Aside from some mildly embarrassing sexism, I’m amazed at how little hilarity I could find in this. The media are different, but the job hasn’t changed much in 65 years. The funniest bit is the part at the end about job security. *sigh*

I found this part particularly interesting, after a few examples of people calling to ask the librarian to “compile a bibliography for a project on radar” and the like:

The reference librarians locate various materials through their familiarity with the contents of the library, a very important money- and time-saving service to the public.

Replace “contents of the library” with “resources available” to take into account databases, websites, Google Scholar, etc., and it sure as hell still is. “Information overload” is a major modern concern. But people don’t turn to librarians to deal with it; they turn to the writers of probably obnoxious books like this one. I think people tend to have the attitude that information filtering isn’t our job, that we will snarkily respond “Let me Google that for you.” We have done some poor marketing, y’all.

“I can never decide which book I want, and I hate buying a book and then realizing halfway through that I hate it. I can’t just return it and I’ve wasted money. I wish there were a way I could just borrow a book instead.”

You can borrow books and return them if you would just GO THE FUCK TO THE LIBRARY.

This website is pretty entertaining. I don’t feel like commenting on it seriously, because just about everything that makes me laugh right now is rooted in something that pisses me off. It’s that kind of month.

At least I finally feel like a bunch of people are sharing my anger and doing something with it.

You can probably see both sides of this: on the one hand, the library needs to stay open so kids can use it! What’s wrong with those unions who want to close a library? On the other hand, this encourages people to get used to the idea that “librarian” is a job that can be done by anyone, with no training.

This bit was the kicker for me:

[P]arents had been upset this summer, believing the elimination of the librarian positions would mean the school libraries would close. When parents heard the libraries would be kept open to students, they calmed down.

They shouldn’t calm down. Who’s maintaining those libraries? Who decides what to buy and what to weed? Who knows the collection and knows the kids and matches them up? Who fights for research and information literacy skills to be part of the curriculum, and who teaches that curriculum? (It’s now “part of the language arts curriculum,” apparently, and I don’t know, but I worry that doesn’t involve much more than “here’s how to find a book on the shelf.”)

I commend these volunteers for wanting to keep the libraries open for their kids, and for being willing to pitch in their time to do it. But a library staffed only by untrained volunteers is only half a library, and the parents of Bridgewater and Raynham (and all the other towns in this country that are in the same situation) shouldn’t accept that.

(Thanks to my colleague Arianna of Wandering Librarians for the story.)

The middle school section at the beginning is the part you helped with. (And those yellow highlighted books, by the way? Are links to YouTube videos of booktalks by my colleagues and me. I can’t bear to watch mine, but feel free to mock my ridiculous facial expressions and hair-fiddling.)

Thanks to all of your for your fantastic suggestions! Special props to those of you who suggested:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Susan Cooper
Lloyd Alexander
Watership Down
Island on Bird Street (replacing one of the seven — yes, really — Holocaust books on last year’s list)
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (which I’d never heard of and totally want to read now!)
Of Nightingales That Weep
Hatchet

…all of which I included. Many of your suggestions were already on the list, and some were (sorry) too old or too young. But I loved hearing what all of you read in middle school, and your ideas definitely helped round out my list!

In case their post is a little confusing for you (it was for me at first), basically the deal is this:

1. Go to Powell’s, go to Wishlist, and type “guyslitwire@gmail.com” as the email address.
2. Buy some books for one (or both) of the schools!
3. Get the address of the school librarian from the Guys Lit Wire post, and enter it as the shipping address.
4. Email Guys Lit Wire to let them know what you bought.

(I hooked up Ojo Encino Day School in New Mexico with some Sherman Alexie and Scott McCloud.)

This project, by the way, is part of the larger endevour called Operation Teen Book Drop, in its third awesome year.

One signed just “a thought”:

Also, books (or any other printed material) cannot be changed by any means without completely destroying them, while e-books can be corrupted anytime … like the time Amazon pulled books from the Kindle, or have we forgotten that already?

It’s so important to remember how malleable and insecure digital information is. Particularly when the information the library “owns” is hosted elsewhere (as with a database), the company can raise prices or discontinue access or shut down entirely — it’s not at all the same as owning the material outright. This isn’t a reason not to use electronic sources, of course, but it has to be a factor in the decision.

From “Jessica, Student,” on what students need:

Excellent physical books to get stuck into and electronic access that makes both broad and precise research feasible.

I couldn’t agree more.

Comment here

Today’s New York Times includes an online Room for Debate feature: Do School Libraries Need Books? The debaters include James Tracy, Head of the now infamous in library circles Cushing Academy, and my fabulous boss Liz Gray.

The “debate” is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few bits I found noteworthy:

James Tracy:

…books deemed worthy of retention were distributed to respective departments, while those not selected were donated to local nonprofits and public schools.

And yet he also talks about the importance of librarians’ reference services. If I’m trying to help a student direct her research project, how can I do that if the resources at her disposal are, in effect, at ten different libraries with no unified collection database? In other words, I don’t have the foggiest clue what books each department has or where they are, so how can I help a student find them? I’d end up having to say, “Err… go talk to the Social Studies Department head” — thus passing my librarian duties off on a colleague, increasing the student’s running-around time, and undermining the value of my position.

Also, “thanks for the crappy books you didn’t want! We have collection policies too, y’know. Love, local nonprofits and public schools.”

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum:

Books, precisely because of their (literally) bounded limitations, teach us to ask questions that are no less essential for the databases and deep archives of the online world: Who wrote that? Where are the competing voices? How is it organized? By what (and whose) terms is it indexed? Does it have pictures? Can I write in it myself?

