Archives – April, 2010
In February author Zetta Elliott wrote a guest post for Justine Larbalestier’s blog in which she discusses the challenges writers of color face in a field that is largely white. She discusses problems of authenticity and white privilege (there are more books about African-Americans than there are books by African-Americans) and the difficulties in breaking into the field. I don’t see a lot of discussions about race or privilege in the library world (the literary world, sure, or the culture studies world, yes, but not nearly as often from librarians), so you should give Elliott’s post a read.
Elliott’s discussion of race and privilege in young adult writing is bookended by a consideration of the reluctance people show in writing critical book reviews, which Sarah McCarry picks up on in her Huffington Post article, “Faking Nice in the Blogosphere: Women and Book Reviews.” She examines this reluctance through the lens of gender, arguing that to shy away from criticism in a field dominated by female writers and readers does women and girls a disservice, because although we should be promoting good books and negative reviews can be very hurtful (see David Lubar’s post about the startlingly harsh Kirkus review of one of his books), a critic’s job is to have expectations, to evaluate a book, and to create discussion.
McCarry also contrasts the reception of works by male authors and the “cult of niceness”:
It goes without saying that male writers are accorded no such coddling, and that entry into this misty realm of sisterly solidarity requires acquiescence to a strict set of codes of behavior. Nice lady writers don’t rock the boat, they don’t hurt people’s feelings, and they sure as hell don’t write about topics that make other lady writers uncomfortable. But instead of promoting community, this obsession with niceness wields a potent silencing force. If nice ladies don’t say critical things about other ladies’ books, they also don’t talk about racism and sexism within the publishing industry, the enormous barriers facing writers of color and women whose work doesn’t fall into tidy and palatable genre categories, and the refusal of mainstream critics to acknowledge young adult fiction in particular as anything other than the realm of hack (read: female) writers incapable of producing “real” literature.
I’m still relatively new to the library world (I did my undergrad in math with the intent to become a math professor before realizing I needed a career with more room to have lots of interests and hobbies and with more of a human element), but I was really struck in my first semester by what seems to me to be a lack of rigor in the field–at least in public librarianship. We read an article in my collection development class that was published in a regional library journal that was just a description of a very narrow weeding project. There was no theory, no analysis, no critique–just a summary of events. The writing was poor and riddled with grammatical mistakes. It seemed shocking to me that an article of that quality was published in a peer-reviewed journal (not a magazine or a newsletter–a journal).
While it turns out that most of the library science literature dealing with public libraries isn’t as bad as that one article, it still seems like actual research and critical analysis can be difficult to find. Has this always been the case? Is it happening because of the emergence of information science from library science? Is it just public libraries that find themselves in a poverty of research? It seems to me that this ties in with librarianship’s struggle to be recognized as a profession.
I read a fantastic book last year by Roma Harris, LIBRARIANSHIP: THE EROSION OF A WOMAN’S PROFESSION (it’s out of print but can be found used or ordered through interlibrary loan) in which she discusses librarianship’s struggle to be regarded as a profession and the challenges librarians have faced because their field is traditionally viewed as a woman’s field. She draws on examples from social work and nursing, too, to show how librarianship is unique in its labeling as women’s work (in some ways we’re actually better off). Anyway, it’s a fascinating read and a lot of the following is informed by her analysis.
One way librarians have tried to achieve recognition as professionals is by adopting the traits of other professions (think doctors, lawyers, and clergy members). We institute educational standards (the required MLS), we have a professional association that adopts standards for ethical behavior, and we point to an exclusive body of knowledge in which active research is being done, all in the hopes that possessing these traits will make us a profession.
But librarianship is still often seen as women’s work, and public librarianship especially, and youth services librarianship doubly so. And so librarians aren’t afforded the prestige of other professions. I don’t mean to say that there is something inherently wrong with librarians or library research and that until those flaws are mended we will never been seen as professionals, but I do think that public library research lacks rigor. We need more library science doctoral candidates who are interested in public librarianship and youth services, whether that means encouraging current candidates to find research subjects in those areas or for people who are currently working in the field to return to school.
Many things that are regarded as “women’s work” are seen as such because they draw on traditionally feminine values like nurturing and caring and working with children. My call for rigor and criticism and research isn’t a call to discard these feminine traits and adopt more competitive masculine values and basically become men to effectively transform our profession into a more masculine one–our society devalues “women’s” values enough already. (Notice, for example, that more prestige and higher salaries are given to academic librarians, who are more likely to be men than public librarians and children’s librarians in particular–even within a “woman’s field,” being at the masculine end is preferred.)
