Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind

Jason DeParle, “Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind,” New York Times, December 17, 2019 p. A1-

     Money helps children in part because of what it can buy— more goods (cheesy chicken spaghetti) and services (gymnastics classes or tutors).  Ms. Bradford, the teachers’s aide, is so eager to invest in her sons that she has used tax refunds to send them on Boy Scout trips to 42 states— even when a flood left them living in her car “I’m trying to instill in them that it’s education that gives you knowledge and power, not cars or clothes,” she said. Before traveling to Washington and visiting the Vietnam Memorial the boys — Tony 17, and Micah 13— wrote a report on a Monroe man killed in the war, which the public library added to its collection.  Finding the soldier’s name on the wall, Micah said, “felt like touching history.”

COMMENT

     The article is about people who are too poor to get the full amount of a child tax credit.  In this example, the extra money helps buy educational experiences that aren’t available at public school.  The library is part of an education plan that includes schools, extra-curricular clubs, field trips and independent research. 

     The student work was added to the local history collection.  This kind of hyperlocal collecting is important for community identity.  What’s more, the library collection is a way to validate the importance of student research.  Academic libraries typically require graduate students to deposit dissertations and theses, but many also allow professors to submit selected undergraduate work for the collection.  In public libraries, display space is available for K-12 students to show off artwork and projects to the larger community. Since people without kids seldom have reason to go into a school building, the library becomes a link between students and community 

How To Do Nothing

Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019

     I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly the opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online.  When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn't immediately present itself.  You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons.  The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a non-commercial and non"productive" space so often under threat of closure, allows for growing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information-- provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it's even about-- are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment.  Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it's me who's being researched.  [p.175]

COMMENT

    This is a beautiful description of library research as a practice of close attention--  the opposite of the endlessly distracting information deluge online.  By "non-productive" Odell doesn't mean that library time is worthless, but that library time is not economically optimized for money-making.  The book argues that such economically unproductive time is not  just a good thing but essential for a good life.

   

Electric Woman

 

Tessa Fontaine, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-defying Acts, 2018.

    Story goes as a high school student in New Jersey, Tommy elided he wanted to be a circus performer, but a six foot two and possessing little grace or flexibility, his options felt limited. He didn't come from a circus family and didn't have the physique of a typical aerialist or tumbler.  What he wanted most of all was to wrestle an alligator.  When he learned about sword swallowing, he thought it could take him to the circus, the gators.
     He checked out a bunch of books on swallowing swords from the library and spread them across his bed, desk and floor.  Their illustrated pages provided step-by-step instructions and accounts of some of history's most famous sword swallowers.  He got to work.

COMMENT

     Nowadays would a wannabe circus performer learn his skills from youtube?  Or would he still go to the library to get those books about the most famous sword swallowers in history?   In the book Fontaine writes a scene where experienced performers try to teach her to swallow swords, so maybe the real trick is to learn how to swallow swords directly from another person. 

Christian Doomsayers Have Lost It

Peter Wehner, “Christian Doomsayers Have Lost It” New York Times, December 8, 2019, p. SR3.

Sohrab Ahmari— a convert to Catholicism who is both the op-ed editor of The New York Post and a contributor to the religious magazine First Things— was so outraged that drag queens were reading stories to children at a library in Sacramento that he has relegated civility to a secondary virtue while turning against modernity and classical liberalism “To hell with liberal order,” as Mr. Ahmari put it. “Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path.”

COMMENT

     Judging by the political behavior of Trumpist Christians, you’d think that enforcing stereotypical gender roles was a foundational principle of Christian religion. Mr. Wehner suggests that such prejudice is, in fact, contrary to a practice of spirituality, joy, gratitude, kindness and healing grace.

    As a target of self-appointed morality police the library takes on two roles that appear in other library stories: 1) a target of censorship 2)  a defender of free speech and diversity.

Struggling with College Tuition after Excelling in High School

Elisha Brown, “Struggling with College Tuition After Excelling in High School,” New York Times, December 4, 2019, A23 

     Ms. McNair received $27,000 in scholarships for the current academic year in addition to $9,500 in federal student loans. She also received nearly $6,500 in grants, including a $6,195 federal Pell grant A job at the campus library is paying her $2,000 for the school year through the federal work-study program.  But she still owed a few thousand dollars each semester to cover the $57,000 annual cost of attendance, including tuition, fees, room and board. 

COMMENT

     Ms. McNair, who is from Harlem, studies Health Science at New England College in New Hampshire.  She wants to go to medical school, but if the student loans keep piling up it’s hard to see how that will ever happen.  A student job at the library is part of her aid package, but the article says she is planning to work at a grocery store after the work-study money is gone.

     There are many fewer student jobs at the library than there were before so much information was online -- no longer the need for so many people to shelve and check out books, file periodical subscriptions, and catalog cards or order books.  The result is that many fewer students get to experience library work.  That's a problem both because student jobs were a way to attract people into the profession and because people who have worked in a library have more knowledge of and respect for information systems.  The student jobs vanished unnoticed, except perhaps as a cost savings the annual budget. Few librarians considered what might be lost along with all those student jobs.  I have thought that academic libraries should make student jobs part of their mission, creating paid internships that let students work with librarian mentors.  If we truly believe that libraries are centers for creativity and innovation, these library internships would be the best jobs on campus. 

Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City

Scott Shane, "Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City," New York Times, December 1, 2019, p.1, 26-28.

