The New York Times recently ran an article about a private company being contracted to run public libraries. The company is LSSI (Library Systems and Services), and they’re now running 14 library systems with 63 different locations in California, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas–which, if you measure library system size by branches, now makes them the fifth-largest library system in the country. The idea is that a private company is better suited to cutting costs and increasing efficiency, but I think ceding control of our public libraries to private companies will destroy exactly what is good about public libraries.
Alicia of The LibrariYAn does a great job of identifying a lot of the problems with the rationale behind letting a private company take control of a public library and the effects of doing so (especially her arguments about how “cutting costs” often means cutting salaries and benefits and excluding union workers or turning to volunteers instead of trained professionals), but I wanted to contribute some more thoughts.
I think what makes me angriest is what Frank A. Pezzanite, the CEO of LSSI, thinks about libraries and librarians:
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
[...]
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”
You know what, Mr. Pezzanite, screw you. I’m sure that there are librarians who have been coasting throughout their careers, but especially now in a time of budget cuts and there being more MLS grads than there are new positions, the librarians I know are not doing nothing. It’s true that because of the high cost of firing someone and replacing them, it can be difficult to get rid of less productive employees at a non-profit organization, but that’s still no reason to insult an entire profession. And New York Times, you’re really not helping dispel the notion that libraries are full of old people who are resistant to change by showing a picture of an elderly librarian who “is opposed to the outsourcing plan.”
Furthermore, Mr. Pezzanite’s snide dismissal of public libraries as “this American flag, apple pie thing” makes me very angry. The library isn’t a sacred organization, but in many communities, it’s the only place the least fortunate have to go to be put in touch with resources they desperately need. As more and more government services are moved exclusively online (especially things like filing for unemployment) and employers begin accepting applications online only, it’s even more important that public libraries are able to offer free computer and Internet access to those who can’t get online anywhere else. (Remember that 67% of public libraries are the only place in the community that offer free computer and Internet access and that 90% of public libraries offer technology training.)
Libraries are also where parents can take their children for storytimes that improve their literacy skills, where families can borrow DVDs for free, where people can attend classes that teach them new skills or help them develop their hobbies, where anyone can get book recommendations or have their questions answered, where works of fiction and non-fiction representing what humanity has created and discovered are kept, and where resources are shared. None of this is done because it turns a profit, and in fact, the people who most need libraries are the ones who are least able to afford those services elsewhere. A for-profit company is going to be much less concerned with meeting the needs of the community that supports it and much more concerned with operating as cheaply as possible, regardless of what services they have to cut or the quality of those services and materials. In some ways, this echoes the preference for “male” values (competition, success, profit) over “female” values (helping others, sharing, building community) that I’ve talked about before.
I also think that one of the greatest strengths of the public library is that it is local. The management tree never goes past the city or county or maybe state that funds the library, so libraries are able to reflect their communities. They develop digital collections of photographs reflecting their communities over the years, they connect people to local agencies, they plan programs that make use of local people’s expertise, and the really good ones buy locally (even when it’s more expensive than getting materials from huge corporate vendors) and invest the tax dollars they receive back into their communities. I have a hard time believing that a for-profit company based in a state all the way across the country would be as interested in knowing, serving, and supporting the local community.
We need to consider who wins and who loses when we turn control of our public libraries over to private, for-profit companies. Staff members suffer in reduced wages and a limit on their ability to form unions. Patrons suffer because cutting costs means cutting services or materials or requiring payment for things that were formerly free. The entire local community suffers because the library is less likely to serve local interests or invest money back in the community. The only party who wins is the for-profit company. Rather than turning public libraries over to for-profit companies, libraries should find ways to cut costs and increase efficiency themselves or, if they need outside help, hire consultants while still maintaining their autonomy. And in fact, that’d be an even better outcome in terms of costs vs. expenditures because however much the local government spends on the contract with LSSI, LSSI is going to be spending less than that to run the library so they can turn a profit. Keeping the library public means keeping that would-be profit to a private company invested in the community.
This isn’t some sort of American flag apple pie garbage–it’s preserving our local culture, our identity as citizens instead of consumers, and our cultural repositories from the dehumanizing crush of a capitalism that favors profits over people and efficiency over assistance. Public libraries need to remain publicly funded and publicly managed if they’re going to continue to do the good they do in our communities.