Nurture and compassion and care for children is essential in our society and in our work as librarians to young people. But we do need to have that exclusive body of knowledge both to fit the traditional mold of a profession (if that’s the way to professionalizing librarianship) and to justify our master’s degrees being master’s degrees and not just bachelor’s degrees, but also to make us better librarians. It is through this research that we will find the best ways to serve our patrons, the best ways to understand them, the best ways to nurture them into successful adults and to create a better society.
Although she writes from the perspective of an author rather than a librarian, I agree with McCarry that we need to not be afraid to be critical in our reviews. I am not advocating nastiness or the destruction of a supportive community for writers, just higher standards and a willingness to hold authors to them. Young adult literature has improved in leaps and bounds since its emergence in the 1960s from children’s literature, but we should always be asking more. We should look for quality writing and plot construction and character development and recognize when it isn’t there. We should examine books from frameworks of race and gender. We should not be afraid to rock the boat. We should not be cruel, but we should analyze and evaluate and spark discussion and in doing so, push for more for our patrons.
April 28, 2010
PLA2010 ended a month ago and it simultaneously feels like it just happened and like it happened a million years ago. But now that the requisite 30 days has passed since I wrote my posts about the conference for the PLA blog, I can have the full text available here. So in case you missed them the first time around:
Writing for the PLA blog was a really neat experience; if you’re attending a conference and have the chance to be a volunteer blogger, I’d highly recommend it. It gave me the opportunity to take time during the conference to think about what I was hearing and doing, it gave me another chance to engage in discussion, and it was honestly just fun.
April 28, 2010
On Friday we had our third and final ALISS Luncheon Lecture of the semester. Patsy Allen, an IU SLIS grad and the research librarian at Roche Diagnostics, talked to us about her career as a corporate librarian.
She actually began as a part-time contractor before her position was developed into a full-time one four years later. When Roche was creating the position, there was a lot of debate about what to call the position before they finally settled on “Research Librarian.” Many people in the company handle information of some sort, so they wanted what she is available for to be very clear. She said that some of the older employees didn’t like the name because they still regard librarians as the shushing guardians of the stacks, but that the younger employees who were being hired straight out of school were excited to know that Roche had a librarian for them to come to with their information needs.
Patsy described her position as being “a solo librarian in a global environment” since she’s the only librarian in a company that employs thousands of people. Employees of Roche ask her to find articles and papers, patent data, and lots of other highly specialized information to assist them with their research in biology, chemistry, and engineering, mostly via email (which can be tricky when she’s trying to tease out exactly what a client needs!).
Her manager isn’t a librarian (he works with patent information), so she has a lot of autonomy in her work, which she said she really enjoys. Like Ellen Summers of the NCAA Library, Patsy emphasized the importance of the Special Libraries Association in feeling connected to the profession and having other librarians to help her, although she did point out that corporate librarian positions can be radically different from one company to another. She also talked about how important continuing education is for her, whether it’s through courses at a university or seminars through SLA.
She talked a little bit about how she can’t talk about a lot of her work. Since she works for a corporation that does scientific research, she’s privy to a lot of information that she can’t disclose. The work Roche does is also highly regulated, which introduces further restrictions on what she can talk about. Patsy also talked about the importance of professional integrity: while she may know that two people are working on the same sort of project based on the questions they’re asking her, she can’t tell them about each other.
Patsy spends a lot of energy monitoring copyright issues and explaining them to her clients. Many of them come from an academic environment and are used to being able to pass information to other colleagues fairly freely under the Fair Use guidelines, but copyright rules in a corporate environment are much more restrictive. The general guideline she gives clients is “assume the answer is ‘no’ unless I tell you otherwise.” She also showed us some of the different levels of permission different publishers grant for copying and distributing articles–some allow only paper copies to be made while others allow for electronic copies to be distributed. Roche can be sued by a publisher if an article is posted to the company intranet without permission, so complying with copyright restrictions is really important, and she’s the primary person to educate employees on what they may and may not do. The library also won’t order reports for employees since it requires the recipient to sign off on how they’ll be using the document. She’ll get a client a complete citation, but their department must be the one to order it. She also has to be careful about exactly what she advises people to do, since in Indiana offering legal advice counts as practicing law, which you can’t do unless you’re a lawyer.
