Category: Library world

Happy National Library Week

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This week is National Library Week, the time of year that we “celebrate the contributions of our nation’s libraries and librarians and promote library use” (as opposed to the rest of the year…when we also do those things). Jessamyn West wrote a NLW post full of great links at the actual beginning of the week, which is well worth checking out. The Swiss Army Librarian posted a wonderful quote from the very pro-library author Neil Gaiman back in 2011, which is worth revisiting. And of course, the #nlw13 tag is also active on Twitter.

On Monday afternoon – Marathon Monday – I was sitting with a friend of a friend who is considering leaving academia (she’s a few years into a PhD in English Literature) and becoming a librarian. We had met up to talk, and she asked me what librarians were like. I told her one of the striking things I had noticed about librarians as compared to people in other professions: on the whole, they – we – are collaborative, not competitive. We are friendly and helpful and very willing to share our work, our discoveries, and of course our favorite books. “There may be asshole librarians out there,” I said, “but I haven’t met one yet.”

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Calling all researchers: timeline of the end of repair

Jenny3 Comments

During the major blizzard in February (dubbed Nemo), my digital camera stopped working. When I turned it on, the lens would extend, then retract; it would do this a few times and then give a error message to turn it off and back on again. This did not solve the problem, so I began wondering if I could get it repaired, or if I would have to replace it. This repair-or-replace question made me think of a timeline I had seen, which I will describe:

Physical description: It was a black-and-white timeline (though it could originally have been in color); I had it on an 8.5×11″ paper, which I had to blow up onto multiple pages in order to see all the small print properly.

Content: I’m not sure what the earliest year represented was, but the timeline extended through the present and into the future. It showed when repair stopped being a viable option for everyday objects like clothes, shoes, toasters, and radios; when built-in obsolescence, or planned obsolescence, made it cheaper to buy a new item to replace the old one, or simply impossible to repair the old item.

Question3I wanted to find this timeline again. I started with a Google search, using a variety of keywords (repair, replace, timeline, obsolescence/obsolete, chart, technology, etc.), and then switched to a Google image search. I couldn’t find it, so I looked through my grad school notebooks, thinking maybe it had been a handout from one of my classes. It wasn’t there, so I reached out to grad school friends and professors, none of whom specifically remembered what I was trying to describe (though some said it sounded cool), or could help me find it.

Next, I reached out to the Swiss Army Librarian, an ace reference librarian in Chelmsford, MA. He spent a generous amount of time helping me try to dig up the timeline, consulting print and online materials, but we still haven’t found it. However, we found a number of other cool resources along the way:

  • the Consumer Reports Repair or Replace Timeline – access to the timeline itself requires a subscription to CR, but you may well have access through your local public library, as many libraries purchase subscriptions. (If you happen to live in Arlington, MA, click here.)
  • an article from The Economist by Tim Hindle called “Planned Obsolesence” from March 23, 2009
  • the book Made to Break: technology and obsolescence in America by Giles Slade, which didn’t have the timeline I was thinking of, but it makes interesting reading. (It will probably make you angry.)
  • a very long piece from Adbusters by Micah White called “Consumer Society is Made to Break” from October 20, 2008, which includes a clip of (and link to) a short film called The Story of Stuff, and a reproduction of Bernard London’s 1932 pamphlet entitled “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence,” which contains the following rather incendiary proposal:

“I would have the Government assign a lease of life to shoes and homes and machines, to all products of manufacture, mining and agriculture, when they are first created, and they would be sold and used within the term of their existence definitely known by the consumer. After the allotted time had expired, these things would be legally “dead” and would be controlled by the duly appointed governmental agency and destroyed if there is widespread unemployment. New products would constantly be pouring forth from the factories and marketplaces, to take the place of the obsolete, and the wheels of industry would be kept going and employment regularized and assured for the masses.”

For those who are now fascinated and/or infuriated by the whole concept planned obsolescence thing: if you research further and find that chart, please let me know!

Copyright and Plagiarism

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Last month, I attended two webinars on copyright with Mary Minow of LibraryLaw.com. The first was Copyright Basics, and the second was called Hot Issues in Copyright; the webinars were presented by the Massachusetts Library System.

