Showing posts with label Librarians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Librarians. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians

 

Taylor Brorby, "The Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians" New York Times, Feb. 24, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/opinion/libraries-sex-books-north-dakota.html

Last fall, I was the keynote speaker at the North Dakota Library Association’s annual conference. The theme was “Libraries: The Place For Everyone.” There were rainbow flags, paper-link chains and multicolored glitter scattered across tables. It was the safest I have ever felt back home as an out, gay man. When I was a young person, libraries were where I went to find stories that made me feel I could fit in, not only in North Dakota, but in the wider world.

...

Growing up in the closet in North Dakota in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I found sanctuary in libraries that I couldn’t find anywhere else. I ate breakfast every morning in Bismarck High School, combing the stacks and reading books by authors like James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Willa Cather. When some of the school’s football players circulated a petition to have the one openly gay boy in my class change in the girls’ locker room, I went deeper into the library shelves, tried to keep quiet and hide who I was.


COMMENT

This op-ed is technically about libraries, but it contains a library story about a place of refuge and finding identity.  

Monday, October 17, 2022

How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?

 Rachel Aviv, "How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?", New York Times, October 16, 2022, pSR4-5.

Ms. Gaines-Young ended up incarcerated for a crime she committed when she was psychotic, and she became close with a prison librarian with whom she discussed the books she was reading each week. She felt grounded by a deep connection to another person, and when she was sick, she trusted the librarian's assessment of her state of mind.  When, after going off psychotic drugs, the librarian told her, "I don't fully recognize you," Ms. Gaines-Young decided to start taking medications again.  "She knew me intellectually, philosophically, and even on some level spiritually," she said.  "She was a huge barometer to judge my wellness and non-wellness. Ms. Gaines-Young went on "She wasn't treating me like a problem to be fixed only with medication.  She understood the language I was speaking."


COMMENT

The non-judgmental practice of librarianship becomes a helpful approach for a woman with mental health problems.  The connection is established by talking about books and ideas, not focusing on a medical diagnosis. 




Saturday, December 18, 2021

A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives

 Jennifer Schuessler, "A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives", New York Times, December 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/arts/television/emily-dickinson-archive-harvard.html


Now, a show that emerged from the archives is returning whence it came, for — as Dickinson might have put it — all Eternity.

The series, whose three-season run will come to an end on Dec. 24, is donating dozens of costumes, period furnishings and props to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass., where they will be used to flesh out the sense of her daily life at the Dickinson homestead.

And in a twist, it is donating its production archive of scripts, costume and set designs, and paper props to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Included in the haul: the show’s painstaking re-creations of Dickinson manuscripts, which will be housed alongside more than 1,000 of the Real Thing.
...

The donation to Harvard’s Houghton Library is the library’s first acquisition from a television show, according to Christine Jacobson, an assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts.
Jacobson first started following Smith on Twitter in 2018, after she got wind of the show when the production requested permission to reproduce a portrait owned by Harvard. They struck up a virtual friendship (bonding over a side passion for Russian literature), and last summer, when Smith asked if Houghton wanted materials from the show, she jumped.

 COMMENT

The show used archival materials for it's creation, and returns the fruits of that creative effort back to the library.   The library was able to aquire the materials due to a personal relationship between an astute librarian and the shows creators. 

Saturday, December 11, 2021

Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, "Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic", Washington Post December 10, 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/12/10/tarot-cards-pandemic-trend/
The rise of contemporary artist-made tarot decks is being documented by MIT Libraries, describing the more than 400 decks as “unbound books” with narratives. MIT has purchased decks from crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter or directly from the artists on sites like Etsy with a particular interest in radical, feminist, queer, people of color, and spiritually and religiously diverse revisions. The idea for the MIT tarot library emerged after an MIT’s curator was staying in a hotel in Washington in 2018 when she saw a tarot deck for sale at the mini bar, according to Alex McGee, an archivist for MIT Libraries.
“That confirmed to us that tarot was having a moment,” McGee said. “If we’re arguing it’s an unbound book, how could we not create a space for it?”

COMMENT

I have often described Tarot cards as perhaps the only successful hypertext book. The librarians at MIT  agree. 