Patsy also talked about some of the tools she uses in her work including Medline, Embase, Biosis, SciSearch, Current Contents, ScienceDirect, Wiley InterScience, Google and Google Scholar, PubMed, OCLC FirstSearch, FDA, EBSCOhost Databases, and other STM, business, and legal resources. She said that she works to be really proactive in constantly scanning the media and news alerts and blogs for items of interest and then forwarding them on to clients who might find the information useful before they even ask for it or need it. She said that this not only reminds them of the library’s usefulness but also gives her a chance to show potential new clients what the library can do for them.
Despite Roche being on the cutting edge in their industry, they are by necessity technologically cautious in some ways. Since Roche is a gigantic company, they need to be reserved in how quickly they adopt new technology and new versions of software, so she’s trying to make do with Internet Explorer 6 and old versions of other software packages. She’s also lost her physical library: she used to work in a room full of books but was moved to a cubicle with a computer and a book cart. While lots of information–especially the most recent of research–is available online and she does conduct most of her correspondence via email, she said that she missed being in a proper library.
Although the slow adoption of new technology and constant assessment of copyright compliance seemed at times exasperating, Patsy said that she loves her job. Since she’s helping clients with their scientific research, she learns new things every day just by seeing that information go by. She did emphasize knowing one’s limits in a special library and being able to tell clients that what they wanted was too advanced for her to do, but that she could put them in touch with another person or resource that could help them. Her job is fast-paced and she never knows on a given day what she’ll see thrown at her and she loves being kept on her toes. She also mentioned the social aspect of her job, pointing out that her life isn’t just research and information all day long, but that there’s a human element, an opportunity to help people and to teach them. The analogy she provided was that of being an information bartender–I think that’d be a great thing to put on a business card!
Patsy closed with a quotation from Neil de Grasse Tyson that’s appropriately scientific but also blends with the librarian’s life:
In life and in the universe,
may your signal be high
and your noise be low.
April 26, 2010
Part of why I liked the zine collection at the Multnomah County Library (see my recent post, too) is that it reflects part of the culture of Portland. Especially with budgets being cut across the country, libraries might feel stretched just trying to maintain a core collection, so seeing these unique (or unusual or at the very least interesting) collections continue to exist is cool. I’ve run across three such collections recently that I’d like to share with you.
Archives, since they usually have a specific focus and can collect deeply in that area, often have some of the neatest collections. For example, the William Stafford Archives at Lewis and Clark College include private papers, recordings, teaching materials, and photographs belonging to the late poet. What makes this collection really noteworthy is that Stafford wrote every single day for the last 43 years of his life, producing 20,000 pages. He also saved letters that he received and sometimes even included a copy of his replies–another 100,000 sheets. The website doesn’t provide access to every item in the collection, but you can browse books, poems, audio and video recordings, and images. In “Evidence of me…”, Sue McKemmish discusses different levels of personal recordkeeping and explores how “memories of me” become “memories of us.” While not everyone wants to (or should!) keep a record of everything he or she writes, having such a huge body of work from a well-known figure is incredible.
The National Library of Medicine has a new web exhibition, “An Iconography of Contagion,” that includes many examples of 20th century public health posters from around the world. And again, a specialized organization can offer an extensive, specialized collection. But what I love is that they’re making these items available for viewing online. There are the war-era warnings against catching STIs that you’d expect, but there are also more recent posters that attempt to educate people about, for example, the way HIV/AIDS is and isn’t spread, and even more interesting things like one poster from China in 1935 that discourages spitting in public, which facilitated the spread of TB.
And lest this post be entirely about collections in highly specialized libraries, I’ll also direct you to a recent article in Fine Books Magazine about the Jewish cookbook collection at the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. When a patron asked where the Jewish cookbooks were and the reference librarian, Roberta Saltzman, discovered the library only had a few, she began buying Jewish cookbooks at online auctions and donating them to the library. The collection includes over than 700 cookbooks (more than double the number the Library of Congress holds, according to an article from last year in Forward), many of them collections printed by synagogue sisterhoods. The collection also includes one cookbook printed as a fundraiser for the Jüdischer Frauenbund, “an early German feminist organization” in 1935 during the early part of Hitler’s reign. The collection is nearly entirely Saltzman’s doing; NYPL just accepts her donations and preserves the cookbooks.