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Some of the material was familiar, of course, but some was new. Minow (coincidentally, the aunt of a close friend of mine) confirmed that all original creative content is automatically copyrighted to its creator. However, in order to gain the additional level of legal protection required to bring a lawsuit against someone who has infringed upon your copyright, it is necessary to get the official copyright from the government (there is an excellent Q&A page at copyright.gov).

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Some people infringe upon others’ copyrighted work because they think they can get away with it; others do it out of ignorance. Using a Creative Commons (CC) license is one way to raise awareness that you hold the copyright to your work, and that others must ask permission before using it. There are a variety of CC licenses, but, as it says on the site, “All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially. Every Creative Commons license also ensures licensors get the credit for their work they deserve.”

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Though I had included a note on the “About” page of this blog and my other blog (“Unless otherwise noted, all blog content © Jenny Arch”), I added Creative Commons licenses recently as well – partly thanks to Minow’s reminder, and partly because, coincidentally, some of my own work was plagiarized right around the same time.

The internet is vast; I never would have known about it had an alert former co-worker not e-mailed me to let me know. She sent me a link to a post entitled “Plagiarism Sucks: It’s More Than Just Drama” on the blog Sparkles and Lightning, which is written by Annabelle, a high school senior in California. Annabelle’s fellow blogger Jessi (of Auntie Spinelli Reads) compiled a list of plagiarized reviews and bloggers, which Annabelle included in her post; my former co-worker noticed that one of my Goodreads reviews (for Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eyre Ward) was on the list.

I can’t slap a Creative Commons license up on Goodreads, because they have their own Terms. The “User Content” section of these terms includes the statement, “You understand that publishing your User Content on the Service is not a substitute for registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office, the Writer’s Guild of America, or any other rights organization.” This means that content-producing Goodreads users retain their automatic copyright, but don’t have an official government copyright – the same as if that content was posted on a blog online.

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The “License Grant” section of the Goodreads terms reads, “By posting any User Content on the Service, you expressly grant, and you represent and warrant that you have a right to grant, to Goodreads a royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, list information regarding, edit, translate, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative works of all such User Content and your name, voice, and/or likeness as contained in your User Content, in whole or in part, and in any form, media or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing for any purpose at the sole discretion of Goodreads.”

The key words in the above paragraph are grant and license. By adding content to Goodreads, all users give Goodreads permission to “use, reproduce, modify, publish,” etc. that original content. I’m not a lawyer or an expert in copyright law, but it seems pretty clear from these terms that the user still retains the copyright to their original content, while giving Goodreads these permissions.

Neither Goodreads nor its users, however, give permission for user content to be copied by a third party and passed off as their own work – otherwise known as plagiarism.

Bookish Resolutions

Jenny8 Comments

My first successful New Year’s resolution that I made, kept, and remembered, was: read at least one nonfiction book a month. Then, as now, I was reading about 10-15 books a month, and they were nearly all fiction. I decided I needed to push myself to branch out and read in some other areas, like (auto)biography, history, and science. Thus did I discover such excellent books as The Ghost Map, The World Without Us, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, and The Wordy Shipmates, not to mention Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Keith Richards’ Life.

In the years between that resolution and this new year, I have accumulated a number of books that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading. Most are fiction, but some are nonfiction. Most I’ve bought used, some have been sent to me by thoughtful and generous friends. It used to be that if a book was in the house, I had read it or was in the process of reading it; now that’s not the case. (Partly because I work in a library; I’m surrounded all the time by free books that I can just borrow and give back, and which always seem to take precedence over the books that I own, which don’t have due dates.)

bookishresolutionI want to get through my shelves of unread books, either by reading them or by deciding that I don’t want to read them. After I’ve read them, I may keep them, may donate them, or may pass them on to friends, but there are too many unread books in the house.

So help me out: have you read any of the below? Loved them? Thought they were a waste of time? A few came with personal recommendations and are at the top of the list: Far From the Tree, God’s Hotel, Shantaram. If you’ve got opinions on those or any of the others, please share!

 

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More 2012 favorites

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Cross-posted as “Favorites of 2012” on the Robbins Library blog.

My colleague Linda posted her favorite reads of the year a few days ago, and we’ve definitely enjoyed some of the same ones: I too would highly recommend the fresh and funny Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, the wise, wonderful and heartbreaking The Fault in Our Stars, the paranoia-inducing Gone Girl, and the erudite essays in More Baths, Less Talking.