Sunday, October 24, 2021

How to Recommend a Book

 Malia Wallan, "How to Recommend a Book," New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2021, p. 15.

"Recommending books you love is the hardest thing of all," says Joyce Saricks, 72, who worked for nearly 30 years as a reference librarying in suburban Chicago.  Saricks has written several textbooks on so-called "readers' advisory," which largely disappeared from libraries after World War II and is credited with helping spark a national revival in the practice of librarians' suggesting books to patrons.

...

When Saricks was stumped, she often led patrons into the library stacks, where book spines would spur ideas and conversation.  "My colleague used to say, 'The books know when you're desperate,'" she says.  


COMMENT

The librarian in this story is an author of a book for librarians that, according to this author, helped restore a culture of reading and literacy to contemporary libraries.   The story includes a plug for physical browsing, which can lead to finding something unexpected.   The Internet most definitely does not know when you're desperate. 

Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve

Steven Moity, "Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve," New York Times, October 17, 2021 p. 2.

The puzzles first go to three testers who work for Mr. Shortz.  One is Nancy Schuster, a former crossword editor and champion of the first American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the country's oldest crossword competuition.  LIke Ms. Eysenbburg, she test-solves the puzzle and keeps her eye  out for anything that is off.
Brad Wilber is the chief faxt checker.  A former librarian, he brings his attention to detail to meticulously check as much of the informaiton as possible.  "You have to watch old commercials on YouTube, you have to check song lyrics, you have to check quotations," Mr. Wilber explained. He then calls Mr. Shorz directly and discusses any errors he has found and discusses potential wording changes. 


COMMENT

My dream job!

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

My Brother Will was a Force of Nature

 Pat Bagley, "My Brother Will was a Force of Nature," Salt Lake Tribune, p B1, B6.

Will could be irascible.  He would pound the table to make a point, an action that sound technicians at KUER dubbed "Bagleying the table."  Injustices 150 years old were fresh wounds to him.  The folks at the Church History Library came to dread his demand for documents and called him Gimli amongst themselves.

COMMENT

Will Bagley was a historian who wrote about the LDS Church.  The librarians probably loved helping him with his extreme research projects, but they also probably really did call him Gimli. 

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

 Kelly Jensen, "Anti-Critical Race Theory Parents fight The Hate U Give," book Rion, August 10, 2021. https://bookriot.com/the-hate-u-give-challenge/?fbclid=IwAR3xZMSlv3isO98FaNDjN_BxJ_A3708MG1uTShFYKHpVh_Y6mR5fUUEqZdQ

In most parts of the US, if public schools aren’t back in session, they will be soon. If fights about masking or not masking during a global pandemic and rise of the COVID-Delta variant weren’t enough, nor were protests against access to inclusive sexual education material, now teachers and librarians have to fight a third front. Opponents to Critical Race Theory (CRT) are flooding school and library board meetings, hoping to squash use of titles that explore anti-racism. Angie Thomas’s award-winning debut The Hate U Give is one such title under the spotlight by anti-anti-racism activists in Putnam County, New York.

...

The Hate U Give is no stranger to criticism, having been on the American Library Association’s most challenged list since its publication in 2017. Reasons for its continual challenge include it being “‘pervasively vulgar’ and because of drug use, profanity, and offensive language.” 

COMMENT

Librarians are in the role of defending a book from angry parents and maintaining a list of banned books.  Without saying it in so many words,, the article makes it clear that the censors have not read "The Hate U Give" but then again, censors almost never seem to have actually read the books they object to. 
 

 

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison

 Emily Bazelon, "Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison?", New York Times Magazine, July 4, 2021, pp 27-33, 47, 49.

It started with an email I received from a retired librarian in Oregon  "Dear Ms Bazelon, Karen Oehler write in July 2019.  "I correspond with an inmate, Yutico Briley, at Dixon," a prison in Jackson, La.  For a couple of years, Oehler and Briley had been writing to each other through a support program for incarcerated people. 

...

Briley mentioned that one of his favorite books was "Exodus,' the 1950's novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel, which he borrowed from the prison library cart.  I remembered the paperback copy I checked out from the library when I was growing up.  "One of my faviore things to read about is history," he wrote,. "The book I read is old, and the pages crch when you flip them."

