…has passed. But I just found this quote and wanted to share:
“Book-banning is ridiculous, if for no other reason than it makes people want to read the banned book even more. The exchange of ideas (even unpopular or inconvenient ones) is important in making us who we are, and helping us to promote independent thought. Also, books about witches and talking animals are awesome.” –Jenny Lawson, a.k.a. The Bloggess, for CafeMom
The “young adult” sector is generally considered to encompass the 12-18 set. This is a pretty huge span: there’s much more of a developmental difference between, say, a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old than there is between a 30-year-old and a 32-year-old. Obviously, some YA books are aimed toward the younger end of the spectrum – the “tweens” – and some are pitched toward an older audience. Add to this that YA is beginning to encompass a few more years in either direction – so it might span from 10 to 25 (according to YALSA) – and that’s not exactly a homogenous demographic.
Additionally, there’s no switch that gets flipped when you turn 19, and all of a sudden you are totally uninterested in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and are picking up Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom instead. Readers in their late teens and early twenties may go back and forth between YA and adult fiction – especially if there isn’t much out there featuring main characters in that age range, as seems to be the case (“Where Are All the Young ‘Adults’?”, Young Adult Review Network; “The College Experience in YA Books,” YALSA’s The Hub). Both of those articles have a few suggestions for YA fiction featuring late teen/early 20s protagonists; I’ve added a few below as well. Feel free to add more in the comments!
Love is the Higher Law, David Levithan (set in New York; characters are high school seniors/college freshmen)
Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld (set at a Massachusetts boarding school)
I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe (set at a fictionalized Duke University)
The House of Sleep, Jonathan Coe (set at an English university)
Lucky Girls, Nell Freudenberger (short stories)
Right below the Nobel article in Salon, there was an article about hypertext novels, titled “Why the Book’s Future Never Happened,” Hypertext fiction, according to Wikipedia, is electronic literature with hyperlinks that allow for non-linearity and reader interaction. (Not having read one, the impression that I get is something between a choose-your-own adventure novel and a novel told in a non-linear fashion, e.g. with flashbacks or different character perspectives.)
Apparently there was a lot of hype about hypertext fiction back in the ’90s – it was supposed to be “the next big thing,” but it never really took off. The author of the Salon article posits that hypertext fiction was “born into a world that wasn’t quite ready for it,” and additionally, its failure had more to do with its content than with the its format. That is, the first hypertext novels simply weren’t very good. (“True, the hypertext offers you the puzzle-solving pleasure of making sense of the story, arranging the pieces in your head to see the whole mosaic, but why would you do that, if the pieces don’t suggest a picture you care to see? Not every puzzle has an interesting solution.”)
The article’s author suggests that hypertext novels are even more difficult to write than regular novels, because “the sections have to be readable along multiple paths; they have to be richly related in multiple ways; and they have to keep you reading.” However, non-linear fiction has been written before: the author offers Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and and Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar as examples, and I might add to that: The Time Traveler’s Wife?
For those who are interested in Nobel prize politics, there’s an article in Salon.com titled “Why American Novelists Don’t Deserve the Nobel Prize.” The author cites the problem of (American) Great Male Narcissists and the “write what you know” message drilled into MFA students. I find it difficult to offer my two cents here – as many contemporary novels and “modern classics” I’ve read, it doesn’t seem to be enough to form a decisive opinion the way the Salon author (and the Nobel committee) has.
Also, like most Americans, I have not read widely outside of American and British literature, despite the admirable efforts of publishers like Europa Editions to offer works in translation (Europa published Muriel Barberry’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog; about two-thirds of the books they publish are works in translation). Furthermore, the stated criteria for the prize seem a bit vague: the Nobel prize shall be awarded for “achievements in literature,” to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” (See the official Nobel Prize in Literature page, and the list of laureates.)
I’m sure there are tacit criteria as well, but surely of all the authors in the world, there are many who could justly receive the prize; it’s a bit like applying to a top Ivy – there are a lot of qualified applicants who don’t get in. Also, it seems unlikely that Europe is producing all the best literature. I’m not necessarily arguing that American literature is superior, but there are a number of other countries and continents in the world, and I believe there are authors there too…?