What are your favorite distinctive library collections?
April 23, 2010
After a few days of working out the details, Librarified’s new look is finally complete! It’s been a lot of fun to work with the brilliantly talented Brandon Peat on the design. If you ever need design work done, he is the dude to ask. He does logos and illustrations and websites and he is full of great ideas, has a solid sense of how things should look and function, has a good eye for detail, works quickly, and knew exactly what I wanted even when I didn’t. At every step along the way he exceeded my expectations and I cannot recommend him highly enough.
I’ve been so eager to reveal bits and pieces of the design along the way, but I wanted to wait until it was all finished to announce it. And now it’s finished! And this is the announcement! And the new look is totally awesome, so if you keep up with Librarified via RSS you should visit the site itself to see.
April 22, 2010
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while! At the beginning of the month, Julie Just wrote an essay for the New York Times Sunday Book review called “The Parent Problem in Young Adult Lit.” In it, she argues that while literary parents of the past were often absent or dead to give the young protagonists the space and autonomy for their adventures, present-day parents in young adult lit are downright bad:
[...] what’s striking is that some of the most sharply written and critically praised works reliably feature a mopey, inept, distracted or ready-for-rehab parent, suggesting that this has become a particularly resonant figure.
She cites a dad acting as a single parent who has no idea how to cook (Sara Zarr’s ONCE WAS LOST), a dangerously accident-prone mother and a father who works late nights (Natalie Standiford’s HOW TO SAY GOODBYE IN ROBOT), an overworked and absent mother who works as a surgeon and doesn’t see the signs of her daughter’s anorexia (Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS), and the parents of characters in popular series such as the Hunger Games trilogy and the Twilight saga.
Just then presents a historical look at parents in young adult literature from its emergence in the 1960s to present day. In the ’60s parents in novels were generally absent entirely and “the teenager’s problem [was], overwhelmingly, other teenagers,” with the focus of the story on survival. But as the prevalence of the “problem novel” grew in the ’70s and ’80s, conflict centered within the family as parents divorced one another or abandoned their children entirely. But still this wasn’t a realistic portrayal:
One study from the 1970s compared mothers in young adult fiction with the ones in real life, based on statistics from the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, and concluded that less than 3 percent of the depictions were “realistic”: in the novels, mothers were disproportionately seen as being paralyzed at home, while in real life they were beginning to go out and get jobs.
Today’s literary parents, Just says, are toned-down versions of the self-absorbed monsters of the ’70s and ’80s, but still don’t accurately represent parents today. She does see our present ambivalence about what parenting is present in these books: is it just keeping kids fed and safe? Is it being helicopter parents, always attentive to a child’s every need and ready to swoop in and rescue them at any minute? Reflecting on her own experience growing up in the ’60s, she concludes, “Back then parents knew how to get out of the way and let the orphan’s rise begin.”
Rebecca at Crete Teens (the teen services blog of the Crete (IL) Public Library District) reflected on Just’s essay, providing further examples of bad parents in books but countering that with suggestions of good parents, too (which members of the listserv also did, offering Joan Bauer’s books, INTO THE WILD NERD YONDER, FLASH BURNOUT, TWENTY BOY SUMMER, WHALE TALK, IF I STAY, ROCK STAR SUPERSTAR, and KISSING THE BEE as examples).
On the listservs, some people attributed the bad parents in books on the notion that people’s problems are never their own fault but that instead poor parenting is to blame. Others pointed out that when they were teens, they thought their parents were clueless–and that the teens they serve in libraries now feel the same way about their parents, so what we see as a “parent problem” is just the teenager’s emotion-filled take on what parents are like. Many agreed that parenting was more hands-off in earlier decades, which translates to absent parents in older YA lit, whereas today’s parents are more involved and more conflicted themselves–and that we’re seeing that in what teens read.
I think my favorite response to this article, though, has come from the insightful, incisive Liz B. of A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy. She takes a different perspective, asking why adults need to minutely examine the adults in literature for teens–do we see children and teens bemoaning the behavior of characters their age in adult books? She then further picks apart the notion of a “bad” parent: how do we define “bad”? Who defines “bad”? Parents? Their children? How much of a role should parents play in their kids’ lives? Should we be trying to make parents feel bad about being “bad” parents? Liz finally asserts
Let’s get out of the way. Just as parents need to get out of the way for their teenagers to mature into adults, so should we adults who read and review young adult books get out of the way of the intended audience — the teens. Yes, we can read and enjoy those books; but let’s not ask for those books to be written to reflect our reality of adults and parents.