September’s drawing to a close, but there are still a few days left in the YALSA blog’s 30 Days of Back to School. My latest post is about working with non-YA librarians:
In my last post, I talked about my job search and mentioned that I had an interview the next day. I was lucky enough to be offered that job (yay!) and had my first week at work last week. The library where I’m now working has never had a dedicated YA librarian before and I’m excited about developing great teen services, but there’s only so much I can do as just one person. Many YA librarians find themselves on something of a team of one, the only professional at their libraries dedicated to serving teens. When we’re not at the desk or in the building, taking care of teens’ reference questions and readers’ advisory requests falls to non-YA staff members.
That’s right! I got a job! I’m now the Teen Services Librarian at the New Canaan Library in New Canaan, Connecticut. I think the library and I are a good match for one another, and I’m so excited to finally putting into practice everything I learned during my MLS and my work while I was a library student and all of the great ideas I’ve seen on listservs and blogs. And I’m looking forward to doing so in collaboration with my non-YA coworkers! Click through for my thoughts on the necessity of collaboration and working with librarians in adult services and children’s services.
Banned Books Week begins today, and this year it comes at a particularly appropriate time: on Sunday Laurie Halse Anderson wrote on her blog that Wesley Scroggins, an associate professor of management at Missouri State University, had decried Speak as pornographic. While the book contains sexual content, it’s in the form of a rape scene that the protagonist chooses to remain silent about. For once I’m actually angrier about the reason someone wants a book banned rather than the actual move to get a book removed from school. What kind of sicko thinks a rape scene is soft pornography? Scroggins’s original opinion piece is available via the Springfield News-Leader.
Maybe SPEAK isn’t Dr. Scroggins’ cup of tea. Maybe the idea of having his children read about a highly dysfunctional family is upsetting. Maybe the thought of having rape be a terrible reality in the life of the book’s main character offends him. That’s his right. But for every child who is blessed with a non-dysfunctional home and who hasn’t been broken by something as awful as rape, there’s another girl like me. A girl who can’t find the words to describe how shattered she feels. Who doesn’t even know if she has the right to feel shattered. Who’s learned that bringing her secrets to the light results in more pain. That girl needs books like SPEAK to be on the shelves. She needs to know there are others out there like her. She needs to see someone else’s path so she can have the language to start thinking about her own outcome.
As a Christian and a rape survivor, I want SPEAK to stay on the shelves. And I want others to write books about rape. Incest. Child abuse. Eating disorders. Multiple personality disorder. Post traumatic stress disorder. Because those are just as real, just as present, for some kids as worrying about grades and peer pressure are for others. Books can give children the language they need to be able to describe themselves and the things they’re facing. To silence the book could be to silence the child.
I'm not a huge fan of this year's BBW promotional materials, but I really liked last year's
In preparing for Banned Books Week, what struck me about the list of most-frequently challenged books was that most of them are titles for teens, and that most of the challenges are due to the sexual nature of the book, and that what is and isn’t on the list is sometimes surprising. Even this year, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye made the top ten. And while Lauren Myracle’s TTYL, TTFN, and L8R G8R have sexual content, it seems pretty tame and a lot of the conflict comes from the girls dealing with the consequences of making ill-advised decisions (like dancing topless at a party and then having cell phone pictures of her doing so circulated through the school). But is what happens in these books any worse than the sexual content in a John Green novel? In Jellicoe Road? Or even more intense books like Living Dead Girl? None of these titles have made it to the top ten list despite having equally “edgy” or even more disturbing content. I suspect this is because most would-be challengers don’t actually read the book to which they’re objecting, but rather rely on the opinion of friends or newspaper articles about challenges elsewhere to find books to challenge.
And as interesting as the data collected by the Office of Intellectual Freedom is, they estimate that for every challenge that’s reported to them, four or five others aren’t. I saw first hand a book be challenged and silently removed from the library without any media attention or the OIF being notified. So in addition to speaking out against censorship and book banning, I want to speak up for reporting challenges to the OIF. It’s part of raising awareness and helping to fight the good fight.
Bookmobiles have come up in a number of conversations I’ve had recently, so I thought I’d share some thoughts and links.