Public libraries are stocked with digital audiobooks from Amazon's Audible, and browsers can check reviews on Amazon's Goodreads.

COMMENT

     In this article about the Kraken-like tentacles of Amazon.com libraries feature in the role of customers.  When libraries lend audio books, Amazon skims a little off the top.  Instead of turning to librarians for book recommendations, readers can plow through crowdsourced reviews on Goodreads (which are a lot less useful than you'd think with regard to finding something good to read).
     Libraries are a keystone of  literary culture.  They support books and reading by buying stuff, putting money back into writing and publishing. Yet in the world of librarianship there has not been much acknowledgement of this role. Instead, there is a tendency to prioritize efficiency and cheapness.  During the transition to online newspapers, librarians never asked the question of how journalists would get paid.  Likewise, librarians have cut down on purchasing books from university presses without ever asking how young professors will get tenure if there is no place for them to publish books.
     Librarians like to point to libraries as core institutions for community resilience and civic engagement.  Yet abandoning newspapers and academic presses for the sake of "cheapness" was not socially responsible.  It's probably not socially responsible for libraries to switch procurement to Amazon.com either, particularly since prioritizing convenience and cheapness are exactly what lured librarians to make bad decisions in the past.
     Somebody (ALA?) should take a hard look at library spending in order to understand exactly who and what it's supporting. The long and short is, Big Tech distributes information but does not create it.  Amazon.com is the new Wal*Mart, vacuuming up dollars and sucking the life out of communities.  Only now it's happening to cities and not vulnerable small towns.   The article ends with Emma Snyder, the owner of an independent bookstore who says that her customers will pay $10 more for a book just because they don't like the world Amazon is building:  "Part of what people don't like is that Amazon debases the value of things.  We're commercial spaces, but we fundamentally exist to feed and nurture people's souls."  What if libraries applied this idea to spending?  Is there a way to re-focus collection development on building strong communities, not just on getting cheaper best-sellers?

Can Marriage Counseling Save America?

Andrew Furgesun, "Can Marriage Counseling Save America?" Atlantic, December (2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/better-angels-can-this-union-be-saved/600775/

     Yet there I was one bright summer Sunday, wreathed in skepticism, gathered with a dozen others in the community room of a suburban public library in Northern Virginia to test whether this nation, or any nation so fragmented and so polarized, can be united and saved by a workshop.
     This was not just any workshop, of course. I was at a “skills workshop” put on by a grassroots citizens’ group called Better Angels. The group got its start in the shell-shocked weeks right after the 2016 election, and it takes its name from Abraham Lincoln’s famous plea, in his first inaugural address, that his divided countrymen heed the “better angels of our nature.” (They didn’t.)
     Paid-up membership in Better Angels stands at a little over 8,000, but the group creates a commotion bigger than that of organizations many times its size. On any given day somebody somewhere in the United States is hosting an event like the one I attended. There are an average of eight to 10 such events a week. The mission everywhere is the same, explained by the inspirational mottoes on the posters the organizers had hung in the library. “Let’s depolarize America!” “Start a conversation, not a fight.”

COMMENT

     Librarians don't always need to re-invent the wheel.  Here is a citizen group dedicated to civic dialog that is using library space to host events.  The idea is simply to get conservative and liberal voters to talk to one another.

   This may or may not work. One problem is that for all they gripe bout civility, Republican voters seldom show up to such meetings. As the author puts it, "Now, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who will join hands and sway gently back and forth while singing “We Shall Overcome” with Peter Yarrow, and Republicans." This same problem occurred with respect to the transportation open houses mentioned in Better Busses, Better Cities--- the people who show up to such meetings are self-selecting and not representative of the whole community.

   

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, (2019)

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent suites have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat.  The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data— coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against oppressive digital surveillance in many countries— means the it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must are assumed.  Within that range, however we are as confident as any historian can usually be (Laughter.) [p.409].

COMMENT

Libraries appear in Margaret Atwood’s fiction fairly often and she has strong, well-informed opinions about them.  This satirical paragraph is a good example.  At the end of the story, historians of the future try to piece together the evidence to figure out what really happened.   In Atwood's informaiton dystopia, digital material has utterly vanished,  vulnerable to war and misused to prop up a surveillance state.  In this story many of the words that do survive survive on paper.  Aunt Lydia records her own testimony using a antique-style pen and ink meant for teaching drawing.  

The Library Book

Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 2018.

The story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the 1986 fire required years of research and scores of interviews with current and past library staff, deep dives into the Fire Department’s archives and the City of Los Angeles’s court records, and a lot of digging through the musty boxes of material stashed in the Library’s Rare Books Room. There I found a trove of information, including newspaper clippings about the library from the twenties; book lists from the thirties; paraphernalia from every decade; and countless, fascinating odds and ends left behind by the hundreds of librarians who passed through Central Library at some point in their careers. This material was essential to the writing of this book.  I also found a great deal of valuable material in the many books and published papers about California and library history.  [p. 315].

COMMENT

The notes on the author's research process mention those d/musty boxes again.  This time they contain ephemera of a kind that might strike some people as especially useless.   Who would consider old library book lists worth keeping? And yet here they are informing a bestseller. Interviews, government information and published books and articles are also cited as part of the research strategy.   The resulting book is the story of a community told through the lens of its public library, quite literally putting the library at the center of community and community resilience. 

