10 posts tagged “librarianship”

The day I am finished with this degree cannot come soon enough.  I am so looking forward to the time when I can come home from work and spend time with my family or friends or just do whatever the FUCK I PLEASE and not have to bother with some inane busy work that does not in any way improve my skills as a librarian.

Not that the news changes my vote in any way, but it looks like McCain/Palin have just lost the crucial librarian demographic (and any who believes in free speech).  Apparently, the ex-Mayor wanted to make sure the good people of Wasilia, Alaska weren't corrupted by some of the books held in the local public library.  Read here for more.  Oh, she's a beaut alright!

Here's a little anecdote about Little One.  Getting dressed this morning, she says to me she wants to wear a tie, as in a necktie.  This is not the first time she's wanted to wear one -- I've been reluctant in the past since I don't have any "disposable" ties at the moment.  But today I said, what they hey.  Anyway, I asked her why she wanted to wear one.  Her response:  "I want to be a professional."  Classic.

Was helping a student today find some info on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  He was looking at something about the relationship between two of the characters and the how the homosexuality of one of the characters affected that relationship.  So, I found him stuff, including something from a journal entitled something like Lesbian and Gay Literature.  At which point, he apparently felt compelled to tell me that he was not gay.  Then he went on to say that was a stupid thing to say.  I tried to make him feel at ease and reminded him the article was relevant to his topic and that's what was important.

I also had a rather nerve wracking interaction today with a parent.  Guy calls from London saying we had sent an overdue notice for his son to his address in London.  He wants to know why he got the letter and what's up with the book.  I explained that the reason he got the letter is b/c that is the address we have on file, but that I would be happy to discuss the issue with his son and update his record.  The dad, however, did not want to give me contact info for his son.  He says, my son says he turned in the book and there's no fine printed on this notice, so what's up.  I tried to explain that our policy is to discuss issues related to overdues and fines and what have you with the patron.  He got very irate with me saying I was wasting his time and he threatened to call the President of the College.  Of course, he has a pretty valid point given that the overdue notice was sent to his address, so any pretense at confidentiality had already been breached.  In the end, I looked up the record and saw that the kid owed $16.50 and I told the father if he wanted to send us a check in that amount as a donation, we would consider the matter settled.  After the call, Iooked deeper into the system and discovered that the kid had returned the book yesterday, some 3 months overdue.  Of course, we've all returned books late before or even lost a copy.  What irks me is that this kid does not take responsibility for dealing with the consequences, but rather calls on daddy -- and daddy complies!

Emailed the prof about the case of a classmate plagiarizing my work on Sunday evening.  So far no reply. 

Went to check out Bally's gym as a possible alternative to the Y.  I dunno.  I'm not impressed.  There are swim lessons for kids, but that is it and they are expensive.  There's nothing else there for Little One, and she can only use the pool during lessons.  Otherwise, there is a day care room that looked quite depressing, staffed by a someone who looked like a teenager, and had a TV going.  But, unless and until we resolve the issue at the Y, BH refuses to go there.  I understand her point, but I also would still like LO to have the opportunities that the Y provides.

Saw a screening of a new documentary yesterday called The Hollywood Librarian.  It was nominally about the image of  librarians in film, at least the subtitle is "A Look at Librarians Through Film".  And it does show some clips throughout the documentary, but it juxtaposes that with interviews with current librarians and raises many issues the profession faces.  It's a fun film (some hilarious scenes of persnickety, stereotypical middle-aged women wearing there hair in buns), but it lacks focus.  There are also some rather inspiring moments in it, like the inmates at San Quentin who make use of their library and learn from Marin County PL librarians how to teach fellow inmates how to read.  They also organized a fundraiser in support of the Salinas PL (home, of course, of Steinback) which had been threatened with closure due to budget cuts.  A very articulate bunch of guys.  Or the guy who became the Director of a library in Colorado who retold the story of how the library was the place he could go when he was a kid to escape his abusive father.  At home he was constantly told he was stupid and worthless.  At the library, his questions would be greeted with a "What a great question! Let's try to find the answer."  His broader point was that the library performs functions that are not often publicly recognized.