*UPDATED* I found a bit more background/insight to the Nobel issue in the New York Review of Books. Here’s a quote from the article:
“Now, let’s imagine that we have been condemned for life to making, year in year out a burdensome and near impossible decision to which the world increasingly and inexplicably ascribes a crazy importance. How do we go about it? We look for some simple, rapid and broadly acceptable criteria that will help us get this pain out of the way. And since, as Borges himself noted, aesthetics are difficult and require a special sensibility and long reflection, while political affiliations are easier and quickly grasped, we begin to identify those areas of the world that have grabbed public attention, perhaps because of political turmoil or abuses of human rights, we find those authors who have already won a huge level of respect and possibly major prizes in the literary communities of these countries and who are outspokenly committed on the right side of whatever political divide we’re talking about, and we select them.”
Read the whole article: “What’s Wrong With the Nobel Prize in Literature?”
Amy Benson lecture at Simmons co-hosted by ALASC and SCoSAA
Amy Benson is the Librarian/Archivist for Digital Initiatives at the Schlesinger Library, one of 73 Harvard libraries. The Schlesinger focuses on the history of women in America, and Amy talked to us about digital collections: the process of creating, managing, and preserving them, and the challenges.
The first collection they worked on digitizing was women’s travel writing, for an interested vendor. Next was the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Collection, which is now fully digitized, and currently they are working on digitizing the Radcliffe College Publications. All of these collections, for the most part, are analog – papers, letters, books, photos, etc. (The analog-to-digital process is, relatively, the easiest, according to Amy.)
Other types of digital collections involve capturing and preserving web content, and born-digital content. Born-digital content is especially tricky: material comes in various physical formats (diskettes, flash drives, CDs, DVDs, cartridge tapes(!), hard drives, etc.) and multiple file formats – and then there’s e-mail (“Thinking about processing e-mail at the individual message level is a little bit crazy”). Sixty-five collections at the Schlesinger include born-digital material: it’s on more than 1900 individual media storage devices, each containing any number of files. “You begin to see we’re in a big mess,” Amy explained. Then she rephrased, “Well, not a big mess – an interesting time….There’s no shortage of things that need to be figured out in the world.”
Amy spoke about trying to expand scope of collection, but acknowledged that selection was a challenge. Radical feminists on the web, for example – Which ones do you pick? How do you know which ones people will want to use for research? Donor agreements must be worked out, both for materials already in the collection and for new acquisitions, and all incoming born-digital material must be tracked.
Another challenge in managing digital archives is deciding what to keep. And, once that’s decided, how do you preserve it? (In the Schlesinger’s case, items can be deposited into Harvard’s Digital Repository Service.) Once items are selected and preserved, how can patrons access them? “The thing that’s cool about my job is figuring out how to do all of this,” said Amy. She also mentioned the importance of documenting the process to guarantee authenticity of the final product – assuming that the end user doesn’t just give the institution the benefit of the doubt that the item is an exact copy of the original.
Essentially, digital archives are the same as any other archives: selection, accession, preservation/storage, and access are the key elements of the process. “In some ways it’s the exact same thing – you just have to do it through a computer,” said Amy. However, because the technology is new and constantly changing, and because each archives has specific needs and goals, there doesn’t seem to be a go-to set of best practices. So, what do you need to be a digital archivist? “A willingness to experiment and a love for computers.”
On mistakes and loss: “Some stuff is already lost forever. There’s actually going to be a big black hole in the ’80s…”
Interesting links:
MIT’s FACADE project
Harvard’s Web Archive Collection Service (WAX)
Tonight I was one of the panelists at an ALASC event at Simmons, ALA Annual 2011: A GSLIS Student Perspective. Four GSLIS students who attended the ALA Annual Conference in June shared our experiences; we covered the logistics of attending the conference, how to save money, devising a schedule for yourself, networking, and other topics. The event was recorded and the podcast will soon be up on GSLISCast.
I have linked previously to a piece on Hack Lib School to which I contributed with other Student-to-Staffers, and GSLIS alum Stacie Williams wrote a piece as well. I hope current students find this useful if/when they go to ALA Annual or Midwinter!
Yesterday I attended the Library Science Fair organized by the Simmons chapter of ASIS&T. Current GSLIS student Mark Tomko gave an impressive presentation titled “Translating Biological Data Sets Into Linked Data” (he’ll be presenting this at the 10th European Networked Knowledge Organisation Systems (NKOS) Workshop in Berlin later this month). Mark did a great job explaining both the biological aspects (“all the biology you need to know fits on one slide, and the font isn’t even that small,” he promised) and the importance of linked data to an audience who was not necessarily expert in either field.