Better Buses Better Cities

Steven Higashide, Better Buses Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (2019).

Agencies have to do better than "open houses" that draw eight people at the library and instead think seriously about how to get public input that equitably represents bus riders and activates allies throughout the planning process. They have to discard ponderous project development  processes that result in 5-year timelines for bus lane projects and try tactical approaches that change streets overnight instead.

COMMENT

Library open houses are portrayed here as an ineffective way to gather citizen input for transit improvements.  Many transit riders can't come either because such meetings conflict with work, of the bus stops running at night.   In order to get stakeholder input, it's essential to try to get a representative sample, not just respond to a few people who manage to show up in person. 

Face it, Mom and Dad: I'm Not Special

Jenny Dolan, "Face it Mom and Dad: I'm Not Special," (Modern Love) New York Times, November 24, 2019, ST6.

     My parents owned a book called "You Can Heal Your Life" by Louise Hay along with a matching set of affirmation cards, which my mother kept in her nightstand. Hay claims all illnesses result from fear and anger.
     I went to the library and checked it out, wondering what am I afraid of?
     Confident I could solve the problem with mind power, I visualized myself as healthy.

COMMENT

     Of course, the writer is not healthy. She is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, an incurable lung disease.  Her parents, however, are so committed to positive thinking that they are unable to offer helpful emotional support for their daughter who is facing a lifetime of chronic illness and the probability of dying young.   The self help book is worse than useless.

     The irony is that libraries are a public institution that stands against the current onslaught of fake news propaganda coming out of Washington D.C.  But library shelves offer plenty of fake news -- fake self-help, fake diet advice, fake politics.  A library would probably not buy a book by say, a Holocaust denier, but right there on the shelves was a book of science denial that places the blame for illness on the person who is sick.

    Yet even this fact-free book serves a function.  The author's parents own the book and believe it offers helpful advice.  Because the library has a copy she is able to  understand why her parents seem so dismissive of her worries. Later the parents give the author more self-help books for a Christmas present and because of what she learned from the library book her reaction to these books triggers the conversation that parents and child should have had much sooner.  

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986). 

I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves.  We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours.  After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me.  I liked the feel or them and the look.  Luke said I had he mind of an antiquarian.  He liked that, he liked old things himself. 

COMMENT

     It seems that before the repressive Gilead theocracy took over Offred had a job at a library.  Notwithstanding her prowess at Scrabble, she was para-professional staff, not a  librarian. The detail of the library job shows Atwood as a master satirist.  Offred herself has been an  book-burner, albeit an inadvertent one.  Now the book burners are in charge and the world is a total nightmare.  The digitized books did not survive regime change, and this, along with the lack of paper money and elimination of newspapers has helped  fanatics suspend the Constitution. Libraries have been burned, there are no computer connections and women are forbidden to read.

    In the afterword a group of historians discuss Offred's narrative and describe how it had been recorded orally using an already obsolete technology of musical tape cassettes.   In order to transcribe them, the historians-of-the-future have to reconstruct a tape player.  

   Atwood's awareness of library preservation formats is extraordinary and prescient.   Oppression of women has left a gap in the historical record for Gilead scholars, but so has the use of non-archival digital technologies.

    

Here to Help

Tik Root, "Here to Help: One Thing You can do to Slay the Energy Vampires," New York Times, November 1, 2019, p. A3.

Another option is a Kill-a-Watt meter, which measures how much energy individual appliances are using.  they're available at most hardware stores and can sometimes be borrowed at public libraries.

COMMENT

   The library is not just for books any more! It's also a place where you could possibly borrow a  single-use tool in order to help cut energy consumption.

In the Land of Self Defeat

Monica Potts, "In the Land of Self Defeat,"  New York Times, October 4, 2019.

The fight over the pay for the new head librarian had a larger context: The library moved into a new building, with new services, in 2016. Construction began during the natural gas boom years, and ended after the bust, just as the county budget was being squeezed and services were being cut. During the boom, the new building had seemed necessary, but with the revenue decreases, the county knew it was going to have a hard time paying the 2.1 million still owed on it. (Disclosure: My mother was on the library board when some of the decisions about the new building were made.) The library made its own budget cuts, but the savings weren’t enough to cover the shortfall in paying for the building, and there was a real danger of the library closing, leaving its new, hulking brick building empty. The people who didn’t frequent the library argued that the community didn’t really need it anymore, anyway. After all, if you have internet, you can get whatever you want in a day. 

COMMENT

In this article the public library serves as a synecdoche for community that is undermined by anti-tax zealotry.  The author writes that anti-tax Trump voters "view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain, even if it ultimately helps them, too."  She notes that people who would like to live in a place with better schools and good public libraries have already moved away leaving behind a group of people wedded to an ideology of self-defeat since without community services to fall back on all of them are much poorer.

The library building was built with boom-and-bust resource extraction money.  It's typical that a community would overspend, expecting the boom to go on forever.  It never does.  Politicians like to pretend that fossil fuel extraction is economic development.  In fact, extractive industries is a good way for rich people to make money specifically because it employs relatively few people and isn't permanent in a community and therefore doesn't have to worry about long-term community relationships.  They always go bust in the end and always seem to leave behind damage to the environment and economy.

Original Man

Michael Schulman, "Original Man Why Do So Many Directors Want to Work With Adam Driver?" New Yorker,  October 28, 2019, pp 54-63.