There isn’t some universal notion of a “good parent.” Teens deserve books with involved parents whose involvement is both good and bad for the protagonist. Teens deserve books with absent parents whose absence is both good and bad for the protagonist. Their worlds are much more diverse and conflicted than they were decades ago and the rise of the “parent problem” might not be commentary on parents themselves, but on the increasing complexity of teen readers’ lives.
Over the last year or so my philosophy on youth media has developed into this: young people deserve literature (and movies and music and television and…) that reflects their world. They deserve to be treated like people and to be taken seriously. To age up characters when books are adapted into movies because a movie about teenagers won’t sell as many tickets tells teens that they aren’t interesting. To only give teens wholesome reading that won’t expand their view of the world is to declare them too stupid to think critically or to develop their own values systems. To push only books that hold up some particular standard of parenting or that look for “the return of the admirable parent” when so many teens don’t see their parents as admirable but–sometimes within the same day–as absent or conflicted or too busy or too overbearing or even downright malevolent is to tell them that they are not normal or that their stories aren’t worth telling. And that is the worst disservice we can do to them.
April 20, 2010
While I was in Portland for PLA2010, I–of course!–made a point to visit the central branch of the Multnomah County Library. I liked the tree sculpture in the children’s area and how they’ve made the old card catalog accessible for browsing, but what really caught my attention was the zine collection.
The zine collection at the central branch of the Multnomah County Library
Zines–independent publications created by one person or a (usually) small group that are often photocopied–are big in Portland. It hosts the Portland Zine Symposium and is home to the Independent Publishing Resource Center. There’s even a zine about where to find zines in Portland. So since zine culture is so big in Portland, I was really excited to see the public library collecting them and making them available for circulation. I talked briefly with the reference librarian at the desk (who told me, among other things, that the zines actually circulate much, much more than any of their periodicals) and after returning home, I checked out the library’s website for more information and sent some questions to Emily-Jane Dawson, a reference librarian and a member of the library’s zine committee. She was really friendly and thorough in addressing my questions.
The idea to create a zine collection first began in 2004 when Julie Bartel and Brooke Young of the Salt Lake City Library did a presentation at PLA in Portland on their library’s zine collection and the outreach and zine-related events they’d done. Librarians from MCL were interested and put together a proposal for a pilot project, which eventually led to the creation of MCL’s zine committee, outreach and programs, and the zine collection. The collection first arrived in December 2006 and had its official debut in late January 2007. Dawson said that the challenges they faced in establishing the collection were what you’d expect with any new format or large project and mentioned doing internal training to introduce zines to the library staff and the outreach they did to a new segment of the population. Now nine of the library’s seventeen branches have zines available for checkout.
The library also offers a zine exchange that’s kind of like honors paperback collections or paperback exchanges: zines that aren’t part of the collection are available for taking and you can either bring it back or leave a copy of a different zine in its place.
The zine exchange bin at the central library
One of the things I wondered about was where the library gets its zines. There are publishers and distributors, but since zine creation is so decentralized, those organizations will only get you so far. Dawson said the library buys zines at two different local publishing festivals, the Portland Zine Symposium, Stumptown Comics Fest, and local bookstores. They also accept donations, but they’re held to the same collection standards that donated books are. If someone would like their zine included in the library’s collection, they’re invited to send a copy to the library for evaluation along with information on where to purchase more. Librarians then determine whether or not the zine fits the collection development guidelines.
Being able to stay current on what’s going on in the zine scene is also important. Dawson pointed to zine-related library programs as a great way to know what’s new:
The zinesters who present at our annual Zinesters Talking series, for example, often let us know when they have new publications, introduce us to other zinesters, and so on. Also, we network at local zine events, talk with bookstore staff when we visit to buy zines, and read zine-related literature. In addition, some of the members of the library’s zine committee are involved in local independent publishing organizations in their personal lives.
I love that this reaching out to the zine community is mutually beneficial: the library is able to provide materials outside of the publishing mainstream, stay in touch with current trends and publications, and reach a population they might not otherwise. People in the zine community get another avenue for showing off their work and budding zinesters are given resources on developing their craft like a program on creating zines. One of my friends who lives in Portland actually got his library card after moving to the city at a table the library had set up at the Zine Symposium. This kind of initiative to get the library more involved in the community is such a great way for both the library and the community to benefit.