...

I went to law school and passed the bar, but I've never practiced law.  I decided, though I had never intervened like this before, to call a few innocence lawyers on Briley's behalf.  I wasn't sure why -- he was one prisoner among millions.  Was it because I wasn't really planning on writing about him?  Because Briley saw himself in the young men in my book?  Because he mentioned the novel "Exodus"?  I didn't know.  But hen that's often true of relationships and of stories.  One spark catches.  Maybe others follow



COMMENT

What a great library story!  Yes, there are lawyers involved, but Briley's innocence wouldn't have been  established without libraries --first, because of a retired librarian who is still involved in social justice work, and secondly, by his choice of reading that happened to establish a bond with Bazelon.  At age 19, Briley was sentenced to 60 years without possibility of parole.   He spent eight and a half years in prison before a new D.A. was elected in New Orleans who campaigned on a promise to re-examine wrongful convictions.

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?

 Jess deCourcy Hinds, "Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?" (Modern Love) New York Times, June 6, 2021, p.ST5.


I was busy starting a new library from scratch for a public school in Queens. Wondering is Stefan would support my career, I joked to him that my weekends were "booked."  He smiled and offered to help.  Our first excursion took us to a deceased professor's estate in western Massachusetts, where we spent 14 hours loading 3,000 dusty books into a fleet of U-hauls to bring to the new library. 

...

My school library grew, and I cataloged thousands of volumes in Dewey.  Melvil Dewey, creator of the  1876 classification system, was no hero, having withdrawn from the American Library Association after numerous accusations of sexual harassment. He was forced out of the New York State Library for racism and anti-Semitism. 

...

Before I moved in with Stefan, I donated books that reminded me of my exes to my school library.  I donated film books from my filmmaker and actress girlfriend of almost four years, and the nautical books from my boatbuilder boyfriend who lived in a lighthouse.  I let go of old heartbreak by setting my exes books free among thousands of other volumes in my library to circulate.  Every few years, I bump into them like old friends and reflect on how loving this man and woman prepared me to love Stefan, who knew my story from the beginning and always accepted me.  


COMMENT

This tale of Modern Love is by a bisexual woman who wonders where she fits into "queer"  after marrying a man.  She describes building and cataloging a school library based on book donations.  This used to be a common way to build libraries, but in the digital age, many libraries decided that older print books weren't worth the trouble.  This particular librarian, however, finds personal value in donations that represent memories of past lovers.  Since her home bookshelves are no longer an appropriate place to preserve such memories, she keeps the memories safe in the library.  This access to books that are part of one's past is an important function of library collections.   You never know when it might be time to revisit something you thought you'd never read again. 

Saturday, May 29, 2021

Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html"Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96," New York Times, May 21, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html

Ruth Freitag, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for nearly a half-century, was unknown to the general public. But she was, in more ways than one, a librarian to the stars.
...
In a way, Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process.

“Ruth was known for her ability to find a needle in a haystack,” Ms. Carter said.

Her strong suit was compiling epic bibliographic guides and resources. Her notable subjects included the star of Bethlehem, the flat earth theory and women in astronomy. But her crowning achievement was her illustrated, annotated, 3,235-entry bibliography on Halley’s comet, replete with citations of books, journals, charts and pamphlets, as well as references in fiction, music, cartoons and paintings. It was indexed and bound and published by the Library of Congress in 1984, just in time for the celebrated comet’s last pass-by of Earth in 1986. Even the Halley’s Comet Society in London called Ms. Freitag for information.

“These bibliographies would take months and even years to do,” said Jennifer Harbster, head of the science reference section at the Library of Congress. “It wasn’t like you just found a title and put it in your bibliography. She would annotate it all.”

COMMENT

  Ruth Freitag's job is described as knowing more about how to find scientific information than Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan.  She answered reference questions and complied annotated bibliographies. Sometimes she helped with things like copy editing that were probably outside of her job description. The obituary notes that authors frequently thanked her for her help in the forewords to their books (always a good place to look for library stories). 