"One time he snapped so sharply at a student who had used his yoga mat that he reduced the guy to tears. "I was, like, I gotta be better at communicating," he said.  He holed up at the performing-arts library and read plays by David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley, and found that drama helped him express his roiling emotions."

COMMENT 

The library as refuge and self-directed learning for a student destined to become a well-known actor. The library provides a foundation for an unlikely career. 

Chen Wei Guo's Killer Has Been Extradited to Colorado, Charged with Another Murder

Stephany Cortez, "Chen Wei Guo's Killer Has Been Extradited to Colorado, Charged with Another Murder," The Utah Chronicle, V.29 No. 11, 2019 p. 9.

     The next day, Oct. 30, 2017, Austin Boutain was recognized by a librarian at the Salt Lake Public Library, after more than 200 officers and FBI agents conducted a lockdown to find the culprit and assure students were safe on campus.  Boutain pled guilty to two felonies: attempted aggravated murder and aggravated kidnapping, which qualifies for the death penalty in the state of Utah. 

COMMENT

     Vocational awe, anyone?  Though no part of this story is actually surprising.  It's not surprising that a fleeing murderer would go to a perceived safe space in a public library.  It's also not surprising that a librarian there had been following the news and was able to recognize the suspect. 

A Dusty Artifact Shows the Reach of a Social Reformer

Hillary Howard, "A Dusty Artifact Show the Reach of a Social Reformer," New York Times, August 25, 2019, p. Y29.

     The trunk had sat in the library of a midtown Manhattan acting school for decades.
No one seems to have ever fully rifled through its contents save for a researcher her and there, said Whit Waterbury, an archivist and librarian at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the conservatory where Robert Duvall, Jeff Goldblum and Allison January trained.
...
     At first, he didn't think much of the dusty thing, with its fragile binding and fading yellow ribbon on the outside.  He set it aide to focus on documents more clearly related to the school and its founders... But then last spring, he actually flipped thorough its pages.  There was Eleanor Roosevelt's signature. And Amelia Earhart's. The journalist Jacob Riis wrote a nice note. So did Alfred E. Smith, a four term governor of New York.
...
     Last year, for its 125th anniversary, Henry Street Settlement introduced a permanent exhibition, which covers the history of the organization, and of the neighborhood it serves, at its headquarters.
      Officials there have plans to digitize the book and incorporate it into the exhibition. 

COMMENT

   Once again, the tale of hidden treasure in dusty archives,   The word "dust" covering the potential on unnoticed texts, in this case, a guestbook for Henry Street Settlement signed by many notable people and demonstrating the historic importance of the organization.   One person is quoted as saying, "The trunk was something out of Narnia."   Whoever put it in the trunk must have had a sense that it was worth keeping, but since it was in the box they could never have imagined how it would raise that spooky sense of touching history for people in the future.

     Now the guestbook will be digitized, which is to say, it will become an online representation of official history.  Digitization is an odd paradox.  The electronic version will be easier for more people to see, but it won't inspire comparisons with Narnia.  It's inevitable that some of the magic will be lost in translation. Digitization also means selecting the most interesting artifact out of the box, but better access for this single object paradoxically makes it less likely that someone will find something amazing and wonderful than sorting through paper objects stored in a dusty box.

Life Goes On

Thessaly La Force, "Life Goes On" (Notes on the Culture), T: The New York Time Style Magazine, August 18, 2019 p. 98-

     Unbeknownst to [Judy] Chicago, Mary Ross Taylor, one of the administrators who then ran Chicago’s feminist nonprofit, Through the Flower, which had raised funds for the work’s completion and later it’s resuscitated tour, wrote to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art asking if it would be interested in acquiring the research material relating to the piece ["The Dinner Party"].  They declined, finding the material of no interest. Today, Chicago’s archives are stored across three libraries: the Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America, which is part of Harvard University; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and Penn State University.  She is also working with these institutions to build a digital portal of her complete oeuvre, which she plans to unveil later this year.

COMMENT

     It always makes a good story when a library turns down material that turns out to be historically important.

Everything All at Once

Bill Nye, Everything All at Once, Rodale, 2017.

When I was a kid and I wanted to look up an odd or obscure fact or a piece of information, like Millard Fillmore’s politics party affiliation, I hit the books — the actual paper books— in a library.  Or in high school if I wanted to know the atomic number of rubidium, I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, or if I was feeling hard-core, the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (the ol' CRC).  Nowadays I just pull out buy laptop or buy fancy new phone and go to Google. Then 586,000 results and 0.46 seconds later, I learn that Fillmore was the last president affiliated with neither Democrats nor Republicans, lucky guy.  And 146,000 results tell me that rubidium, symbol Rb, has an atomic number of 37, which means that it contains 37 protons.  …In the old days, you had to look things up in just a few reliable sources to save time.  In today’s data-soaked world, though, you easily can do quite a bit of extra sleuthing.  Information comes at us so quickly now that the challenge is not speed and efficiency but figuring out which of those 146,000 results contain the highest-quality answers. [pp.188-189]

COMMENT

Bill Nye the Science Guy documents changes in ready reference in order to promote nerd culture that seeks evidence-based answers.  Librarians no longer need to direct patrons to encyclopedias or CRC handbooks.   That turned out to are a problem because rubrics for counting reference statistics differentiated between  “easy/directional questions,” “ready reference” and “research help.”  The decline of ready reference misled some librarians into thinking that there was no longer any need for reference services.  They failed to notice that not all “easy/directional” questions were actually simple to answer, and that sorting through six-figure results makes it especially hard to find basic background information.  Nye understands that people  need guidance to sort through the overwhelm.  His chapter on “Critical Thinking, Critical Filtering” would make a useful reading for students who are learning the research process.  I once heard Nye speak at a library conference, and he's on our side. 

