse perspectives on two key sets of questions:
  • Can you be a library leader and still maintain a reasonable balance between the demands of work and the rest of your life? To put it another way, can you have it all?
  • Can you be a library director or administrator and have it all?
• We’re trying to make sure you can always explore further and that you can find worthwhile articles in a variety of ways. To that end, we’ve eliminated “orphan articles”–which is to say that every article in PLN has a related-article link from at least one other article. The goal is to have all but the briefest items also have outbound links to the most appropriate other articles. You can help: If you see an article relationship that isn’t flagged, add it yourself or send me a note (crawford@palinet.org).

PLN exists to serve your needs as a current or future library leader. Two current polls on the general feedback page will help us determine how to do that better. Should we provide more technology briefings and commentary (such as the Kindle/ebook cluster)–and should we provide more policy briefings and commentary (such as the Open Source cluster). We need your feedback and ideas to improve PLN–and we encourage you to contribute and to tell your colleagues about the PALINET Leadership Network.

Walt at Random has the most readers of any blog in its class.*

That seems like an appropriate way to begin this little poke at a full-page Chevy ad in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. The ad’s announcing an increase in incentive money, and features three different models. The highway EPA estimate appears for each model–and for two of the three, it’s accompanied by “Best-in-class highway fuel economy” (in one case followed by “with manual transmission.” And, oh yes, there’s a footnote for each of those claims.

The mileage figures aren’t bad, but they’re also not great. Not that I’m a skeptic, but, well, I was pretty sure that the Chevy Cobalt didn’t get as good mileage as a number of other compact cars.

So I did what most readers never bother to do: I read the footnotes.

Here’s the footnote for the Cobalt:

Based on 2008 GM Compact Car 3-Door Coupe segment.

And for the Impala:

Based on Impala with 3.5L engine and 2008 GM Large Car segment.

Isn’t that great? GM’s defining “class” based entirely on cars it manufactures. I don’t know how many “compact car 3-door coupe”s GM makes, but this definitely nicely avoids comparisons with all the compact cars from Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, Mazda…and even Ford and Chrysler.

Imagine if libraries had advertising budgets and the same approach to facts vs. truth. Every library could really be a star, without much trouble:

Mallsville Public Library answers more reference questions than any other comparable library^

Followed by more promotional material, followed by this substantially smaller footnote:

^Based on libraries that are not part of larger library systems, that serve between 2,000 and 2,500 people and that are located within 10 miles of the Mallsville River. Phone and IM reference excluded for purposes of comparisons.

Fortunately, libraries really aren’t businesses in some key respects…

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* Based on library-related blogs written by semi-retired male non-librarians between 60 and 65 years old, living in California.

Cites & Insights 8:5, May 2008, is now available for downloading.

This 28-page issue (PDF as usual, but each essay is also available in HTML form) includes:

• Bibs & Blather: One Book at a Time - A year’s experience with self-publishing.
• Perspective: Offtopic or Not? Mill Creek & Libraries - Do 50-movie (and 100-movie and 250-movie!) packs make sense for public libraries?
• Making it Work Perspective: Changes in Liblogs: Slouching Toward a Study - How have 227 liblogs changed between 2005/2006 and 2007? Notes toward a possible study of 500+ blogs.
• Net Media Perspective: Citizendium and the Writer’s Voice - Notes on Citizendium and how it’s developing–and why I disagree with one fundamental tenet of both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
• Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Hollywood Legends, Part 1 - From the sublime to the ridiculous, from Good News to The Fat Spy, two dozen movies with big-name stars.
• Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 1 - Looking back at “the 1s”–the first, 11th…91st issues of C&I.

What’s up at PALINET Leadership Network? Here’s this week’s post on PLN Highlights.