Lots of material for the blog tonight.  At work today, Better Half called and she was very upset about events at the local Y.  Little One has just started another swimming class there, so they went there together this afternoon for that.  Apparently the lockers in the "Family Locker Room" had been broken into, so she did not want to use that room.  They then went to the women's locker room, but some woman said girl's weren't allowed in the women's locker room.  Huh?  Apparently, there is also a girls' locker room.  Okay, so they go in there.  But then some woman gets all uptight when BH showers in the nude.  She's fuming mad at this point -- why can't a woman shower nude in a girls' locker room?  To top it off, at the pool she was accosted yet again for wearing a swimsuit that was allegedly too revealing. 

Now, I know the Y is technically a Christian organization (BH probably doesn't know that), but I did not know it was a den of Puritan fundamentalism.  This, btw, is not the first time she's had a run-in with them.  Earlier in the year she was  told off for changing L.O. out of her swimsuit poolside instead of in the locker room.  BH is understandably furious.  She sees this as an effort to control womens' bodies and wonders why all these women are ashamed of their own bodies (it appears it has been largely women who have accosted her).  Furthermore, when you have lived in a society that places extreme restrictions on dress, with transgressions subject to severe punishment, it is easy to understand why this kind of behavior would trigger a visceral response.

I need to get better information about what all transpired -- this is just what I heard in our short phone conversation and we have not had a chance to talk more about it this evening.  But, I think we will end up sending a letter to the Y and requesting a meeting with the director in an effort to sort things out.  I fear, however, this may simply be a case where American prudishness and provincialism will be unwilling to tolerate differences.

In other events, I had an interesting transaction this evening at work that had certain parallels to the hypothetical ethics case I had written about earlier.  A student came and asked me for help on citing an internet site.  I said, sure.  She had pulled up a biography on Bertolt Brecht from a site called GradeSaver.com, which is obviously an essay mill.  So, I ask her if she's writing a paper for a class, which, of course, she is.  I said, well, you could use this site as a source and cite it, but who's the author?  We looked around and found no author.  Who publishes this site?  We found reference to some people claiming to be Harvard graduates who established the site.  So, how reliable is this information?  Well, she counters, the information seems consistent with the information published on several other websites, including (you guessed it) Wikipedia.  I pointed out that a:) anybody can contribute to Wikipedia, and b:) while it is a good strategy to check multiple sources to verify information, when it comes to websites of dubious authorship, they may well just be copying each other.  She then concedes that she looked at some books on Brecht in our collection, but they were too difficult to understand.  You gotta empathize with that level of honesty and work with it.

This student was not intending to plagiarize.  To her credit, she had every intention of citing her source.  But, she could not recognize a good source from a bad one. The nice thing was, I was able to turn the situation into the elusive "teachable moment."  I showed her how to access the library's Literary Resource Database, where she could search for information on Brecht.  I also showed her a print encyclopedia on drama writers.  She was receptive.  She stayed in the library until closing working on her paper. I felt like I had really taught her something about "information literacy" (library jargon for understanding how to evaluate sources).  The irony is, the information on the first site she had pulled up may well be factually correct.  Getting the same information from an "authoritative" source requires more work, but then at least you know who you are dealing with. The challenge is convincing students that this is an important distinction.

Doing some research into the "Deep Web" -- those portions of the web that rarely get accessed because they don't show up in Google hits, but they contain quality info.  It's interesting stuff. Don't get me wrong - I like Google; it's a great search engine for many things. But one has to understand it's limitations. And where it doesn't stack up, you have to find the alternatives that do.  And that takes a lot of work.  Work that most of us won't do. 

Just had my first brief experience with an e-book.  I was trying to find something that would help me complete an assignment on developing a reference collection for a social science reference desk at a university library (for my reference class).  Basically I need to identify different types of reference sources (i.e., encyclopedias, almanacs, dictionaries, bibliographies, etc.).  I need to describe the contents of each source.  There's not much here in our small library to help me on this, and I don't think the public libraries nearby will be of much help either.  But then I was searching the SJSU catalog and found an eBook called Social Science Reference Sources: A Practical Guide.  So I took a look inside.  Looks like it might be pretty useful.  However, I think I need to invest a little time in learning how to "read" it.  I searched, for example, for "almanac" to see if I could find almanacs specifically for the social sciences.  Instead of getting a list of pages where the word appears like you would when you search a PDF doc, it just took me directly to a single page with the word "almanac" highlighted.  It was not apparent how you go to the next place where the word appears.  But, I checked the same book using Google Book Search, entered the same search term, and got loads of hits within the text.  So, Google gets it right again -- easier to search than the native interface.  Anybody else use ebrary or NetLibrary books before?