Jane Hu wrote a piece earlier this summer for the Awl called “Booktorrent! The Bookmobile as Rural Filesharing Network”. There weren’t quite as many parallels to today’s models of sharing information as you’d expect from the title, but it’s still a good, short introduction to bookmobile service in England and America. She touches on the way public library service first began in cities, leaving those who lived in more rural areas without the free access to information libraries were beginning to provide. Bookmobiles were a way to bring that information and those resources to a wider audience.
One emerging trend in librarianship now is to position the library as a “third place,” a location that is neither work nor home but which allows for social interaction and the establishment of a sense of community. (The more common way to refer to this is as the library as a community center.) But Hu points out that this is something early bookmobiles were already offering:
The bookmobile also provided often-detached rural populations opportunities to socialize. In attempts to appeal to adults, bookmobiles often added late night stops. (I’m a little disappointed these don’t happen anymore.) The goal of the bookmobile to educate and thus “make better Americans” opened up a cultural conversation that spreads each day with the traveling word.
For a more extensive chronicling of the history of bookmobile service in a particular place, check out the articles and photos (such great photos!) that Western Maryland’s Historical Library has collected and made available. In fact, it was in Washington County that Mary Titcomb started the first bookmobile service in America in 1905 as a way of reaching potential patrons who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) visit the deposit stations in general stores and post offices that she’d established throughout Washington County, Maryland. What I found especially interesting was her evolving thoughts on what the bookcart should look like and what connotations it should evoke. She wrote in The Story of the Washington County Free Library:
The first wagon, when finished with shelves on the outside and a place for storage of cases in the center resembled somewhat a cross between a grocer’s delivery wagon and the tin peddlers cart of by gone New England days. Filled with an attractive collection of books and drawn by two horses, with Mr. Thomas the janitor both holding the reins and dispensing the books, it started on its travels in April 1905.
[...]
When directions were given as to painting, we had the fear of looking too much like the laundry wagon before our eyes, and the man was strictly enjoined, not to put any gilt or scroll work on it but to make even the lettering, “Washington County Free Library,” plain and dignified, directions carried out only too well, for in the early days of our wagoning, as our man approached one farm house, he heard a voice charged with nervous trepidation, call out “Yer needn’t stop here. We ain’t got no use for the dead wagon here.” Suffice it to say, that we promptly painted the wheels red, and picked off the panels of the doors with the same cheerful color.
In 1912, the library began using a motorized bookmobile.
However, this bookmobile suffered frequent accidents and breakdowns, prompting the librarian at the time, Miss Nellie Chrissinger, to write in the annual report, “The wagon is a victim of circumstances over which we have no control. Even at best, but eight or nine months can be counted on and wet days, wet roads, and repairs shorten the time of operation still more.”
The Washington County Free Library most recently upgraded its bookmobile in 2004. It can carry up to 4000 books, has four computer workstation outlets, is air conditioned or heated depending on the season, and comes equipped with a wheelchair lift.
It’s interesting to see how much bookmobile service has evolved in the last hundred years!
Hu mentions that bookmobile service was the only way libraries were able to reach many people living in rural areas. I’m not completely sure I’m remembering this correctly, but during one of my courses with Dr Preer during my MLS, she told us that when public library service was expanding across the country, the government provided funds for libraries to develop bookmobile service in their area to reach rural residents. Even then, though, Indiana had something of a libertarian bent, and most libraries declined this funding, not wanting to take federal money to provide a local service. So while other states were sending out bookmobiles and demonstrating the relevance, importance, and general awesomeness of library service to as many people as possible in their towns or counties or service areas, Indiana was focusing on physical buildings and not doing as much outreach. As a result, even to this day, support for libraries isn’t as strong as it could be in Indiana, and library service often lags behind other states in the Midwest. There are still plenty of people who don’t have library service without having to pay for library cards (the white areas on this map show unserved areas), and because library service is still a patchwork of town and county libraries, it’s harder to have state-wide standards for staff qualifications and services provided and operating hours. If only we’d said yes to bookmobiles!
Mary Titcomb wrote, “No better method has ever been devised for reaching the dweller in the country. The book goes to the man, not waiting for the man to come to the book.” But it’s not just country dwellers whose lives are enriched by bookmobile service; bookmobiles across the country now bring the library’s resources to nursing homes or the homebound.