To these, I’ll add a few of my own, with links to reviews (below). These are books I’ve read in 2012, not necessarily books published in 2012, though many of them were.

Fiction

gold2 Gold by Chris Cleave

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

Cascade by Maryanne O’Hara (this is our Staff Picks book for February, and Maryanne herself will be joining us for the discussion!)

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

rulesofcivility Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (sequel to Wolf Hall; both books won the Booker Prize)

Arcadia by Lauren Groff


The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas)

Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner

Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

Fault in our Stars The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

Nonfiction

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson (a.k.a. The Bloggess)

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (I listened to the audiobook)

Agree? Disagree? What are some of your recent favorites? Leave a comment!

Favorite Books of 2012

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Today at work, I got an e-mail requesting staff send in their picks for favorite books of 2012. (Have I mentioned how much I like working in a library?) We were to submit no more than three each, which as every avid reader knows is a difficult-to-impossible task. However, it’s easier to think of it as “three of your favorite books” rather than “your three favorite books.”

With that caveat in mind, I headed over to my Goodreads page (I ❤ Goodreads) and sorted my shelf of books I had read by date read. Mentally, I filtered out books that were published before 2012; this meant I couldn’t include obvious shoo-in Rules of Civility by Amor Towles or The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, both published in 2011.

And yet: so many good books came out this year! The marvelous John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Maria Semple’s fresh and original Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, the much-feted sequel to Wolf Hall…and then there are the nonfiction books, such as Jenny Lawson’s laughter-and-tears-inducing memoir, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Ken Jennings’ clever Because I Said So: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids.

Yet in the end, here are the three I chose:

gold2GOLD by Chris Cleave
Set before and during the London Olympics, Gold is timely; yet it is timeless in the way that it represents people’s best and worst natures, particularly the struggle between career ambitions and family life. Kate and Zoe are close friends and rival cyclists, competing for one spot on the London Olympic team. Zoe is focused solely on training, while Kate has a family: her husband Jack, another Olympian, and their eight-year-old daughter Sophie, who is battling leukemia. Flashbacks to earlier periods in the characters’ lives reveal crucial backstory in this wrenching novel.

lightbetweenoceansTHE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS by M.L. Stedman
This is a beautiful book with strong characters and a thought-provoking central dilemma. Tom Sherbourne returns from fighting in the Great War and takes a job as a lighthouse keeper on a remote island of the coast of Australia; he and his wife, Isabel, are deeply in love, but Isabel is inconsolable over her inability to have a child. When a lifeboat washes up on their beach containing a dead man and a live baby, Isabel begs Tom to keep it. The Light Between Oceans is the extraordinary story of that decision, and of how to act in the present when the past cannot be changed.

cascadeCASCADE by Maryanne O’Hara
“Life is full of tough choices between less-than-perfect alternatives,” says one character in this Depression-era novel, and that about sums it up for twenty-six-year-old Desdemona Hart. Dez married Asa Spaulding to provide stability for her ailing father, who died a few months later. Asa doesn’t understand Dez’s reluctance to start a family, but traveling artist Jacob does: Dez wants to go to New York City to pursue her career in art. On top of this dilemma, the town of Cascade is itself at risk: men from Boston visit the town as a potential site for a new reservoir. Will Dez fight to save the town and her father’s famous playhouse, or will she flee to follow her dream? The historical setting is vivid, and Dez is a compelling character; the decision she must make is one that many people still face today.

Researching and Writing Historical Fiction

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Cross-posted as “Truth in Fiction” on the Robbins Library blog.

As November, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), was drawing to a close, I had the opportunity to attend a program that I had set up at the Robbins Library: authors Margot Livesey and Adam Braver came to have a conversation about researching and writing historical fiction. Margot is the author of, most recently, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a retelling of Jane Eyre; Adam’s newest novel is Misfit, about Marilyn Monroe.

Do you research first and write after, write and research at the same time, or write first and research after? “Research feeds imagination,” said Livesey. She does some preliminary research before writing, just enough for a chapter or a draft, then researches retrospectively as needed. Both authors agreed that they could get bogged down or sidetracked, and that research could be an excellent procrastination tool.