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This week, new items at the PALINET Leadership Network are largely from the management literature (via Leader’s Digest) or bring together new material to flesh out other articles. For example:

• Searching notes hosts brief notes about searching in general–starting with team searching and Illumin8–and links to some longer articles.
• Ebook notes splits out notes on book-length digital text from notes on Kindle and other dedicated ebook readers.
• Qualities of successful leaders offers notes on qualities of leaders–not just what they do but who they are–and links to longer articles on related topics.
• Leadership development notes serves as a hub for articles on developing leaders and includes brief notes from management literature.
• Open source notes and resources enhances PLN’s cluster of articles on open source software by providing key definitions, linking to articles elsewhere, and offering links to key resources on open source in libraries.

These and other “notes” pages will continue to grow over time. We continue to look for ways to make these and other resources more suitable for your needs. Let us know how we’re doing, specifically in the Feedback and suggestions page and polls and more generally through Feedback pages for each topic.

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Remember: PLN is free and open to anyone who is a library leader or thinks they’ll become one sooner or later–and “library leaders” include managers and directors, but also thought leaders, professional leaders and leaders of innovation.

There’s a wealth of material at PLN on aspects of leadership and many library-related topics. Take advantage of it–and add your own experience and thoughts to the network.

Since a couple of other bloggers have mentioned that they’ll be at TLA (I just spell it TxLA to avoid confusion), here’s my mention–but I think the others actually live there.

I’ll be at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference this coming week–arriving Tuesday early afternoon, leaving Friday morning. Staying at the Hyatt Regency.

Presenting “Balanced Libraries: Books, Bytes and Web 2.0″ on Wednesday, from 2-3:50 p.m.

No, I’m not going to talk nonstop for an hour and fifty minutes…not that I couldn’t, but nobody deserves such punishment. I’m planning to talk for a little less than an hour. The nature and flow of the talk will depend on who’s there, to some extent. The talk will certainly be based on Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change. Among other things, I expect to offer some notes on work in progress–some of which will appear in Cites & Insights a few days after the conference. There will definitely be plenty of time for discussion.

It will be my third time at TxLA, and appears to be my speaking trip for this year (although that could always change). I will be a small part of a program during ALA Annual, but I’d be going there anyway.

As always, when I speak at a state/regional library conference (my favorite kind of speaking), I try to go for most or all of the conference. I certainly plan to be at the Tuesday all-conference welcome party, spend time in the exhibits, and attend some programs. I always enjoy meeting people I haven’t met and seeing people again…

I could say “posting will be light for the next week,” since I still travel without computing technology (OK, OK, so I will have an ugh cell phone and my cute little MP3 player), but posting here is so erratic that there’s no point.

Admittedly, this all assumes that American–my favorite airline–has its MD80s fully in the air by Tuesday, since that’s what I’ll be taking between San Jose and DFW, but that seems like a pretty safe bet…

Here’s this week’s post at PLN Highlights–and, as always, I encourage you to sign up for the PALINET Leadership Network and add PLN Highlights to your aggregator (or subscribe to posts via email).

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What’s happening at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

New articles include notes by Steven Bell on Innovation and control and some new Mentoring notes from the business literature. We’re continuing to add links so you can keep exploring a topic once you find a worthwhile article.

Two new features may also help you find worthwhile articles and notes:

• Every topic (the twelve primary categories in the topics sidebar) now shows a “Feature article of the month” at the end of the list of Recent articles. These articles aren’t necessarily the must-read articles or the best of PLN. They are articles that may deserve more attention than they’ve received recently. You’re encouraged to take a look–and to add criticism or commentary as appropriate.
• We’ve also added What’s hot at PLN? This page shows the 25 articles viewed most often during a given period–currently March 7 and April 6, 2008. Typically, that list will be updated once a month, sometimes a little less often. This isn’t exactly “Greatest hits of PLN”–it reflects recent readership, not overall readership.
• Assembling that first “What’s hot” page–taken directly from log analysis, but with most Topic, Category and Help pages removed from the list–we removed one additional page, but maybe it’s worth highlighting here. The General feedback and suggestions page was viewed a lot–but had no content other than the header. So, to get you started, we’ve added a couple of polls on content within PLN. Please respond to the polls (you can add a message)–and, of course, add your own suggestions there or on the feedback page for each topic, or start a discussion in the PLN Forums.

