

Reference Question of the Week – 10/26/08

   November 1st, 2008 Brian Herzog


Patron: Do you have a copy of Tuesday's ballot?




  • the party of each candidate
  • the running mate for each presidential candidate
  • indicating if a candidate is an incumbent

ImagineElection.com logoHere's what ImagineElection had going for it:

  • it was way more easy to read






Reference Question of the Week – 1/20/08

   January 26th, 2008 Brian Herzog

U.S. Elections '08A patron came up to the desk and said:

I keep hearing on the news about other states' primaries and caucuses. I know it's for the President, but what's the big deal? We don't vote until November, right? What's the difference between a caucus and a primary? What happens if you don't win them? Does Massachusetts have one? And I keep hearing good and bad things about all the candidates - who is winning?

I love easy questions like this.

I knew the Massachusetts primary is coming up, so the first thing I wanted to do is search the state's website for information on that. While doing that, I tried to give a brief description of the whole primary/caucus system: candidates win delegates in each state, who then cast votes in the party conventions to decide who actually runs for President...

By this time I had found a few Massachusetts resources:

  • MA Elections Division, which listed the primary's date (Feb. 5th), as well as lots of information on both state- and national-level elections
  • The Voting Process website, which explained how to register, how to apply for an absentee ballot, what do to and where to go on election day, and more

At this point, the patron confessed that she was far more interested in who was winning than in how the process itself worked. A website I found a few weeks ago is perfect to answer this: CNN Election Center 2008.

I like this website for the same reason I don't like USAToday - it breaks everything down into easy to understand chunks, and does so with lots of colors and graphs. It lists who has won each primary/caucus so far, and how many delegates each candidate has earned.

It also explains the major issues and where each candidate stands, has an easy-to-use calendar for upcoming primaries and caucuses, shows which candidates have dropped out, how much money each candidate has raised and spent, and more.

All in all, it seems like a fairly complete election coverage source. And it satisfied the patron (actually, it outright delighted her to see Ron Paul has won more delegates than Rudy Giuliani even though Giuliani has spent $30.6 million to Paul's $2.8 million). She wrote down the url and promised to read more about the issues before Feb. 5th.

I was curious, though - even though I think CNN is a reliable source, I also wanted to see what other election coverage and resources were available. I spent some time searching, and here's what I came up with, broken down by type:

Election News Coverage:

Campaign Finances:

Election/Voting Resources:

Political Parties and National Conventions:

I didn't bother linking directly to each candidates' website, because many of the sites above do that. In fact, since they're all reporting on the same thing, most of the information on these sites is duplicated. I guess the point is to pick at least one resource you trust and stay informed.

2008, campaign, candidates, election, elections, libraries, library, politics, president, presidential, public, question, reference, reference question


Getting out the (Patron) Vote

   November 7th, 2006 Brian Herzog

In 2007, my library is conducting a "One Book One Town" program. It's the first time this community has done it, and the library received a grant [pdf] from the State to run it.

The biggest question, then, is which book to read. Instead of the library just picking one, we decided to let the patrons choose their book. To do this, the library designed a two-step process.

Step One was "nominations." During the months of September and October 2006, we had nomination forms and boxes in the library and on the website, for patrons to nominate a book (or books - they could nominate as many titles as they wanted) that they thought would be a good read for the entire town.

When nominations closed, a committee of library staff and townspeople tallied up all the nominations. The idea was to take the top five or so most popular, but the committee found that the nominations were all over the spectrum. So, they had to apply some criteria to help narrow the list:

  • had to be fiction
  • had to be under about 400 pages
  • had to be readable by and interesting to ages about fourteen to adult
  • shouldn't be a book everyone read in high school

Once those criteria had weeded out many books, the committee then chose the three most popular nominations, and created a voting ballot for general elections.

Step Two came on Election Day (today, Nov. 7th), with ballots and boxes set up in the library, on the website - and also at the election polling locations around town. The idea was to get people interested in the One Book One Town program by really letting them vote on which title they read.

Voting is going on right now, and I'll post how the results come out.

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