It seems like a lot of people have fond memories of bookmobile service. When my parents first moved us to Indiana, we lived in an area just outside of Fort Wayne that was only just beginning to be developed. The nearest library branch was about 20 minutes away, so we made use of the bookmobile service the library provided while they planned and built a branch in our area. While my memories of the bookmobile are pretty hazy–mostly I remember enjoying the coolness after being out in the hot summer sun and the delight I felt in being in a room full of books–my mom still reminisces about how much she enjoyed being able to request specific titles and have them brought to her the next week.
W. Ralph Eubanks mused on his own memories of bookmobile visits during his childhood in Mississippi for All Things Considered earlier this summer. What I found especially interesting was this passage that reflects on both the inequality of life for a black family in the South, but also on the way library service can change our lives:
Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Mississippi resisted enforcing it. But when my mother, a school teacher, asked for the bookmobile to stop at our house in the summer of 1965, the librarian did not hesitate even though schools were still segregated. By simply following the law rather than ignoring it, the bookmobile transformed me into a lifelong reader and eventually a writer.
The thing I came across most recently that got me thinking about bookmobiles was Audrey Niffenegger’s The Night Bookmobile, a graphic novel about a woman who discovers a bookmobile one night that contains every book she’s ever read. The bookmobile disappears, though, and the woman spends years trying to find it again, becoming a librarian in the mean time.
Being able to bring library service to as many people as possible is part of the mission of any good library. We help those who are able to make it through our doors, but we also need to consider the needs of those for whom visiting the library isn’t possible or practical. We send books to nursing homes, we visit juvenile detention facilities, and we provide ebooks and downloadable audio books, but for many, the bookmobile has a special place in their heart as the way they access their libraries.
Jane
Author: April Lindner
Publisher: Poppy (an imprint of Little, Brown)
Pages: 367
ISBN: 9780316084208
Publication date: 11 October 2010
Review book source: ARC from the publisher
Summary From the publisher: Forced to drop out of an esteemed East Coast college after the sudden death of her parents, Jane Moore takes a job as a nanny at Thornfield Park, the estate of Nico Rathburn, a world-famous rock star on the brink of a huge comeback. Practical and independent, Jane reluctantly becomes entranced by her magnetic and brooding employer and finds herself in the midst of a forbidden romance. But there’s a mystery at Thornfield, and Jane’s much-envied relationship with Nico is tested by a torturous secret from his past.
An irresistible romance interwoven with a darkly engrossing mystery, this contemporary retelling of the beloved classic Jane Eyre promises to enchant a new generation of readers.
My thoughts
I must start with a caveat: I read Jane Eyre in high school and hated it. I’ve since warmed to “the classics,” mostly after a college course called The Victorian Novel in which we read eight works from the early emergence of the novel to the end of the Victorian era and considered them not only in their literary context but their historical and social contexts, too. The course was taught by the best professor I’ve ever had, and her enthusiasm for the subject rubbed off on me. In fact, I still count Vilette as one of my favorite books, so it’s not even as if I have some sort of special beef with Charlotte Brontë. I haven’t taken the time to revisit Jane Eyre again, though, so it was with particular interest that I opened Lindner’s retelling: would this be a pathway to appreciating the original in a way I hadn’t before?
Unfortunately, I think there are too many elements of Jane Eyre that were so grounded in Victorian life that they’re very difficult to translate. I’m not sure contemporary American society has any societal difference so extreme as class differences then, so simply making Jane newly destitute and Nico a rockstar doesn’t put them on separate enough planes, especially in an age where people of royal lineage marry “commoners.” Jane’s sudden fall from wealth and her departure from college life was also hard to swallow–she couldn’t have taken out loans or transferred to a state school or community college?–and then her subsequent poverty on fleeing Thornfield Park seemed unbelievable, too, since she’d been working for months with her room and board covered for an incredibly rich man.
The problems also run deeper than just matters of wealth and class: when Jane discovers that Bibi, Nico’s first wife, is schizophrenic and living in the tower on the third floor of the mansion, just barely kept under control by the alcoholic Bertha, I was shocked by how offensive the portrayal of schizophrenia was. Nico’s insistence that putting her in some institution was too horrifying to contemplate (because have you seen those places?) also seemed a thin excuse. Our understanding of and treatment of the mentally ill now compared to when Jane Eyre was first published have evolved so much as to make this scene make Nico seem cruel and even dangerous. And did he really think, with our current system of computerized records and more official marriage registrations, that he could marry Jane without divorcing Bibi first?