The obituary writer implies that Freitag's skills have been rendered obsolete by Google, but Google won't annotate or evaluate anything for you.  As the Internet has become a source of disinformation, propaganda  and unsubstantiated lies, perhaps the skill of compiling epic bibliographies is due for a revival.


 

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo

Elizabeth A. Harris,  "Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo." New York Times May 17, 2021, p. C2. 

The Book Show, which will be held virtually May 25-27, is aimed at librarians, independent booksellers and book buyers from major chain stores. It is intended to help publishers push their biggest fall titles, which is when many of the biggest books of the year are released in advance of the crucial holiday shopping season.

COMMENT

    Librarians are part of the target audience for a Book Show held by the publishing industry.   The article implies that librarians have a role in helping sell predicted best sellers, but they also have a role in promoting "sleepers" that deserve more promotion than they got. 


Monday, May 10, 2021

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

 

Daniel Markovitz "How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning", Atlantic, May 6, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

Changes in the weightings so tiny that they are obviously arbitrary make material differences in the rankings. In this year’s law-school report, U.S. News issued multiple corrections—for example, eliminating a 0.25 percent weight for the “credit-bearing hours of instruction provided by law librarians to full-time equivalent law students” (whatever that is) and increasing the weighting of the bar-passage rate by 0.25 percent. These maneuvers altered the rank of 35 law schools, including nine in the top 30.

COMMENT

     This article about the fierce competition to get into elite colleges cites library instruction as a particularly absurd measure of excellence.   Apparently, law students are no longer expected to know how to do their research. 

Monday, April 5, 2021

We Have All Hit the Wall

 Sarah Lyall, "We Have All Hit the Wall", New York Times, 4 April 2021, p. BU 1, 7.

Nearly 700 people responded to The Times's questions and the picture the painted was of a work force at its collective wits' end.  We heard from a clergyperson, a pastry chef, an I.C.U. nurse, a probation officer, a fast-food worker. Budget analysts, librarians, principals, college students holed up in childhood bedrooms, project managers, interns, real estate agents -- their mood was strikingly similar, though their circumstances were different.  As one respondent said, no matter how many lists she makes, "I find myself falling back into deep pajamaville".  [p. BU 7]

COMMENT

Librarians are listed among the professions that are experiencing malaise, burnout, depression and stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The article reports that "workers across the board felt makedly worse than they did last April."  

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children’s Book Author, Dies at 104

 

William Grimes, "Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children’s Book Author, Dies at 104" New York Times March 26 2021. ://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/books/beverly-cleary-dead.html

After two years at Chaffey Junior College in Ontario, Calif., she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated in 1938. A year later, she earned a degree from the University of Washington’s school of librarianship and went to work as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Wash.
...
At her library job in Yakima, Ms. Cleary had become dissatisfied with the books being offered to her young patrons. She had been particularly touched by the plight of a group of boys who asked her, “Where are the books about us?” She had asked herself the same question when she was a schoolgirl. “Why didn’t authors write books about everyday problems that children could solve by themselves?” she wondered, as she recalled in her acceptance speech on receiving the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the American Library Association in 1975. “Why weren’t there more stories about children playing? Why couldn’t I find more books that would make me laugh? These were the books I wanted to read, and the books I was eventually to write.”


COMMENT

Who knew Beverly Cleary was a librarian?   This is the first story of Finding Identity where these days the identity is not at all hard to find.   It hadn't occurred to me that before Cleary, children's books  didn't feature white suburban kids. 

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Metropolitan Diary

 Joyce Marcel. "Back in Time" (Metropolitan Diary), New York Times, March 14, 2021, p. 32.

I was doing research on an accident that happened in 1945, when I was 3 and living on 51st Street in Brooklyn....

A friend who is a former librarian and now does genealogy research contracted a librarian in Brooklyn and learned that the Brooklyn Public Library had digitized its telephone directories.

Within a day, I had the name of the family that had lived next door.  It was an unusual name, so I did a search online and found a Buddhist scholar who, to my surprise, lived in the Vermont town next to mine. 

I left the man a garbled, giddy phone message asking if, by any chance, he was related to a family that had once lived in that house on 51st street, which has since been torn down.  

The next day he called back to say that he was related to all of the people who had lived in the house and that the person I was looking for was his grandfather. 