Braver said he will look up facts he needs as he writes, and “sometimes it leads to something [else],” but he also does a large amount of preliminary research, using newspapers and interviews. Both authors said they have worked and researched in public libraries, using newspapers, microfilm and microfiche, and of course books. At home, Livesey has two computers: one that “doesn’t know the Internet exists,” and another that is online. She writes on the offline computer, and only goes to the online one if she really needs to look something up.

How do you manage to spend so much time with your novels and not get sick of them; how do you manage to persevere? “Not getting sick of it is the challenge,” Braver responded. He said he usually goes through 15 – 20 revisions per book, and would often like to quit when it’s “good enough,” but “I’m restless until I feel like it’s right.”

How do you deal with conflicting versions of history? Braver answered that conflicting versions often become the story. Like historians, novelists are looking for the truth behind the facts; the facts may be irrefutable, but the order in which they are told is what makes a story.

How much is fact and how much is fiction? What liberties do you take when you write fiction set in the past? As a reader of fiction, Livesey said, “I count on fiction to tell me the truth…be faithful in certain ways.” One might, for example, add a burn unit to a hospital that didn’t have one, but not drop bombs on a city that wasn’t bombed. (Of course, authors can address what’s true and what’s invented in an Afterword.)

“I think readers mind very much about precision,” said Livesey, estimating that about 30% of the mail she receives from readers contains corrections to her work. However, “people are forgiving…unless it’s sloppy.”

What’s the difference between writing about a period some people remember, as opposed to writing about a time no one alive remembers? Braver said that certain periods in the past are viewed “in sepia tone,” and his goal is to “strip away the nostalgia,” and make the reader feel as though, by opening the novel, they are opening a door into the past.

Braver writes about well-known historical figures – President Lincoln, Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe – but focuses on the periphery, on moments that occurred out of the public spotlight. Livesey’s characters, by contrast, are “modest,” and invented. “Small details of ordinary life,” she said, can be more important than big events.

Librarian by Name

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This past summer, Amy Frazier wrote a post on the Hack Library School blog called “Librarian by Name, Geek by Nature.” The post itself deals with the idea of what is taught/learned in Library and Information Science (LIS) programs (a.k.a. library school), and what isn’t. Her article focused on what isn’t taught – what we don’t learn, and what we wish we did.

I rarely read the comments on any blog post or article, but the comments on this one are well worth reading; it’s a real conversation. People weigh in about the importance (or not) of coding skills and other IT skills; other “wishlist” items include more courses on project management, teaching, and customer service.

The desire to learn, not just in school but throughout life, is somewhat characteristic of librarians. One theme that is repeated throughout the comments is that library students and librarians would like to learn more technical skills and coding languages, but the course offerings in most programs are insufficient.

Like many of the participants in the discussion, I went to Simmons, where the only required technology course was Technology for Information Professionals. I lucked out (i.e., fought my way in) and took this class with Michael Leach, who gave us both a conceptual background and some hard skills. Linda Braun’s Web Development and Information Architecture course, though, was the one that made me excited about technology and coding and gave me confidence in the skills I had learned in her class, and in my ability to learn more.

However, I spend a lot of time with software developers – full-time coders  – and the odd technology librarian, and my knowledge of HTML/CSS/PHP pales to nothing next to theirs. (They write in a variety of languages including PHP, JavaScript, C++, Python, Ruby on Rails, and others.) As Andromeda Yelton wrote, “We can always find people who make us feel inadequate as coders. Sometimes it’s genuinely because they’ve forgotten more code than we’re ever likely to know, but most of the time? They know things we don’t because code is big. No one knows all of it.”

Not every librarian needs to be a coding expert, but if the discussion over on Hack Library School is any indication, most want to learn more – or at least have enough of an understanding to communicate with those who do it full-time. At the very least, librarians should be a few steps ahead of patrons in terms of tech-savviness.

