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.