The malice with which Jane’s family treats her both before and after her parents’ deaths was hard to believe; that she would have such selective access to cell phones and the Internet was hard to believe; her utter ignorance of and insulation from pop music and pop culture were hard to believe. Her tenure as a nanny felt not like time as a nanny but as time as a governess. Jane’s description as strong and self-assured doesn’t play out in her constant self-doubt and the way the story feels like it’s happening to her instead of because of her. Her interest only in classical music, painting, and French with absolutely no concessions to modern life make her seem like a relic from Victorian times. There was just so much in this story that seemed to happen or exist only because something similar happened to the original Jane, and the Victorian feel was too preserved within the insular grounds of Thornfield Park. I think Lindner wanted to stay as close to the original source material in her retelling, but it means her story uncomfortably straddles the original setting and values and our more modern life with a stable foothold in neither.
But I think the thing that bothered me most about this story was the relationship between Jane and Nico. I didn’t understand why their romance was forbidden from the start; their interactions are all stilted as she remains far too formal even after living at Thornfield Park for months; and there’s no reason for them to fall in love with each other (she does so mysteriously, maybe pulled in by his music, and he falls for her… because she resists his advances at first, unlike the previous nannies?). Why would you want to be with someone who causes you unbearable heartache because he’s trying to make you jealous so you’ll want him more, who lies to you about still being married, and who is super-controlling? When Jane finds out that Nico tried to trick her into a wedding while he was still married to the mentally ill person he was keeping imprisoned in his mansion, threatening the safety of everyone else who lives there, she decides to leave (smart girl!)–and then she fears that he’s going to come after her, that he’s going to use her bank activity or cell phone use to find her, that his “violent temper” will flare up again. She abandons every part of her previous life and lives and works using a new name because she’s afraid of him. All of this makes her sound exactly like a woman who’s been suffering from domestic abuse but is afraid to leave because of her partner’s violence and control over her and because she doesn’t have the financial independence to support herself away from him. That is not what love is like! Maybe in the era of Edward and Bella this is enchantingly romantic, but in the real world, these are all warning signs of an abusive relationship–and I mean that with zero exaggeration.
All of that said, I think that readers who loved Jane Eyre will enjoy seeing the story adapted to modern times and will be much more forgiving of these problems in modernization and the dynamic of Jane and Nico’s relationship. Readers who haven’t yet dipped into what Austen and Brontë have to offer can use Lindner’s retelling as their introduction to these classic stories. Teens looking for stories of forbidden romance, dangerous mystery, or sentimental tales of virtuous heroines bravely suffering through the injustices and humiliations life has heaped upon them so they can be rewarded with a man at the end will like this story. Lindner’s Jane does a remarkable job of staying true to its source material and capturing all of the melodrama of the original–and for some people, that’s exactly what they’re looking for.
More reviews
Chasing Ray (this review points out more problems in the modernization of this story)
67% of public libraries report that they’re the only organization in their communities that provides free access to the Internet and computers.
Almost 90% percent of all public libraries offer some kind of technology training to patrons.
67% of public libraries reported that their staff members helped patrons complete online job applications last year.
57% of urban public libraries have fiber optic public access Internet connections. Only 17.7% of rural libraries do.
Only 26.5% of libraries reported having a sufficient number of public workstations for patrons to use throughout the day.
For FY2009, 40% of libraries reported flat or decreased operating budgets. 56.4% reported the same for FY2010, and 62% are anticipating flat or decreased budgets for FY2011. Staff salary and benefits expenditures dropped 43% in FY2010, and collections budgets were cut 47%.
We know all of this because every year the American Library Association’s Office for Research and Statistics and the Center for Library and Information Innovation at the University of Maryland conduct the Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study. It continues the longest-running and largest study of Internet connectivity in public libraries, originally begun in 1994 by John Carlo Bertot and Charles R. McClure. It’s the big study that major media outlets use to talk about library technology and funding. And the PLFTAS not only gives us a picture of what library technology access and funding are like, it also shows us how that access has changed over time. For example, in 2006 only 36.7% of libraries offered free WiFi; now 82.2% do.