Was talking with my boss today about her daughter's back to school night last night.  She has also just started Kindergarten, but in a different school (same district).  Apparently they laid it on thick about how the kids really need to be doing homework every day and they can never be doing enough, etc.  Wow.  What are these people thinking?  These are 5-yr old kids.  They need to be playing.  Actually made me thankful that Little One's school is more relaxed.  And she's liking it.  She told Better Half she likes going to school.  BH asked why.  Apparently she said she likes learning math. Cool.

That really turned out to be a bear of a commute coming home.  It was the full-on multi-nodal journey.  From Fullerton train station to home took about 2 hr.  Would have been less if I had not screwed up and take the slower bus on the last leg of the journey.  But all the changing got pretty tiresome.  I'm thinking tomorrow it makes more sense to just go back to Union Station and transfer there to a bus headed home.  It's more miles, but less stress and then I can actually relax a little more on the train and bus b/c I know I won't have to get off in just a few minutes. 

What I want to know is what genius designed the Green Line?  At the west end of the line, it stops just south of LAX instead of actually going to the airport.  Want to catch a flight?  Just lug all your bags off the train and take the "convenient" shuttle bus to the airport.  Yeah, that'll encourage people to use public transport, won't it?  At the east end of the line, it stops 3 miles west of the Norwalk Metrolink station, which means you have to take a bus between the two (biking the route looks seriously life threatening).

The class was actually not bad for an all day class.  I find myself somewhat fascinated by the arcane nature of cataloging.  There are all these bizarre rules to learn.  It is sort of like geometry; once you learn the rules you can follow  the logic and create a record.  He showed us one curious example when discussing what is called author authority files.  This is a list created by the Library of Congress of the authoritative way to refer to specific authors.  For example, if you are cataloging The Cat in the Hat, who is the author, Dr. Seuss or Theodore Dreisel?  Anyway, the example was for Leslie Lynch King, Jr.  Turns out that was Gerald Ford's given name at birth, but it was changed very early in his life after his parents divorced.  What was curious was that in the authority file record there were notes taken from Wikipedia about Ford and his name change.  i was surprised that the Library of Congress would reference Wikipedia in what is supposed to be its authoritative list!  I pointed this out to the instructor, but he said it was legit to use Wikipedia as a source, commenting that it was uncontraversial when it comes to bibliographic data.  Oh really?  There was also info taken from another source, a published reference text, and i noticed a discrepancy between it and the Wiki info.  So clearly at least one of them was incorrect.  The fact that I notice such nitpicking details is one reason why I think cataloging might actually be something I will like.

I'm so tired right now I can barely see straight. Reading stuff for the final quiz for this class.  If it's anything like the last quiz, it'll be a real joke.  20 MC questions that served only to test whether you had read the material, but had nothing to do with actually thinking about it. Hard to really get excited about that.

In my paper research I came across an oft quoted passage by Roy Tennant, who writes a regular column on Digital Libraries for Library Journal:  "Only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find."  It's clever and pithy and may be true. BUT, if it is true I suspect there are a lot closet librarians out there. Should they be outed? :)

When I was a kid, I used to have to weed in our yard.  I hated weeding, although I think I got paid for it.  Well, now I'm weeding again, only this time its library weeding.  We're pulling backfiles of National Geographic, Newsweek, Science and a couple of other titles.  Most of the stuff we have access to online or on microfiche and we need the space.  Still, it feels strange to just toss so much print in the recycling containers.  I offered to donate the journals to an organization that provides them to libraries around the world that want them, but they said they could not used what we had.  I quipped to my boss that if anyone asked for the old National Geographics, I could probably find it in Dad's attic.

Actually, in the process of pulling those NG's from the shelf, I came across an interesting cover story about Berlin from 1982.  Pretty interesting to go back and read about how things were in those Cold War days.  And now I want to get a subscription to NG again....

Just came across a BBC article about a study done by some British psychologist claiming that compared with fire fighters, police officers, and teachers, librarians actually suffer the most stress.  Seriously?  I dunno.  It certainly does not mesh with what I have heard over the past few years in my conversations with librarians.  Course, if it turns out to be true, I suppose I could get a good gig battling blazes out here in the west :)