Work Friend

Megan Greenwell, “Work Friend: A Closed Mind Amid Open Books,” New York Times, August 11, 2019, p. BU3.

The library recently hired a new children’s department head who has told me that she doesn’t believe in evolution and doesn’t think public schools are good and that “Mexicans don’t read.” She talks about religion constantly and has added several creationist “science” books and DVDs to our library collection.

COMMENT

     This library problem comes from the work-related advice column. The library profession generates “vocational awe” but some librarians are nonetheless incompetent.  Other library stories relate encounters with racist librarians and it’s clear that a librarian with this kind of attitude has potential to cause actual harm.  It's especially hard to get rid of people who have been given administrative positions.  No matter how bad they are, administrators somehow make themselves immune from accountability.

     A professional standard of neutrality is meant to keep personal bias from bubbling to the surface, but it can’t stop someone who won’t accept the standard.  I once got into a debate at a library conference with a librarian who wanted to preach anti-abortion from the reference desk. My point of view is that the best way to approach controversial topics is to get students to identify the stakeholders— the right answer is not to take sides but to encourage patrons to determine who cares about the issue and why. This librarian wanted to use the platform of the reference desk to “guide” patrons towards her own preferred political position. In any case, stocking the shelves with science-denial is not objectivity but just false equivalency.  There are not two sides when one side is simply wrong.   Academic libraries might have creationist propaganda for research reasons, but even so it's problematic because cataloging rules can make fake information look legitimate.  If we want to combat ignorance librarians shouldn’t be spreading fake news, even if there are people out there who want to read it. 

Arts, Briefly

Arts, Briefly: Library Arts Program Has Big First Year, New York Times, August 17, 2019, p. C3

     It’s been one year since public library cardholders in New York’s five boroughs were given expanded — and free— access to the Arts through the city wide Culture Pass initiative.     Since the program’s beginning in July 2018, over 70,0000 people seem to have taken the libraries up on their offer and signed up for the pass, the city’s public libraries said Tuesday.

COMMENT

     This program allows library patrons to reserve free passes for participating museums and other cultural venues. It proved to be so popular that tickets ran out for MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, while some of the lesser-known museums had noticeable attendance growth.  

     One question about this kind of program is how to advertise and catalog it to make it sustainable in the long run.  The article notes that most people who signed up did so early on when the program was first announced.  That suggests that there may be a need for continuous promotion since an arts pass is not something people expect to find at a library. It’s an issue with any innovative  library service. It might start with a bang, but in the long term, how will patrons know it’s there?  For instance, I remember that my own public library had a program to check out a pass for State Parks.  It’s a great idea, but even though I'm a public library user I have no idea whether or not that program is still operating. 

Paule Marshall [Obituary]

Richard Sandomir, “Paule Marshall, 90, Influential Author Who Wrote of Ethnic Identity, Is Dead,” New York Times, August 17, 2019, p. B13. 

     At a local library, she found sustenance in writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Zane Grey  and William Makepeace Thackeray.  She also discovered the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.  The opening lines of his “Little Brown Baby” (“Little brown baby with spa’klin’ eyes/ Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee”) moved her, she later said because her father had already left. 

COMMENT

Her obituary says that Marshall, best known for writing Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959),  wrote strong female characters using the linguistic rhythm s of Barbaddian speech, and that her novel is conserved to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s writing. I am a bit surprised that I have never heard of the book.  I am also surprised that a foundational Black writer felt inspired by poetry written in dialect.  I have always hated reading dialect because, I suppose, I assume that people with different accents are really just pronouncing written language differently.  The issue of Black language also comes up in an article about Maya Angelou who wrote in Black vernacular. [1]   It seems that as more diverse writers use English it may be even more important to represent different language patterns on the page, but hopefully without falling into the trap of stereotypes.

[1] Well Read, Well Known

Chuck Kosterman (By the Book)

Chuck Klosterman (By the Book) New York Times Book Review, July 21, 2019, p,. 7

Whose opinion on books to you most trust? 

Part-time bookstore employee and research librarians. They have no agenda and plenty of free time. The research librarians are especially good, because they don’t even care if their suggestions make them seem cool. 

COMMENT

    Klosterman is repeating a stereotype that librarians have a lot of free time to read.  In fact, the life of research librarians follows the academic year, incredibly busy at some times and in the summer more relaxed since many students and researchers are away. Despite his misconception, he values the service of readers’ advisory. 

      As for myself, I’m constantly recommending books, and I appreciate his vote of confidence.  It makes me realize, though, how often I’m enthusiastic about books that probably do sound fairly un-cool. I keep thinking that it would change people's lives if only they would read William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces  or Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking it would change their lives.  Lately, I've been using Eric Klinenberg's Palaces for the People which basically says that libraries are going to save the world. 

Selling Treasure Chest of Black History

Julie Bosman, "Selling Treasure Chest of Black History: The Auction of Ebony and Jet Magazines' Photo Archive Has Scholars Worried," New York Times, July 17, 2019, p. B4-5.