Know people who are or might be library leaders and haven’t heard of PLN? Tell them about it and encourage them to join. And if you have acquaintances who have PLN accounts but aren’t getting these posts–encourage them to sign up. PLN Highlights is the best way we have to keep you informed on what’s happening at PLN. We won’t flood your aggregator or inbox, but we will try to let you know what’s new.

Looking for deep thoughts? Boy, have you come to the wrong place…

Disappointment: We watched The Bourne Ultimatum on Saturday night. We’d seen The Bourne Identity. Somehow, the second flick (these are flicks, not films) is way down on our Netflix list… Anyway: A little ways in, my wife noted that she didn’t remember the plot of the first flick. At the end, we agreed there was a reason: Neither of us would remember the plot of this one two weeks later, much less a few months later. Lots of action, lots of car crashes, no heart, no real plot… A flick many people would love, but it sort of felt like a waste of a couple of hours. (If you love the Bourne flicks or novels, more power to you. Just not really our thing.)

The Pearl Rule (if I have it right): When I picked up a few books at Mountain View Public Library last time around (three weeks ago–I’ll take them back later this week), one of them was George Carlin’s 2004 book. I seem to remember liking George Carlin as a comic–snarky, a little mean-spirited, but literate and funny–so expected th like the book. Five or six pages in, I realized that it wasn’t so much a book as a bunch of little observations slapped together in no apparent sequence–like a blook, but less coherent than most of those. OK by me…

Then, a few more pages in, I found that I was getting lots of dystopian views, an enormous amount of bitterness, and damn little humor. And, speaking of “damn,” a different four-letter word was being used to an extent that, frankly, comes off as a lack of a real vocabulary. That word can be effective used sparingly. When we start a movie where it’s used in every other line of dialog, we usually don’t bother–and here, it seemed to show up at least every couple of paragraphs. Sure, that reduces the shock value–but it also means the prose reads badly.

Well, OK, no problem: You’re not going to like every book you pick up, and apparently Carlin’s aged differently than I have. He’s turned into one of those who frowns upon any questionable pleasures that don’t happen to be his own while, of course, frowning even harder upon anyone who disagrees with him. And somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost his humor.

I made it to Page 38. Which is where the Nancy Pearl Rule comes in, if I remember it rightly.

That rule? Once you’ve decided to give a book a try, you should give it a fair try–which starts out as being “read the first 50 pages,” but as we age, we find that life is too short. Thus, the rule as I remember it: Read the first 100 pages minus your age–so, for me, the first 38 pages.

Over the last couple of months, I had the other half of the Nancy Pearl Rule, in both cases with Connie Willis novels. (I love Connie WIllis’ short stories, but hadn’t really been familiar with her novels.) To Say Nothing of the Dog was, for some reason, a little difficult–maybe because I was initially reading it in short spurts, which wasn’t the way to read it. But at Page 38, it was clear that I should give it a few more pages–and by Page 100, I was hooked. This month, I picked up her Doomsday Book–which is a big book (578 pages in the mass-market paperback my local library has) and “five years in the writing.” It also took a little getting into, because it is a big, serious book–but by Page 38, I knew I was going to read the whole thing. And loved it, of course.

Then there’s Donald E. Westlake and a newish Dortmunder novel, What’s So Funny? With Westlake, I don’t need 38 pages. On the other hand, his prose is of a sort where you go through 38 pages pretty quickly…and just keep turning those pages. Not big, serious books, but I do love ‘em.

Now to read that serious librarianship book I agreed to review…

Back in November 2006, I wrote this post–or, rather, I cut it out of an Offtopic Perspective in Cites & Insights and used it as a post, with slight updating.