COMMENT 

Even former librarians still have the impulse to help people find information.  The digitized phone books record a snapshot of people and businesses from the past.  Libraries used to have shelves full of them.  

Friday, March 12, 2021

Personal Jesus

 Vinson Cunningham, "Personal Jesus: What Thomas Jeffereson did to the Gospels," New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021,  pp. 77-80. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/what-thomas-jefferson-could-never-understand-about-jesus

"The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" was brought to public attention in 1895 by Cyrus Adler, an observant Jew from Arkansas, who was a librarian and a curator of religious items at the Smithsonian.  Nearly a decade earlier, as a doctoral student searching the private library of a wealthy family, Adler had happened upon a set of Bibles that Jefferson had owned, with key passages of the Gospels snipped from their pages.  Now, charged with mounting an exhibition on American religion and still mulling over that discovery, Adler finally figured out where the missing passages had gone: into Jefferson's little book, which was hidden away in the library of Carolina Ramsey Randolph, Jefferson's great-granddaughter.  Adler bought the book from Randolph for four hundred dollars and promptly put it on display in the Capitol, where in Jefferson's time, it would almost certainly have been a scandal. Now it was met mostly with affectionate enthusiasm, as another example of Jefferson's wide-ranging brilliance.  [p.80]

Comment

     A librarian/historian solves a puzzle of why Thomas Jefferson cut up his Bible and tracks down the missing pages.  This story has all the elements of librarian heroism, recognizing and saving an important historical document. The fact that he put it on display illustrates a sense of triumph which I have felt myself upon discovering hidden treasure. 
 


Friday, February 19, 2021

Across the Years the Pages Come Alive

Jennifer Schuessler, "Across the Years the Pages Come Alive," New York Times, February 19, 2021, p. C12.

Julie Carlsen, a librarian and cataloger who curated the exhibition with Lomazow, called his collection “endlessly fascinating,” if a bit daunting to sort through in search of a clear narrative line. “It’s encyclopedic, as is Stephen’s memory of it,” she said. “He has highbrow material, but also oddball one-off material. It’s wonderful to page through.”

COMMENT

The librarian helped curate a display of  first issues of magazines. 

 

 

Sunday, February 7, 2021

Inside the List

 Elisabeth Egan. Inside the List. [Angie Thomas].  New York Times Book Review, February 7, 2021, p.20.

     Suddenly, my editor texts to tell me that Dr. Jill Biden shouted me out at the American Library Association midwinter conference!  She said she just bought 'The Hate U Give."
     Thomas consulted social media, where she'd been tagged by teachers and librarians and was able to see a video clip of the moment.  She said, "What shocked be was, this novel about a 16-year-old girl dealing with police brutality found its way into the hands of the first lady of the United States.   Had you told little Angie that 20-something years ago, she wouldn't have believed she wrote something that made it that far-- that this little Black girl in Mississippi whose family sometimes didn't know if they would have food would have a book in the White House."

COMMENT

     Teachers and librarians have the ability to promote worthy books.  In this issue of the NYT Book Review, "The Hate U Give" is #4 on the Children's Best Sellers list, with 204 weeks on the list.   Clearly, Thomas' book  already made a huge impact even before Dr. Jill Biden mentioned it in her keynote.  Still, the knowledge that the first lady has read the book offers a hopeful chance that it's message might result in actual social change. 

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Bindings

Anthony Lane, "Bindings; 'The Truth' and 'The Booksellers'", New Yorker, March 23, 2020, p. 68-69.

     The dealers' mission, one declares, is to "inculcate neophytes into the wonder of the object of the book." (Translation; get the suckers hooked.) We glimpse one volume containing mammoth hair; another covered inhuman skin, with teeth embedded in the cover; and a librarian doll, "with Amazing push-button Shushing Action!"

COMMENT

   A review of the documentary  "The Booksellers" is about people who are obsessed with print books.  I happen to own the librarian doll mentioned, a toy that was all the rage with librarians back in 2003.  She was modeled on librarian Nancy Pearl who wrote "Book Lust." Here's a history of the famous librarian action figure: https://mcphee.com/pages/history-of-the-librarian-action-figure