     "It keeps me up at night, thinking about the future of this archive," said Tiffany M. Gill, associate professor of Africana studies and history and the University of Delaware.  "You can't really tell the story of black life in the 20th century without these images from the Johnson archive.  So it's important that whatever happens in this auction, that these images are preserved and made available to scholars, art lovers and everyday folks."
      Several museums have expressed interest, and the obvious candidates are the Schomburg Center from Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library; The National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
     Another possibility that is feared by scholars: A private collector buys the archive and stashes it away. 

COMMENT

    The photo archives from Jet and Ebony document a cultural history of African Americans in the U.S., but the like many other print periodicals, these once-popular magazines are victims of the Internet.  The photographic archives are set to be auctioned to whomever can pay for them.  That is likely to be one of the world's billionaires, but it's impossible to say whether they will be friend or foe to the interests of scholars.  On the other hand, if a library or museum buys them it will open up a whole new world of images; if a private buyer gets them they may be off-limits.

      Libraries, in other words, are a kind of public space in more ways than one.  It's not just the physical space but the information space where things like these photographs can be made accessible to the public.  One frequent library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  These photos no doubt contain such treasure if anyone is ever allowed to go looking for it.

University Contributions to the Circular Economy

Nunes, Ben, et al. "University Contributions to the Circular Economy: Professing the Hidden Curriculum." Sustainability10.8 (2018): 2719-

Scopus was used to identify 150 pieces of relevant literature. These were then reduced to 70 studies by only including (i) papers appearing in journals with an impact factor cited by the Web of Science, (ii) books receiving a high level of citation on Google Scholar, and (iii) publications relevant to the topic of study.[p.2718]

 COMMENT

   Scholarly articles nearly always have a literature review, but the library research process is almost always invisible. It's just assumed that scholars know how to use the library.  In this paper, the researchers used an expensive research database called Scopus which was almost certainly provided by an unmentioned academic library. The process of winnowing such papers is described.   The authors specifically threw out papers that are not published in peer reviewed journals or scholarly books.  This research strategy is good as far as it goes, but it has the potential to create a blind spot. University facilities are often managed by people who are not faculty and who therefore have no mandate to write publish. As a result, it is harder to find papers about faculties management than articles about university curriculum and teaching. If I were advising these researchers  I might have suggested extending the Scopus search with citation searches on the key articles as well as reviewing the article bibliographies for relevant publications. I also might have suggested seeking out reports published by universities that were not published in journals at all.

Vivian Perlis Dies at 91

Anthony Tommasini, "Vivian Perlis Dies at 91: Oral History Project Captured Music's Giants," New York Times, (Obituaries) July 15, 2019, p. B7

     Ms. Perlis came to run the project accidentally, after taking a job as a research librarian at the Yale School of Music in 1967.  She had become involved there with the library's extensive Charles Ives collection and one day she made a visit to New York City to pick up some additional materials donated by Julian Myrick, who had been a pattern with Ives in an insurance business.
     Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder
...
     She became a harpist with the New Haven Symphony while working the library job at Yale that led to her founding the oral history project.
     For years Ms. Perlis essentially had to secure funding for the project on her own. The Yale School of Music provided office space and work-study students to assist with the endless task of transcribing interviews. But she often felt "like and orphan," she said, as she labored in her basement headquarters.
...
From the start Ms. Perlis buttressed the collection with existing recorded interviews acquired from radio stations and historians, building it into one of the most extensive oral history archives in America. 

COMMENT

     This obituary makes me happy and sad at the same time.  In the 1960's Ms. Perlis wanted to do a Ph.D in musicology but Columbia University refused to give her the flexibility to take care of her kids.  Instead she became a pink-collar academic librarian and  got to do the project of her dreams collecting oral history from famous musicians, albeit with no professional recognition and almost no institutional support. The the library gave her space in the basement with no air conditioning while PhD musicologists derided her collection as "pipsqueak stuff."  I can only imagine how much her librarian colleagues must have resented her getting to spend time on her pet project that nobody cared about.  Until somebody did care, that is. 

    This tale is all too familiar in the world of academic libraries.  Administration actively discourages librarians from "niche" work that seems out of line with organizational priorities.  Yet that often turns out to produce the most unique and most valuable collections.  In this case the librarian built a collection worthy of an obituary in the New York Times.  I will bet the the people who tried to shut her down never accomplished anything even half as notable. 

     

Delia Owens

Delia Owens (By the Book), New York Times Book Review, July 14, 2019, p.8.

When I was a child, I thought reading was something you did when it rained. I was a tomboy out collecting and releasing frogs and salamander or riding a horse named Strawberry.  When I was about 9, my friend dragged me into the library and while she was searching for a book to read, I stumbled into a display table filled with guidebooks for birds, insects, reptiles and shells.  In an instant my world of nature was connected with the world of words. 

COMMENT

     In this story serendipitously finding a book in a library display makes an impact on an outdoorsy child.  Guidebooks are an underappreciated source of inspiration for many people because of the way they seem to contain the observable world.  Though they are intended to teach people about unfamiliar things, guidebooks are especially wonderful because of the way they reflect familiar things in the observable world and reveal some of their secrets.  For instance, a bird guide shows you where the neighborhood birds go in the winter and maps of places where people never see those birds at all.   Birds can be one of the more disorienting aspects of travel likewhen you look up and see that white vultures instead of familiar turkey vultures, or a screaming flock of green parakeets instead of starlings, or notice a bright red cardinal when no such bird inhabits your home ecosystem.  Guidebooks are part of a literature of place and as climate change shifts the range of species they may become important historical records.