Since then, I’ve been staying on the treadmill, watching those old movies (and in some cases TV movies), posting each time I get through one disc, and adding a new Offtopic Perspective each time I finish half a box (six DVDs, once in a while seven DVDs). For a while, it seemed as though the company–now named Mill Creek Entertainment–was running on empty, just distributing the 20-odd sets they’d assembled from public domain, TV movies, and other sources where they didn’t need to pay royalties.

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Finkelstein of Infothought sent me an odd email, assuring me it wasn’t spam and he wasn’t getting a commission. He reads C&I sometimes, and knew I watched these old flicks. He saw that BestBuy.com was having a two-day sale (sorry, it’s over): Two of the 50-movie packs for $25. I didn’t really need any more movies–I’m on disc nine of one set and disc seven of another, with two more packs (100 more movies) waiting after that–but, hey, 100 movies for $25 is a pretty good deal. So I checked it out–and found a couple of sets I wasn’t aware of, one of them released last month. I ordered two of them (that’s right, I now have more than 200 movies waiting to be watched–I intend to keep using that treadmill for years to come), and decided it was time to take another look at Mill Creek Entertainment.

Here’s what I found: The company’s active–and they’ve come up with some even bigger packs. As I write this, there appear to be thirty different 50-movie megapacks, up from 21 in late November 2006. 50-packs I don’t remember seeing before include Box Office Gold, Combat Classics, Drive-in Movie Classics, Family Fun, Frontier Justice, and Nightmare Worlds.

There are also eight hundred-movie packs–most of them straight combinations of 50-packs with no duplications (e.g., Action Classics combines the Action and Suspense 50-packs), all of them (I believe) composed of movies that are also in 50-packs. There were already some smaller subsets of 50-packs and that continues–I see 24 20-movie packs and nine 10-movie packs. (I could see some people going for the 20-pack of John Wayne flicks, most of them early and short, and some of the thematic packs are interesting.)

For libraries where the “informal circulating collection” model suggested in the earlier post might make sense, Mill Creek now has something else to offer:

250-Movie Packs.

That’s right. Four packs–Family Collection, Horror Collection, Mystery Collection and (predictably, given the 50-packs) Western Collection. The “foil collectors boxes” still have individual cardboard sleeves for each disc. So you’d have 240 informally-circulatable items, each with four or more old movies, for a total outlay of no more than $400 and probably significantly less.

Make that definitely significantly less, if you can buy from Amazon: I see all four 250-movie packs available for $50 each. That’s a thousand old movies for $200–less than a buck per circulating DVD.

I’m not shilling for Mill Creek. There are a couple of the 50-movie packs I’d be reluctant to buy for myself or a library (a couple recent packs are heavy on R-rated schlock), and lots of these movies are from damaged prints, nearly all VHS-quality or worse. When they say “Carefully digitally remastered,” they mean the movies were converted from analog to digital form: Otherwise, they couldn’t put them on DVDs. It does not mean restored or anything of the sort: Not at these prices!

That said, Mill Creek Entertainment is doing a fine job of using the public domain for all it’s worth, and I think that’s a good thing. Sure, you can download a lot of these movies–but why bother?

I just checked Amazon a little further. They appear to have all thirty 50-movie packs at $13 to $18 each) and all eight–whoops, all nine 100-packs (there’s one that isn’t even on Mill Creek’s site yet, and it won’t actually be out until May 2008)–at $27 to $45 each.

Mill Creek has some other stuff–collections of cartoons (300 in one box), TV boxed sets and TV-movie mixes, even a few indie movies and fitness sets. But mostly, Mill Creek is boxes of public domain movies at fair prices. The prints may be (and usually are) mediocre, and lots of the pictures are B or less–but there are also some classic gems. Within the last two weeks, I’ve watched McClintock! and the original, black-and-white, Irene Dunne/Charles Boyer Love Affair. Good stuff.