Ben Florin (GSLIS alum, former staff, currently a web developer at the Boston College Libraries) also gave a talk entitled “What I don’t like about our library’s website, plus why we haven’t changed it yet, and what we’re doing about it.” He took us on a virtual tour of the BC Libraries site, pointing out its pros (prominent discovery tool, i.e. search) and cons (a fixed interface, with wasted screen space, instead of responsive design).
The example of responsive design Ben gave was The Boston Globe’s new site; if you go to the home page there and resize your browser window, the layout will adjust from three columns to two to one (as you go smaller), and then from one to two to three (as you make the window larger again). The layout of the BC Libraries page, on the other hand, remains fixed at two columns.
Chances are I will not end up working as a software engineer (or biologist), and maybe not even as a web developer; however, it was interesting to hear two extremely bright people talk about their work as it relates to libraries and organizational schemes.
This is another event that wasn’t on the initial schedule I drew up for myself, but a fellow student-to-staffer (and YALSA member) told me about it, and we went together. I’m so glad I did, especially as I’m taking a young adult literature class this fall; I got a jump on thinking about some of the issues that plague this particular group of readers.
Whose Common Sense?: How Labeling Systems Hurt Young Readers was sponsored by the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee, and featured four amazing panelists:
Barbara Jones, Director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, began the session by making the distinction between book reviews and ratings: book reviews treat books as a whole; ratings target elements in books (e.g. sex, violence, etc.). This was perhaps the most objective statement of the whole session, because it was an impassioned session; while some panelists displayed understanding as to where “the other side” was coming from, others did not hold back, though for the most part they were preaching to the choir – librarians generally are for intellectual freedom and readers (of any age) making their own choices, and against censorship.
Michael Norris of Simba offered several statistics, reminding the audience that “not everyone loves books.” In fact, there are 5 print book buyers for every one e-book buyer, and 40% of iPad owners have never bought (or, presumably, read) an e-book. However, he added, censorship is one of the least effective ways to get boys to read books. (Girls are more likely than boys to read on their own.)
Jeffrey Nadel spoke as if he were the nation’s top five debate teams all rolled into one and someone had just hit the two-minute timer. Which is to say: well-spoken, well-rehearsed, articulate, impassioned, persuasive, and armed to the teeth with rhetoric. “What is protection?” he asked, then answered, “A group of people presuming to know better for another group.” In this case, protection is an “intellectual blockade” to exploration and curiosity; Nadel argued that restricting reading can actually harm young people, and that ratings take away freedom and creativity. Young people, he said, are the only protected/regulated “class” in the country, and yet “youth are unique.” He cited the problem with age-based ratings in other forms of media (e.g. movies), which is that “not all 13-year-olds are inherently the same.”
Parents, educators, and anyone with a shred of common sense knows this; one kid might be ready to dive into the Harry Potter series at age 7, while another might not be ready until 10. Christine Jenkins followed this nicely, describing the right and wrong approaches to helping a child find a book. If a kid comes up to the librarian and says, “I need a book,” “How old are you?” is the wrong response; instead, ask “What have you read that you’ve liked?” – just as you would for any other patron. Help with the discovery process, she advised, then let go.
As for ratings and age labels, Jenkins said, they only “give the illusion of control”; furthermore, attitudes shift in response to labels. Yet people are eager to label: the group Parents Against Bad Books in Schools, for example, pays lip service to the idea that “Bad is not for us to determine. Bad is what you determine is bad. Bad is what you think is bad for your child.” That, of course, is followed by a plethora of lists of books with “bad content.”
It’s this kind of mindset that sends David Levithan over the edge. These organizations, companies, and activists – the pro-ratings (and pro-censorship) groups – appear to be nonjudgmental, caring, and objective, but, Levithan said – and he has a point – “you cannot have an objective warning label.” Warning labels imply judgment; warning labels are “the enemy of the truth”; they are devoid of context. “The problem with warning labels,” Levithan said, “is that they’re fucking crazy. They are everything that the freedom to read is NOT about.”
Warning labels are reductive, he argued, and we cannot reduce literature to ratings. In terms of encouraging young people to read, he said, “You have to keep those gates open wide to everything…You can save time [using labels] and end up losing everything.”