I like this. Books have boundaries, and therefore clearer context. I endlessly emphasize the importance of context on the web: Who wrote that? Who published it? Why do we trust them (or not)? Every website is different, but books have a familiar format that makes that information easier to find and more intuitively understood.

Liz Gray:

The digital natives in our schools need to have the experience of getting lost in a physical book, not only for the pure pleasure but also as a way to develop their attention spans, ability to concentrate, and the skill of engaging with a complex issue or idea for an uninterrupted period of time.”

Nicholas Carr says the same, from a research standpoint. And I know this anecdotally: I can read for an hour on the train home without interruption, but just reading this article required clicking over to my work email, my home email, my previous blog post on the subject, yadda.

This also brings up a distinction that people aren’t making enough in this conversation: there’s a huge difference between reading for research and reading for pleasure. Could we get by in my library without research books? If we added some more database and e-book subscriptions, yes, we could. I’m not saying we should, but research sources at the 6th-10th grade level, at least, are quite thorough online. (More in-depth upperclass research projects might be another story.)

But I would not want to work in a library without pleasure-reading books. Real books, on shelves. Several times a week a girl asks me, “What should I read next?” And the best way I have to answer is to look at the shelves with her. What are her favorites? What didn’t she like? What’s new? It jogs both our memories, and the covers and jacket copy pull her in. A Kindle can’t do that.

And finally…

William Powers:

Likewise, the automobile didn’t kill off the passenger train. On this crowded, environmentally troubled planet, it turns out pulling up all those old rail lines was short-sighted and dumb.

The automobile effectively did kill the passenger train, actually, because we started subsidizing highways and stopped subsidizing rail. Turns out that was short-sighted and dumb, and so would be pulping all the books. As I said before, in a post-peak oil world with rolling blackouts and electricity rations, I hope I still have something to read.

Comment here

Crosbie, John S. Crosbie’s Dictionary of Puns. New York: Harmony Books, 1977.

Let’s start with the fact that there’s a dictionary of puns. It’s alphabetized by keyword, without attribution, such that each entry reads (for example):

fray A good seamstress is like a good poet: She knows how to turn a frays.

Thanks, pun dictionary! That was… helpful?

But what’s really “awesome” about this book (by which I mean “gross”) is its casual racism. The fourth paragraph of the introduction reads:

One recalls the story of Eleanor Roosevelt at a state dinner, discussing democracy with an Oriental ambassador. “And when did you last have an election?” she asked. “Before blekfast,” he replied with some embarrassment.

Nothin’ but class, John Crosbie. (And no, I did not “recall” that in no way apocryphal story.) Ew, on so many levels.

Because there’s not enough “ew” in this post, I will close with a quote from the final page, an excerpt from Word Play: What Happens When People Talk, copyright 1973 by Peter Farb. It attempts to be “scholarly,” characterizing a common two-part structure of obscene puns. For example:

The two-element structure is adaptable to a great variety of pun forms, such as… the Confucianism, which partakes of the traditional proverb with its pretensions of wisdom, thus adding an extra bite to the humor: “Confucius say, ‘Seven days on honeymoon make one whole week.’”

Gosh, weren’t the 70s fabulous? If this is the first page and the last page, I can only imagine what’s in the middle. Off to the discard pile with you, Crosbie’s!

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Our li’l MA independent school library world is national news: the headmaster of Cushing Academy was interviewed on Here and Now today (listen to “Technology in the Classroom”).

What’s the deal? Basically, Dr. Tracy, the headmaster, has instructed the Cushing library to toss all their books. Instead of a regular library, they will have a Library of the Fuuuuuture (sorry, a “learning center”) made up of… well, 18 Kindles, some database subscriptions, and a coffee bar. Here’s the story in the Globe, back when it was only local news.

Let me state up-front that I am not a book fetishist, particularly. I am not going to wax poetic here about the smell of the books and how wonderful it feels to snuggle into bed with one. Lord knows I spend enough time reading stuff on the internet. But books? Turns out they’re still useful.

1. A school library collection reflects the specific needs of a school. It is built over time by librarians, who are trained experts in the collection development process. If you chuck all the books, every single librarian and teacher will have to start from scratch to redesign their projects to reflect whatever resources are now available.
2. I worship at the internet altar even more than most people, and I’m telling you: not everything is on the internet. Not even close.
3. 18 Kindles. That means 18 kids and adults can have books checked out at any time. Way to encourage pleasure reading, there.
4. People learn in different ways. Your better educational institutions are all about “different learning modalities” these days. “Hey everybody, do all your research online” is the opposite of this.
5. Books work when the power goes out. They work on the beach and on your service trip to West Africa and when the server goes down. (And, Hippie Girl would like to point out, books work x years past peak oil when the power goes out forever. I hope we haven’t thrown out all our books when that happens, ’cause I’d like to have something to read in between apocalypses.)

This is just a start, of course. I could go on forever. I heart “technology” as much as the next very nerdy person, but this is unbelievably shortsighted. Remember when Macs stopped including floppy drives and nobody could figure out how to move their files around and it made the tech support people crazy? (Ok, maybe that was just me.) This is like that, only infinitely more so. We just aren’t there yet. Not even close.

This was a more or less unilateral choice by Dr. Tracy, is my understanding. This was not the librarians’ decision. And he’s achieved his goal: everybody’s talking about Cushing Academy and the Library of the Fuuuuuture. I look forward to hearing what they’re saying in a few months and a few years.

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