I was also interested in the weeding policy for zines and if the library did any work to create an archive of especially noteworthy zines. Dawson said that the weeding policy for the zine collection was modeled on the library’s general weeding policy; the two most important criteria are the physical condition of the zine and how well it circulated. They have a yearly weeding event based on circulation and the zine coordinators at each branch periodically weed based on condition. And while they don’t make an effort to preserve most zines, the closed-stack Oregon Collection does include zines that are about Oregon and the communities in it, and these zines are only accessible for in-library use.
I was really impressed with how hard the library worked to become a part of Portland’s zine culture. Offering zines as part of the library’s collection is a great way to showcase local talent and make these zines accessible to a wider audience and for the library to reflect local culture. The library also does a lot to offer programs and other outreach initiatives to develop partnerships with other people and organizations interested in zines, which pulls in people who might not otherwise be interested in the library and gives them the resources to develop their work.
For more on the library’s zine collection, check out their website, this post from 2007 at DIY Alert, and the interview Emily-Jane Dawson did with Sandra Morgan in the latest issue of the Oregon Library Association’s quarterly publication (the interview starts on page 21).
April 18, 2010
ALA sent out an email today announcing the addition to the ALA Store of posters and bookmarks for Preservation Week, which is 9-15 May this year. I was disappointed to see that except for the short acknowledgment that “Digital copies allow treasures to be easily shared, but remember digital items need preservation, too,” Preservation Week seems to be mostly focused on preserving physical artifacts like books, maps, family heirlooms, and clothing.
To be sure, saving these physical objects is important and libraries can take this opportunity to teach library users about preserving items they care about. And ALA does provide links to digital preservation resources. But so much information created today only ever exists in digital formats, so it’s critical that libraries also heavily promote digital preservation.
I’d love to see a bookmark and poster that address digital preservation specifically. It might include the following tips:
- Choose open file formats. Digital items such as emails, photographs, and documents require software to read and display them. If the company that makes a particular piece of software stops supporting that software, you may lose the ability to read your data.
- Make backups across multiple storage devices. If your hard drive crashes or you misplace your flash drive, will you lose your family photographs? You can also create hard copies of certain kinds of content as a means of backing up that data.
- Create good metadata. Metadata tells you about the digital objects you have. Who is in the photo? When was the photo taken?
- Be selective. While digital photography allows you to keep every photograph you take with no concern for filling up your home with physical photo albums, will you really still want all of those pictures a year from now? Five years from now? Fifty years from now? How long will you keep that online boarding pass confirmation? Not all digital content is equally important and our cognitive associations fade over time and file formats change, so it’s important to be able to identify what’s important so it can be documented, organized, and preserved.
The “how” of digital preservation can be tricky: new file formats and the sheer overwhelming amount of data can be daunting. But librarians continue in their quest to organize and preserve the world’s information. Earlier this month, Andrew K. Pace, the Executive Director for Networked Library Services at OCLC and the President of LITA, wrote an entry at Hectic Pace called “Librarians Give Permanence to Twitter.” He outlined how Twitter posts could be cataloged using MARC records. And today, the Library of Congress announced (via Twitter!) that they’re acquiring all public tweets since March 2006. (There’s a privacy/content ownership side of things here, too, but that’s another post for another time.) Also, from the Library of Congress’s Facebook announcement, check out their stance on digital information:
So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.
The organization and preservation of digital content is still a developing field with interesting new projects, and it’s not some inaccessible academic issue or for tech nerds only. It’s something that librarians need to learn about themselves and then educate library users about.
For more on metadata, see my earlier post and Erin’s earlier post at her own blog on our digital preservation project this semester. And for more on preserving your own digital content, check out the Library of Congress’s guide to personal archiving.
April 14, 2010
There’s a lot that libraries can do for you including providing fun programs, a quiet place to read or study, homework help, tax forms, technology training, free Internet access, and volunteer opportunities. But there’s something you can do for libraries–and they need your help.
I recently wrote about the trouble Indiana libraries are facing due to property tax caps and the cuts school libraries are facing in Monroe County. But yesterday delivered stunning, devastating news about New Jersey libraries: they’re facing a 74% reduction in funding.