 

NELA, Part III

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Here’s my final post about NELA ’12. (Read about Sunday afternoon’s sessions here, and Monday morning’s events here.) The following two sessions were on Monday afternoon:

Library Renewal, Ryan Livergood

Neither publishers nor libraries are happy with the current model(s) of access to digital content (e-books and digital audiobooks) through libraries: not all publishers will sell or license e-content to libraries, and librarians aren’t pleased with the cost, availability, or difficulty. Library Renewal proposes a new model: “fairly priced equitable access to e-content.” To this end, Library Renewal is building the non-profit infrastructure that will allow rights-holders to sell directly to libraries, have transparent pricing, and be easy for patrons to use.

Some have predicted that in ten years, libraries will circulate more digital content than physical content. If one accepts that (a) technology makes libraries more relevant and useful, and (b) communities need libraries to thrive, this new infrastructure begins to look absolutely essential. Furthermore, it streamlines the process: instead of Publishers –> Vendor (e.g. Amazon, OverDrive) –> Libraries –> Vendor –> Patrons, it looks more like Publishers –> Libraries –> Patrons.

Now if only Library Renewal had the same kind of funding as the DPLA.

Reshaping Reference, Julie Kinchla and Patty DiTullio

Julie Kinchla, Head of Information Services at the Winchester Public Library, spoke about opportunities to create change, and types of changes to consider. Opportunities include major and minor renovations, strategic planning, technology upgrades, new staff hires, and analyzing usage statistics. Types of changes include weeding, downsizing the reference desk, redesigning the reference stacks, and offering different types of reference services, such as tiered, roving, or book-a-librarian. New technology (think iPad) makes roving reference a good choice for helping patrons at their point of need, a smaller desk is more approachable, and generic business cards make it easier for patrons to contact reference librarians.

Patty DiTullio, Director of the Amesbury Public Library, spoke about the importance of having a mission and vision for the library. Working in an old building, a small space with significant constraints, DiTullio described implementing a new model – making changes to the circulation and reference desks – as “adventures in change management.” She said that retraining staff was a circular process, not a linear one.

Staff buy-in is important to any change, as is clarification of division of labor (e.g. when does a circ question become a reference question?). Patrons, too, need to be “retrained”; a great sign for the reference desk is “You’re not interrupting our work, you ARE our work.” (A similar sign says simply, “Interrupt me!”)

Even if a brand-new building, major or minor renovation isn’t in the cards, we can all use DiTullio’s formula: (small actions) x (lots of people) = big change

See also: the Swiss Army Librarian’s NELA conference wrap-up.

NELA, Part II

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Read NELA Part I here (or scroll down to previous post). Here are my summaries of the first two sessions on Monday; the last two will make up the final NELA post.

Connecting through Social Media panel

Ryan Livergood, Library Director of the Arlington (MA) libraries, led off with some guidelines for libraries using social media. He reminded the audience that social media was more than just advertising and shouldn’t be just one-way, but should be an interactive dialogue that engages the community. When trying to decide which platform(s) to use, he said, “Go where your users are.”

Next, Michael Wick of the Peabody (MA) Institute Library talked about what works in social media: conversations, informing your community, finding a niche, and instruction. (Wick is the local hero who created the how-to videos for downloading e-books from the Wellesley Free Library and throughout the Minuteman network.)

Finally, Ona Ridenour and Allison Babin from the Beverly Public Library talked about how they use Pinterest. They have created many beautiful and useful boards with visually curated content, and in many cases (such as book lists), links to click through to the library catalog. After their presentation, I was much more open to Pinterest than I had been.

The need for a social media policy arose during the Q&A session. Not all libraries have one, though most follow a few rules of thumb: be respectful, create/reuse appropriate content, think twice before posting anything, and follow/friend only other organizations, not people.

The Trouble With E-Books, Scott Kehoe and Danny Pucci

Massachusetts Library System consultant Scott Kehoe outlined the history of the relationship between publishers and librarians, focusing on recent thorny issues surrounding e-books, such as digital rights management (DRM), proprietary hardware and software, and the erosion of the First Sale Doctrine. It’s clear that another solution is necessary; for out-of-copyright works, that solution is already in the works, in the form of the Internet Archive and Open Library.

Digital Projects Librarian Danny Pucci of the Boston Public Library also spoke about e-books (she described OverDrive as the BPL’s “28th branch,” and said it had the second-highest circulation after the main branch, Copley) and digitization. The BPL works with the Internet Archive to digitize library materials and make them available to a wider audience online; visual collections are available on Flickr.