Follow the Science. Back to the Classroom

Dale R. Wagner.  "Follow the Science. Back to the Classroom." Salt Lake Tribune, July 22, 2020.  https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2020/07/22/dale-r-wagner-follow/

     There is no shortage of legitimate peer-reviewed research on the topic. Combining the search terms “COVID-19” with “children” and “school closure” resulted in 143 articles in PubMed, a database of the National Library of Medicine. The journal citations that accompany my statements are “open access,” meaning that anyone can view the article online in its entirety without a fee or journal subscription.

     

 COMMENT

     In this editorial the author is using open-access articles in scholarly journals to consider COVID-19 studies.  Many journals have made COVID-19 research publicly available, at least temporarily.  The National Library of Medicine maintains the database that makes these articles easy to find. 

On Moral Injury

Janine di Giovanni, "On Moral Injury," Harper's Magazine, August 2020, pp. 65-69.

     He knew that soldiers returning from active combat suffered from PTSD, but he'd never heard of a conflict reporter suffering similar symptoms. He asked his research team to compile studies that might provide precedents, but they came back empty-handed.

     They told me there was nothing published on the topic," Feinstein recalled  "I didn't believe them. Because in medicine there is always something that comes before you."

     But the University of Toronto's medical library did not have a single study on the subject.  Feinstein was baffled: there was extensive scientific data on firefighters, police officers, soldiers, and victims of sexual assault, but a void when it came to reporters. 

COMMENT

    Psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein is looking for studies that link war journalism to PTSD.  The search turns up a void which guides his research into "moral injury" caused by witnessing a situation where people are in trouble and failing to help. It seems like a failure when there is nothing the library because patrons want to find an answer, but librarians know that a gap in research is also an opportunity for a PhD or scholarly publication.   The trick is to be good enough at searching to feel confident that the knowledge gap is real and not an artifact of sloppy information research. 

     

The Chekhov of Suburban Connecticut

Gal Beckerman, "The Chekhov of Suburban Connecticut," New York Times Book Review, July 12, 2020 p. 14.

     So deep is my remembered shame that men now, sitting at my keyboard at the age of 43, I'm blushing.  I know that times have changed, that today boys can like whatever they like, are even applauded for it.  But in the 1980's, when it seemed the only real option s for me were "The Hobbit" or the Hardy Boys or choose Your Own Adventure books, stories that as I recall all involved dragons and trap doors and motorcycle chases, sneaking home one of Ann Martin's books about a group of 12-year-old girls from fictional Stoneybrook, Conn., felt like a crime.  I mean, all of the covers were pastel. 

     It was a moment.  I think I read the first 15 books in the series over the course of fourth grade; whatever was in my school's library-- and I certainly didn't share my enthusiasm then with another soul.

 

 COMMENT

     The division between "boy books" and "girl books" is remembered as a shameful enthusiasm for books in "The Babysitters Club" series.  Luckily, these books were available from the school library.  How a 9-year-old boy worked up the nerve to check them out, the author does not say. 

     

The Time is Now for Us to Sit and Listen

Sharlee Mullins Glen. "The Time is Now for Us to Sit and Listen." Deseret News. June 25, 2020, p. A6. 

One evidence of the striking singularity of this particular moment is the fact that there are currently 206 holds at the small library in Kearns, Utah on the book "White Fragility: Why it's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism."

 COMMENT

     Library use is cited as evidence of community involvement in #BlackLivesMatter protests.  Demand for library books tracks current events. The library can help by purchasing a few extra copies so that readers can get the book faster. 

How to Dig Up Family History Online

J.D. Biersdorfer. "How to Dig Up Family History Online." New York Times. June 25, 2020, p. B7.

While not all government records may be free or digitized, the National Archives hosts a page of links from other genealogy sites where you can look for information.

... 

Libraries and historical/genealogical societies may also have books and periodicals that recorded the development of the area and the people who lived there, although you may have to visit in person to look at the original material has not been scanned. (Some libraries also offer free access to the commercial genealogy services.)

COMMENT 

     The article mentions online genealogy sites and the National Archives as places to start.  Libraries come in further down the list once you have done your background research online. They type of local history that genealogists seek can be hard to find. There is a period when newspapers were preserved on microfilm, and many of these have never been digitized. One-of-a-kind Special Collections materials are hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  If you get a chance to poke through them, you might find something fascinating. 

Secrets Hidden in the Stacks

Adrienne Raphel. "Secrets Hidden in the Stacks." Poets & Writers, July/August 2020, pp. 14-17. https://www.pw.org/content/secrets_hidden_in_the_stacks

When University of Virginia (UVA) professor Andrew Stauffer sent his class to the library in the fall of 2009, he expected them to focus on the printed text of the books they brought back.  But Stauffer and his students soon realized that was just one story being told in these volumes.  While looking at nineteenth-century copies of work by Felicia Hemens, a poet widely beloved at the time for her sentimental verse, the students were immediately drawn to everything else happening in these books; not just the expected underlining and dog-ears, but bookplates, diary entries, letters, quotes, pressed flowers, and readers own poetic flights of fancy.

...

In this way,  Book Traces celebrates what Stauffer calls bibliodiversity; appreciating each book as its own object with its own life and history.  "We're fighting against the idea that once you've digitized a single copy, then you don't need others,: says Stauffer.

COMMENT

    The Book Traces project is not anti-digitization, but it it does show the limitations of treating books as merely texts. The article describes how the kinds of books that the Book Traces project seeks are specifically targeted for weeing because they are old, beat up and not rare.

     

How to Read Coronavirus Studies Like a Scientist

Carl Zimmer, "How to Read Coronavirus Studies Like a Scientist." New York Times, Jun 2, 2020, p. D7.

     The National Library of Medicine's Database at the start of June contains over 17,000 published papers about he new coronavirus.  A website called bioRxiv, which hosts studies that have yet to go through peer review, contains over 4,000 papers.
     In earlier times, few people aside from scientists would have laid eyes on these papers.  Months or years after they were written, they'd wind up in printed journals tucked away on a library shelf.  But now the world can surf the rising tide of research on the new coronavirus. The vast majority of papers about it can be read free online.
     But just because scientific papers are easier to get hold of doesn't mean that they are easier to make sense of.  Reading them can be a challenge for the layperson, even one with some science education.  It's not just the jargon that scientists use to compress a lot of results into a small space. Just like sonnets, sagas and short stories, scientific papers are a genre with its own unwritten rules, rules that have developed over generations. 

COMMENT

   This article offers a variation of the library "dusty shelves" with unread articles tucked away until they were rescued by online distribution. Many publishers have made COVID-19 studies open-access, but in fact there are usually paywalls between laypeople and scientific journal  literature.   The article offers helpful advice for how to approach scientific literature.  The article mentions NLM databases and a medical pre-print archive.  Medical information has its own unique information system because it can be so urgent for doctors and public health agencies to have up-to-date research.