The cuts, which add up to $10.4 million, could also cost New Jersey access to $4.5 million in federal matching funds which, among other things, currently provides internet access for roughly two-thirds of the state’s 306 public libraries.
That’s right: No Internet at the library. Never mind that the public library is the only free internet access in 78 percent of communities, according to the New Jersey Library Association; or that many state agencies have moved their forms on-line.
It’s especially disheartening that this news comes at the beginning of National Library Week. Especially through Internet access, technology training, and database access, libraries are becoming more important, not less. And while everyone needs to make cuts when state budgets get trimmed, libraries are being disproportionately targeted.
Yet another irony is that, of all the villains that have pushed New Jersey to the brink of financial oblivion, libraries simply aren’t one of them. Librarians aren’t represented by powerful unions. Their pay hasn’t escalated at 4 percent to 6 percent a year. Library funding at the state level has been flat for twenty years.
“We have never fed at the trough like public safety and education,” said Robert White, executive director of Bergen County Cooperative Library System, which represents 75 libraries across four counties. “And now we’re being punished for it.”
If you’re in the area, there will be a rally in Trenton on 6 May to demonstrate support for New Jersey libraries. You can also contact legislators, send a letter to the paper, or join supporters on Facebook at Save My NJ Library.
And since it is National Library Week, be sure to tell your own legislators that you support your library. If you’re in Indiana, you can do that online via the Indiana Library Federation. You can also take national action via the ALA website, where they’re asking you to talk to your senator by 14 April (that’s this Wednesday) to express your support for libraries before the Senate Appropriations Committee meets to determine funding for the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) and the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries (ILTSL) program in its FY2011 budget.
You can also use the ALA’s Library Value Calculator to see how valuable your local library is to you as a patron–or to your community if you’re a librarian trying to defend your institution.
And finally, if you haven’t yet sent in your Census form, please do so. The number of people in your community determines how federal funds will be allocated, and your library is one of the organizations that will be affected by that funding. While it may not seem like one person really matters, when it comes to the Census, you do.
April 12, 2010
About two years ago, the Indiana legislature voted to institute a property tax cap of 1% for residential homes effective in 2010, and Governor Mitch Daniels signed the bill into law. This is bad news for libraries because in Indiana, most of the library’s income is from property taxes (about 80%, in fact, according to the director of the Allen County Public Library). Budgets were cut, hiring was reduced, and cost-saving measures were introduced. The St. Joseph County Public Library said it’d cut all its Saturday hours. A year after the tax caps were announced and revenue cuts had begun, most of the library branches in Vigo County were closed. This fall the Anderson Public Library cut its hours. And yesterday, the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library (IMCPL) announced that they’d likely be closing six branches and cutting 55 jobs. Back in January one poll showed the governor’s approval rating was about 65% across the state with his highest rating (around 70%) in the Indy area, and about 73% of people approve of the tax caps. Libraries provide things like story times and recreational reading and fun programs, but we also provide absolutely essential resources like computer and Internet access and assistance in filing for unemployment online. I’m really hoping that when library services, hours, and staff get cut, people reconsider their approval of property tax caps, but since even cutting fire departments by about 30% hasn’t convinced people that the tax caps are a bad idea, I just don’t know how hopeful I can be.
In more cheerful news, IUPUI’s University Library recently got rid of about half of its microfilm collection and the librarian in charge of the weeding project, Mindy Cooper, was determined to keep it out of the landfill. According to Mindy, a lot of it went to students at the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI, Indiana art teachers, and the Eiteljorg Museum, and one of the things it was used for was to make this collage by Alisa Nordholt-Dean at the Eiteljorg. What a neat reuse of discarded library materials!
Finally, the application process for YALSA’s mentoring program began on Monday (here’s the official blog post). They’re looking for librarians who’ve been working with teens in public or school libraries for at least six years to be paired up with new librarians and graduate school students to form a mutually beneficial mentoring relationship. The application forms are due by 30 June and reference forms should be submitted by 7 July. Participants will be notified of their selection in mid-September. I’ve applied and I’m hoping to be selected, but regardless of whether or not I’m invited to participate, I think this is a really cool program and I’m glad YALSA is offering this opportunity not only for new librarians to have guidance, advice, and a source of encouragement, but also to give more seasoned librarians a chance to pass on some of their wisdom and learn new things themselves.
April 10, 2010
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