     Nowadays there are apps that identify birds, flowers, stars, and such, and GPS systems that make maps of where you intend to go,  but these seem to me to lack the depth of guidebooks.  For one thing, they declare an answer without the need to think through one’s own observations.  For another, instant identification lacks a larger context of interrelations.  I doubt that an app would help a child connect nature with the world of words, but Owens says that Roger Tory Peterson field guides led her to read Aldo Leopold, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Karen Blixen and Charles Darwin.

Woman of the River

Richard E. Westwood, Woman of the River: Georgie White Clark, White-Water Pioneer, Utah State University Press, 1997.

I have had the generous help and cooperation of many people in getting this book together.  Karen Underhill and the staff at Cline Library, Arizona University, got me started and helped along the way by guiding me through the Georgie Clark collection and putting me in touch with Rosalyn J. (Roz) Jirge. This book would have been incomplete without the input and help from Roz.  She not only told me of her own experiences, but collected others' diaries, did interviews, transcribed taps of my interviews and supplied me with names and address of passengers and boatmen that were invaluable in my research. 

COMMENT

It's not uncommon to find a librarian listed in the acknowledgments of a book. This one has a nice description of a research strategy as well,  that includes tracking down people for interviews.  Sometimes the answer to a research question is not in the library collection but in knowing the right person to ask. This librarian happened to know that Roz Jirge was the right person. This kind of reference help is only possible when librarians have local knowledge.  Librarian training is focused on generic strategies to find published or archived information, but researchers are often focused on information gaps-- the biography that has not yet been written, the history that has not yet been told.  A recurring library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty stacks or archival boxes -- the material that nobody has noticed and nobody has thought to use.

Thanks to this researcher, the historical memory of Roz Jirge has been written in a book that is now available in the library collection, and anyone can read the story of a river running pioneer.  Not so long ago, I took a river trip through Westwater Canyon at high water (30,000 cfs).  The river guides lashed the rafts together in "double rigging" that they said was invented by Georgie White Clark to run the big rapids in the Grand Canyon.  I'm glad those guides knew their river history!

There Should be a Public Option for Everything

Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne L. Alstrott, "There Should Be a Public Option for Everything," New York Times, July 7, 2019, p,. SR10.

Throughout our history, Americans have turned to public options as a way to promote equal opportunity and reconcile markets with democracy.  For example, public libraries allow anyone to read, check out books or surf the internet.  This expands educational opportunities and guarantees access to information to everyone, but it doesn't prevent people from buying books at the bookstore if they choose. 

 COMMENT

     The oped argues that if capitalism is going to survive we need to reverse trends towards privatization of public spaces and deliberately offer  public options, government supplied goods and services that coexist with the private marketplace and that are available to all. The public library is offered as an example. People are still free to buy books and pay an ISP, but they also have the library as an option. The authors argue that "We don't have to choose between competitive markets and equal opportunity.  Public options are a way to mitigate the damage that comes with the worst aspects of capitalism while creating a common fabric that ties us together."

     With Republicans in Congress forming an Anti-Socialism Caucus, it seems essential to push this point. Privatization of everything is not only bad for citizens, it's bad for capitalism. Public options compete in a free-market, but they don't stop entrepreneurs from offering fancier, better, more convenient services to rich people.  Public parks don't stop people from having yards,  public transit doesn't stop people from driving cars, and the Post Office isn't the only place that can deliver packages. Sociologists are beginning to pay more attention to civic infrastructure that holds communities together and much of it consists of public options.  Ironically, "anti-socialism" that attacks public options is probably anti-capitalism as well.

   




   
   

SLC Airport Wants Public Input On It's New Master Plan

SLC Airport Wants Public Input On Its New Master Plan (Local Briefs), Salt Lake Tribune, July 6, 2019, p. A10.

The new $3.6 billion re-build of Salt Lake City International Airport was envisioned 20 years ago in the Airport's current master plan.  Now, the city wants to know what residents think the airport should look like 20 years from now.
..
It invites all interested parties to share ideas at a meeting July 17 from 6 pm. to 7:30 pm at the Salt Lake City Public Library.

COMMENT

Refreshments, parking validation and live streaming on Facebook encourage the public to weigh in on community planning.  The public library provides space for the meeting.  The notice of the meeting is published in a local newspaper, and presumably (I didn't check) listed in library events.  In any case, it's hard to know how citizens would discover this opportunity for public comment without the newspaper and the library.

Once Upon a River

Diane Setterfield. Once Upon a River: A Novel. 2018.

     The character of Henry Daunt is inspired by the magnificent real-life photographer of the Thames Henry Taunt. Like my Henry, he had a houseboat kitted out as a darkroom. In the course of a lifetime he took some 53,000 photographs using the wet collodion process His work came close to being destroyed when, after his death, his house was sold and his garden workshop dismantled.  On learning that many thousands of he glass plates stored there had already been smashed or wiped clean for use as greenhouse glass, a local historian, Harry Paintin, alerted E. E. Skuse, the city librarian in Oxford. Skuse was able to stop the work and arrange real of the surviving plates for safekeeping. I note their names here out of gratitude for their swift actions. It is thanks to them that I have even able to explore the Victorian Thames visually and weave this story around Taunt’s images.  [p.461]

COMMENT

  This anecdote describes the preservation function of the library.  It's not just a “book museum,” but a multi-media museum as well. As is often the case, the librarian stepped in to rescue a valuable history collection only after part of it had already been destroyed. While librarians are sometimes criticized as "gatekeepers," it is also true that outside of bookish professions people may not recognize the value of media artifacts. 