If you’re interested in learning more about this picture of nationwide library funding and technology service, check out the executive summary for PLFTAS 2009-2010, the technology-specific summary, and the funding summary. They’ve also made available data for each state, which lets me report to you things like the way libraries in my new home, Connecticut, have higher operating expenditures per capita ($42.13) compared to the US average ($35.63–that’s right, your library provides you everything it does for the price of about one hardback book per person), but that they saw a greater decrease in hours (20.7%) than average (14.5%). I can also tell you that while libraries in my previous home, Indiana, are less likely to provide WiFi to patrons than Connecticut libraries (79.8% versus 92.7%), they’re more likely to be the sole provider of free access to computers and the Internet in their community than Connecticut libraries (79.7% versus 60.1%). The ALA also has a blog, Libraries Connect Communities, that discusses results of the survey.
Anyway, I apparently really like poking around in these reports and digging up interesting data just for fun, but I also think using the information we get from these reports is essential to making a good case for libraries in our communities. By using this data, we can show people what it is that libraries do and the impact we have on people in our communities. We provide Internet access and technology training and assistance with e-government websites and we’re doing it with less and less money. The results from the PLFTAS–along with the data collected by the Institute for Museum and Library Services–are the most detailed and long-ranged tools we can use to illustrate what libraries do and why that matters.
The survey for the 2010-2011 PLFTAS is now available. Please make sure someone at your library fills it out, because the more libraries that participate, the better a picture of public library technology access and funding we can paint.
Just a few quick links and thoughts about libraries and technology:
Online and mobile library accessibility
Fiona of A Work in Progress recently wrote about library catalogs and touched on how library catalogs online often don’t behave the way Google does in that if you don’t formulate your query exactly correctly, you may get zero results. Amazon and Google will correct misspellings or suggest alternate searches, but plenty of electronic library catalogs force you to figure it out yourself. Ross Singer’s super-long post at In the Library with the Lead Pipe from about a year ago examines some similar issues in user-friendliness and accessibility. Even I frequently Google a book title or look it up on Amazon if I’m not sure I know the author or if I’m not sure I’m spelling things right because using library catalogs can be such a hassle. I know that we’ve come so far from the cards-in-drawers model of a catalog (and the accessibility of records with that model), but as average users become more comfortable with computers and grow to expect search tools to behave like Google and Amazon, we need to be able to keep up.
One library that’s doing a great job with making the catalog (and the library in general) accessible and friendly is the San Jose Public Library, which recently launched its cross-platform mobile app. Sarah, the Librarian in Black, reports on the app’s features (including a smart search with predictive text, the ability to reserve and renew, access to magazines and newspapers, upcoming programming, and more!), reflects on working with Boopsie and the Apple Store, and emphasizes the importance of having a good mobile-friendly website above all else when it comes to mobile accessibility. What kinds of mobile access does your library offer? Do you have a mobile-friendly website? A mobile app? Do you offer reference via text? Notifications that holds are available via text? Access to periodicals and eBooks from users’ home computers? From their mobile devices? It’s hard to talk about what public libraries as a whole “should” do since there can be huge differences in the communities they serve, but for communities with patrons who are glued to their phones, mobile access is an important part of library access.
Technology literacy vs. information literacy
Last month one of Brian’s Reference Question of the Week posts at Swiss Army Librarian dealt with advanced Googling techniques. While Google is most people’s search engine of choice (they have about a 63% market share) and its suggested searches help correct mistakes like misspellings or adjust for alternate verb forms, there are still advanced tricks you can use to refine your searches. Search engines have come so far from their Boolean operator-bound roots (even I remember being taught how to use AltaVista in middle school!) and are a lot more user-friendly, but there’s still room for information and technology literacy skill instruction in using them. Google offers a cheat sheet that covers different operators, and their basic search help and more search help pages offer lengthier explanations of how to refine a search query. These can, of course, also be helpful for older users who may not be as comfortable with the Internet and need more assistance.
Brian links to a ReadWriteWeb report that claims that digital natives might not be as media-savvy as people think, citing a study that found that many students never went further than “it was the first result on Google” when assessing a website’s reliability. But it’s not all doom and gloom:
Another interesting finding from the study involved the use of Wikipedia. Perhaps because of teachers’ insistence over the years that the user-generated encyclopedia is not a credible source of information, only a third of the students used Wikipedia to search for answers when given particular tasks. This is a drop from earlier studies (like Raine & Tancer, 2007) which showed Wikipedia use at 46% among students.
