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