[vox] [LUGOD] Library

[Nick Schmalenberger]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:04:27AM -0700, Jim Lowman wrote:
> Nick Schmalenberger wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 03:40:40PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> >   
> >> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 06:39:55PM -0700, Jim Lowman wrote:
> >>     
> >>> It might take someone two or three evenings to look each book up
> >>> by ISBN on Amazon.com to see what they'd be worth.
> >>>       
> >> A shame we don't have some kind of scripting tools and command-line
> >> ways of doing web access. ;)
> >>
> >>     
> > Supposedly Amazon has an API, but I don't know what it lets you do.
> > Anyway, I'd prefer not to sell them on Amazon so that they stay in this
> > area. I think arranging shipping would make things more complicated and
> > it would be nice to make a social connection with whoever might be
> > interested in the stuff.
> >
> > Besides giving the books to a library or away at a meeting, how about a
> > swap meet at the Veterans Memorial Center parking lot? Lugod previously
> > had a sort of swap meet but it was at someones garage in South Davis so
> > it wasn't as accessible to people outside of the club. At the VMC, we
> > might be able to have people from other groups too, like the Yolo
> > Amateur Radio Society, the Davis Macintosh Users Group, and I don't know
> > what else.
> > Nick Schmalenberger
> One more idea from a distance - since Nick mentioned donating the books 
> to a public library, has
> anyone approached the Davis Public Library or UCD Library with this 
> idea?  Seems like one of
> the libraries would be happy to get such a donation, and possibly could 
> list it as a special collection
> from LUGOD.
> 
> I've donated a number of my excess books to the library of a local 
> community college.  A new
> wing had been added a few years ago but, of course, there was no money 
> in the "pocket" for
> acquiring books to populate it.
> 
I talked to the Davis Public Library about it briefly and they said they
pretty much already have too many books and if we don't want them why
should they? That they might be able to take a few books at first, but
not a lot. On the other hand, they already have Cobol For Dummies (I
checked it out once) and maybe a Wordperfect book, so some of our books
aren't necessarily more obsolete than some of theirs. So we should sort
it all out and, I think we should do it at a meeting, giving us the
opportunity to pick books for ourselves and hopefully we can get one of
the librarians to come too (we are at the Library after all). They do
have some nice Linux books too, some donated through us.