Other popular trusted sources included SparkNotes (a study guide site), WedMD, Planned Parenthood, CNN, BBC, Microsoft (specifically Encarta and Office-related resources) and those sites with a .gov or .edu extension. Some students even thought that .org domain name meant a site was inherently trustworthy – they weren’t aware that the .org extension can be freely registered just like .com and is not for nonprofit use only, as may have originally been intended.
Technology literacy doesn’t automatically impart information literacy. Young people still need to be taught how to evaluate the veracity of a source–maybe even more than their parents did when they were growing up–and they are receptive to those lessons. Frank Wescott at Tech & Learningdiscusses using intentionally misleading websites (Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus is my favorite!) to help students determine whether or not a website is a reliable source. Wikipedia’s recently published FAQ for librarians is also a good resource.
Digitized comics
And in more fun news (via Metafilter), the Digital Comic Museum is a collection of Golden Age comics that are now in the public domain and are free to download. Cool!
This collection of links is going to be a real mix of things, but there’s so much interesting stuff I’ve seen lately!
YA lit and library news and trends
One of the things I’d like to see more of in librarianship in general and youth services especially is more rigor and research. YALSA is launching the Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, an online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, in November. They’ve put out a call for papers for the Winter 2011 and Spring 2011 issues.
Through 20 September you can also nominate librarians for the I Love My Librarian Award. The winners get a $5000 cash award, a plaque, and a $500 travel stipend to attend an awards reception in New York hosted by The New York Times, so this is a great opportunity for all of you library users to nominate a librarian who’s made a difference in your life or your community.
The Horn Book has available a poster called “A is for XBox: 26 Ways to Prevent Summer Reading.” While I think there’s some unnecessary hostility toward technology (you can read books and play video games), it’s still pretty cute.
Speaking of summer reading, one Bronx teen read 325 books during the New York Public Library’s summer reading program. That’s astounding, but I think my favorite part of the article was the bit about the boy designated “most improved” who began having to have his parents read to him but finished reading over 60 books on his own. Yeah summer reading!
Alexie’s book has won a number of awards, but that did not sway the board.
“We can take the book and wrap it in those 20 awards everyone else said it won and it still is wrong,” said board member Ken Spurgeon.
Supporters of the book said it was chosen to get high school boys, particularly, interested in reading. Spurgeon said that was a mistake because the book’s reading level is low for high school readers.
Over at Closed Stacks, The Librarienne rails against the ALA for continuing to promote the idea that librarianship is a greying profession and that there will soon be a mass exodus of retirees leaving positions for new librarians to fill, citing the unemployment and underemployment she and her fellow graduates are suffering.
But in non-sucky news, Bitch Magazine recently interviewed Lia Friedman, he head of public services at the UCSD Arts Library, the staff librarian for make/shift magazine, and an active member of Radical Reference. Lia talks about the values of librarianship, stereotypes of librarians, and what Radical Reference does.
The team at Orbit had their summer intern do “a survey of cover art elements for the top fantasy novels published in the previous year,” and a few weeks ago they published their results. The summary in chart form:
This month the writers of the YALSA blog are doing 30 Days of Back to School with a post each day that considers some aspect of going back to school or gearing up again for fall library work with teens. This is going to be the first fall in 20 years that I don’t go back to school and I’m still looking for my first professional position after getting my MLS, so I reflected on my job search so far.
Click through for disappointment! excitement! frustration! renewed hope! and more! It’s like a crazy soap opera, but with fewer secret twins returned from the dead to surprise you with the news that they’re actually your dad.
A few weeks ago there was some discussion around “The Kids’ Books Are All Right”, a New York Times article by Pamela Paul about adults reading youth lit. I’ve been thinking about the article a lot, especially as I’ve been explaining my excitement about Mockingjay to my grownup friends, and today I noticed the woman next to me at the gym was reading a Harry Potter book.
In the article, Paul writes that it’s not just twenty-somethings who grew up with Harry Potter and are continuing to read YA as they move into adulthood; she interviews and discusses middle aged readers who were just as eager to get their hands on a copy of Mockingjay as teens were and notes that
[a]ccording to surveys by the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-old women and 24 percent of same-aged men say most of the books they buy are classified as young adult. The percentage of female Y.A. fans between the ages of 25 and 44 has nearly doubled in the past four years. Today, nearly one in five 35- to 44-year-olds say they most frequently buy Y.A. books. For themselves.