The heroic librarian is specifically mentioned by name since the rescued photographs were the basis for a novel. Unlike Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, this novel doesn't reproduce any of the  historic images that inspired it.  The but the images are only represented in the writing. This kind of output from library materials is so much more imaginative than the carefully documented scholarly communication and undergraduate term papers we tend to associate with library research.  

   There are a number of books about Henry Taunt and his photographs.  In his day, he even wrote a river guide-- A New Map of the River Thames (1872), which inspired interest in recreational boating including what is possibly the best river-trip book ever written, Three Men in a Boat (1889).  

  

Book Publishers, Unbound at Last

Jane Margolies, "Book Publishers, Unbound at Last," New York Times, June 12, 2019, p. B6.

When Abrams Books recently moved to new offices in Lower Manhattan from its longtime home in Chelsea, it hired the consultants that companies typically calling for their expertise in audiovisual, m lighting temperature and ventilation needs,     It also hired a library consultant, who identified the first and latest editions of almost every title the 70-year-old publisher had ever printed, which were then line up on towering oak shelves.  The 10,000-volume library is the first thing visitors see when they enter the new workplace.     That may sound musty, but Abrams was striving for a modern workplace.  Designed by the architecture firm Spacesmith, the 41,0000-square-foot office has an open plan, m a spacious cafe and state-of-the-art technology.

COMMENT

     In a redesigned publisher's headquarters, the first thing visitors see is an impressive library of all the books Abrams Books has published.  The books serve as a kind of architectural decor that communicates the 70-year history of the company in a concrete way.  The author of the article feels obliged to take a dig at a company "committed to print in a world going digital," and yet the publishing industry has stabilized and is even beginning to grow again.  Maybe the world of reading has become as digital as it's going to get.  When ebooks started to gain a foothold, librarians who never studied calculus believe that the trendline of digital publishing would keep going up until nobody read print any more.  But in fact, not all curves are straight lines, and not all readers want ebooks.

     Librarians may sneer at the decorative use of books, but a photo with the article shows just how effective this design strategy is.  The library stacks are enticing-- they make you want to go in and browse.  If Abrams were going to publish your book, they help you envision it on the shelves of a bookstore or library.  It doesn't look musty at all.  It looks kind of magical, like a place I'd be happy to work. 

     

3 Million U.S. Students Don't have Home Internet

Michael Melia and Jeff Amy, “3 Million U.S. Students Don’t Have Home Internet,” Deseret News [Associated Press], June 11, 2019, p A3. 

     School districts, local governments and others have tried to help.  Districts installed wireless internet on buses and loaned out hot spots.  Many communities compiled lists of wi-fi-enabled restaurant and other businesses where children are welcome to linger and do schoolwork.  Others repurposed unused television frequencies to provide connectivity, a strategy that the Hartford [CT] Public Library plans to try next year in the north, end.      Some students study in the parking lots of schools, libraries or restaurants— wherever they can find a signal.…     In rural northern Mississippi, reliable home internet is not available for some at any price.      On many afternoons, Sharon Stidham corrals her four boys into the school library at East Webster High School, where her husband is assistant principal, so they can use the internet for schoolwork.  A cellphone tower is visible through the trees from their home on a hilltop near Maben, but the internet signal does not reach their house, even after they built a special antenna on top of a nearby family cabin.

COMMENT

         In this story the library is both a helpful internet hot-spot and a nuisance because it isn’t open long enough hours. The public library and school library are theoretically places where kids can use the internet, but in practice students are sitting out in the parking lot. Why haven’t any adults noticed this?  Couldn’t they open the buildings for internet-enabled study halls?  How come the assistant principal whose own children have no internet at home has never had a talk with teachers who casually tell students to learn math from YouTube videos?  The article reports that 1/3 of houses in their town have no computer and 1/2 have no internet.  It seems easy enough for teachers to poll their students to find out how many have home computers or home internet. 

     Frustratingly, the article quotes a teacher who refuses to hand out assignments on paper because, “I really need you to get familiar with the technology because it’s not going away.”  The cruel irony is, some students can’t “get familiar” with it unless they have time to do online work at school. Due to the digital divide, pushing internet use outside of school hours just becomes  a harsh and damaging lesson in social inequality. It’s not clear whether students with home internet get better grades because they learn things online (doubtful, considering how distracting it is to be online), or whether the “convenience” of requiring online  homework just creates an extra barrier that causes students to do worse without it just because it’s so hard to turn things in. 

     

    Regardless, it’s clear from this story that the digital divide is in part an artifact created by digital haves who refuse to accommodate the reality of digital have-nots. In fact, the most common computer that people have is a smartphone, which is close to useless for typing term papers. Teachers and librarians should try using the systems they are imposing on their students and patrons. They might find out that it’s not such an educational necessity after all to force students into battle with buggy, frustrating, poorly designed software just to turn in a multiple-choice worksheet.  If unrealistic expectations are undermining education for 16% - 18% of students, it seems like educators should put a lot more thought into whether their requirements for online homework are educational or arbitrary.