All of this occurred before the Q&A session. During the Q&A, one audience member immediately brought up the Wall Street Journal article “Darkness Too Visible,” by Meghan Cox Gurdon, and this topic dominated most of the rest of the time. Gurdon’s article was a protest against the darkness, violence, and “depravity” of young adult literature. She lamented the fact that so many YA books contain “ugliness” and “damage, brutality, and loss.” The article provoked a tremendous reaction; author Sherman Alexie wrote an articulate and passionate defense, also in the WSJ, a few days later (“Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood”).
Alexie was one of the many who spoke out. “When a body of [work/literature] is attacked, the people who it helped come to its defense,” said Levithan. “We are reflecting the problem, not creating it.” Sometimes, the consensus of the session seemed to be, it is better to the let child/young adult experience [fill in the blank] in a book rather than in real life – to have that experience vicariously through the safety of literature. Conversely, for those children and teenagers who have experienced the “dark” subject matter in books in their own lives, they are likely to be comforted, not damaged, by the books – they can empathize with the characters, and know they are not alone. And generally – like any other group of readers – if teens don’t like a book, they will stop reading and put it down.
Another question, after the WSJ article debate, was how to counter the idea that kids need to be protected from ideas. There is a proven link between leisure reading and educational achievement. It is important that kids have access to books that are interesting to them; our role as librarians is to make sure they have that access. Worse than books being challenged is books being censored preemptively – teachers not adding books to their syllabi or librarians not buying books for the library collection because they expect the book to be challenged.
Throughout this panel, I tried to think of a book – any one book, ever – that I had read that had damaged me in some way. I have read over a hundred books a year since grade school, and I know that I have read many of the most frequently banned/challenged books, including more than 30 from each of the most frequently challenged books of the decade lists (1990-1999 and 2000-2009; there’s a lot of overlap). Many of them have been assigned in school – see the list of challenged classics. (Ironically, people have wanted to ban Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 a lot. Bradbury and Orwell would be proud. Or horrified.)
The point is, I couldn’t think of one book I had ever read that I would have preferred to be “protected” from. I’m not a statistically significant sample size, just a case study, but my experience has led me to believe in the freedom to read, for people of all ages. Parents might have the right to determine what their own children are allowed to read, but they should not have the right to determine this for anyone else – not in school libraries, and not in public libraries. Ratings systems make it easier to target those books with “bad content,” and it’s a slippery slope from rating to banning.
After an unforgivably long lapse (“it was summer” doesn’t count as an excuse, does it?), I’m here to write about the rest of my ALA experience. First, the LITA (Library and Information Technology Association) Tech Trends panel. The panelists*:
*I didn’t manage to write down everyone’s full name at the time; I checked against this post from the Metadata Blog. The quote in the title of this post is from Lorcan Dempsey, during the Q&A.
In the first round, Nina talked about the content management system Drupal, which is “free as in kittens” – i.e., you don’t pay for it, but there’s a steep learning curve. Clifford talked about mobile apps, and the difference between apps and customized browsers. Monique spoke about mobile/proximity-based marketing, noting that 87% of libraries in the U.S. have free wi-fi; interactive is better than static, as it is more likely to be targeted and relevant (as well as grant-friendly and cost-effective).
Jennifer highlighted social reading – sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing that are designed to foster social interaction around books and reading, but also features built into e-readers such as Kindle and Kobo. To end the first round, Lorcan spoke about managing down print collections – developing infrastructure to support regionally based hubs (consortia) as libraries begin to cut down on some print material in favor of e-books and online journal subscriptions.
In the second round, Nina spoke about web accessibility and vendor awareness (which has, she noted, improved over the past ten years). (To learn more about accessibility and section 508, you could go to the government site…but then you might want to try Wikipedia.) Clifford spoke about imaging, computational photography, and images as interpretative/interactive data sets as opposed to fixed images (maps and other geospatial data, for example, are good candidates for this).
Jennifer talked about “the death of the mouse,” and using cameras and OCR (optical character recognition) as input in the future; she also talked about the trackpad vs. the mouse. Personally, I can see the move away from the mouse already, with so many people using laptops with trackpads or touchscreens, and of course the iPad touchscreen as well. Poor mouse: </mouse>
Lorcan spoke about LibGuides as a set of curated resources or microcollections, and Monique wrapped up the panel with a discussion about online books (“what is a book?”).
This was a popular event, held in one of the smaller (but still large) auditoriums. It was interesting to hear more about those trends I was already aware of, and get some new ones on the radar as well.
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