I think that this adult interest in YA books is largely just because of the increasing quality of YA books. The problem novels of the 70s certainly had their place, but YA lit has grown and gotten so much more complex and interesting in the last few decades. It’s honestly just good literature now, not just good… for kids.
But since YA lit isn’t written for adults, it’s going to seem different to grownups giving it a try. I think a few quotations from people Paul interviewed really illustrate this:
“A lot of adult literature is all art and no heart,” Foreman, who is currently working on a book about British involvement in the American Civil War, said. “But good Y.A. is like good television. There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging. Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or disappointed people.”
[. . .]
Y.A. may also pierce the jadedness and cynicism of our adult selves. “When you talk to people about the books that have meant a lot to them, it’s usually books they read when they were younger because the books have this wonder in everyday things that isn’t bogged down by excessively grown-up concerns or the need to be subtle or coy,” explained Jesse Sheidlower, an editor at large at the Oxford English Dictionary and member of Kidlit. “When you read these books as an adult, it tends to bring back the sense of newness and discovery that I tend not to get from adult fiction.”
“There’s an immediacy in the prose,” said Darcey Steinke, a novelist who says she reads about one Y.A. book a month (recent favorites: “Elsewhere,” by Gabrielle Zevin — “better than ‘The Lovely Bones’ — and anything by Francesca Lia Block of “Weetzie Bat” fame). “I like the way adolescent emotions are rawer, less canned.”
When we’re recommending YA books to grownups, we can highlight that freshness, that engaging immediacy. We can also mention that a lot of YA novels aren’t too long and so might be good beach reads or vacation reads (I recommended the Luxe series to my hair stylist, who was leaving on vacation and had read The Host wanted something with romance and intrigue that wasn’t too trashy, and she loved them). There are lengthy, complex YA novels to be sure, but quicker stuff might be just the gateway drug some adult needs. Of course, grownups who are looking for deep, character-driven tales of midlife misery and regret might not be able to find much in YA, but the lure of a high-action story or an intriguing fantasy world or a dystopian sci-fi tale that critiques society might convince other adult readers to give YA a shot.
And while YA lit often has a different flavor than a lot of adult lit, in some ways recommending YA books to adults is just like recommending adult books to adults–we still need to find out what they’re looking for and then pair them with a book that delivers that. My husband picked up The Hunger Games when I couldn’t stop talking about it and then read Catching Fire when I brought it home and has my copy of Mockingjay right now. But as much as I’ve gone on about how much I was surprised to enjoy the Luxe series, he’s just not interested. I asked him about what would make him pick up a YA book I was reading, and he said that he needs to be interested in the genre or the setting. He also mentioned format: he’s planning to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret because he’s intrigued by the automaton, but also because he’s a graphic novel enthusiast and is interested in the way the illustrations and text work together in Selznick’s book. (He’s also been more interested in reading it since he found out Scorsese’s directing the film adaptation.) While Casey might appreciate that he can finish a YA book more quickly than an adult book, the content of the story still needs to be interesting to him. In general I think this might make realistic fiction a little harder to sell and fantasy and sci-fi a little easier to get adult readers to try.
What really surprised me in our conversation, though, was that Casey said he doesn’t expect to be able to identify with the protagonist and often actually expects to feel frustrated with him or her. I thought this was especially interesting because it seems like identifying strongly with a character is what drives teen’s love or hate for a book. But since YA lit isn’t written for grownups, while they’re going to appreciate and love some of the same things that teen readers do, they’re also not going to like other parts as much or in the same way.
Since there are still tons of adults who still don’t read YA lit (adult services librarians included!), it seems like there needs to be someone acting as an ambassador from the world of YA lit to introduce an adult to it. It might be a relative or spouse or friend who’s a YA librarian, a friend who’s already discovered YA lit, or even a grownup’s own teenage child who recommends something she particularly likes. For those of us who are YA librarians or booksellers or high school English teachers, we can be those ambassadors. We can be the ones who talk up the great new book we read and pass it on not just to teen readers but to the grownups in our lives as well. Because YA lit really is legitimately good lit, not just kiddie lit. We know that, and it’s about time everyone else does, too.
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