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.  

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. 
 

Hey Let's Go and Zone Out at Hogwarts

 Eliza Brooke, "Hey Let's go and Zone Out at Hogwarts", New York Times, February 18, 2021, pp. D4-D5. 

Picture this: You’re in the Hogwarts library. Rain falls outside, a fire crackles across the room, and somewhere offscreen, quills scribble on parchment. You might look up from time to time to see a book drifting through the air or stepladders moving around on their own. Or maybe, you’ll feel so relaxed, you nod off to sleep. Welcome to the world of so-called ambience videos, a genre of YouTube video that pairs relaxing soundscapes with animated scenery in order to make viewers feel immersed in specific spaces, like a jazz bar in Paris or a swamp populated with trilling wildlife. They are part of a long tradition of audiovisual products and programming designed to make a space feel a little more relaxing, a little nicer.

...

There’s a video for just about every taste and mood. Library and cafe environments tend to be popular, but viewers can also enjoy the more specific experience of a carriage ride through the woods, a haunted Victorian manor, the RR Diner from “Twin Peaks” or a full hour of Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single “Driver’s License” edited to sound like it’s playing in another room during a rainstorm.

 COMMENT

The library place of refuge is so compelling that it is translated into things that remind people of libraries, in this case, a video meant to create a library mood. 

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. 

 

 

Latina/o transfer students’ selective integration and spatial awareness of university spaces

 Andrade, Luis M. "Latina/o transfer students’ selective integration and spatial awareness of university spaces." Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 17, no. 4 (2018): 347-374.

The most prevalent theme that emerged was that students navigated toward spaces where they could connect with other Latina/os. The most common place they visited to meet other Latina/os was the library. In total, nine students identified the library and areas within the library, such as the Chicana/o Resource Center 

...

The second consistent emergent theme was that students navigated to areas on their campus to be alone. They sought quiet spaces to escape the academic life and to rest. Unsurprisingly, the library was the most cited area where students visited to be alone. 

... 

The third most prevalent emergent theme was that students navigated toward spaces where they could benefit from others—students or faculty—in their majors. Five students indicated that they preferred to visit the buildings that housed their majors, such as the business, biology, or science buildings.

Library association awards Carnegie medals to McBride, Giggs

 

Hillel Italie, "Library association awards Carnegie medals to McBride, Giggs" Washington Post, February 4, 2021.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/library-association-awards-carnegie-medals-to-mcbride-giggs/2021/02/04/5a82f238-6735-11eb-bab8-707f8769d785_story.html

NEW YORK — This year’s winners of the Carnegie medals for fiction and nonfiction, presented by the American Library Association, have each checked out a few books in their time.

“I work from libraries a lot, and my wallet is full of library cards,” says Rebecca Giggs, an Australian author whose “Fathoms: The World in the Whale” received the nonfiction prize Thursday.

James McBride, the fiction winner for “Deacon King Kong,” has library cards in four different cities and wrote parts of his novel in branches in New York City and Philadelphia.

“In New York you can get anything you want but it takes longer because you can’t leave the library with them. But in Philly, you can,” explained McBride, whose novel last year was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

...

McBride and Giggs each have strong childhood memories of libraries. McBride, a longtime New Yorker, would visit them often because they were a “safe space” and because his family couldn’t afford to buy many books. Giggs remembers her mother getting into aerobics “in a big way” and , a few nights a week, dropping off her and her sister at a library next door to the workout space.

Ghost stories were a favorite.

 

COMMENT

Authors describe using libraries as a workspace and to check out books.  

 

 

 

 

Create a Digital Commonplace Book

 J.D. Biersdorfer. "Create a Digital Commonplace Book," New York Times, February 10, 2021, p. 

If you’ve never made a commonplace book before, first learn how others have used them. Academic libraries, along with museums, are home to many commonplace books, and you can see them without leaving the couch. John Milton’s commonplace book is on the British Library site, and the personal notebooks of other writers and thinkers pop up easily with a web search. The Yale University Library has scanned pages of historical commonplace books in its holdings, and the Harvard Library has a few in its own online collection, as well as images of a version of John Locke’s 17th-century guide to making commonplace books, which was originally published in French. And the Internet Archive has hundreds of digitized commonplace books for browsing or borrowing, including one from Sir Alec Guinness.