Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) is one of the top ten library science schools in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. Simmons GSLIS is the only top ten-ranked LIS program in New England.
Category: Library world
Speaking Volumes: Rare Books at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Earlier this week I went to an interesting talk at Simmons: Dr. Anne-Marie Eze, the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, spoke about Isabella Stewart Gardner as a rare book collector and about the upcoming exhibit “Illuminating the Serenissima: Books of the Republic of Venice” (May 3-June 19, 2011).
Though Isabella Stewart Gardner is most well known for collecting art, she began collecting books first; however, no one has looked at the rare book collection as a whole or considered Gardner as a collector/bibliophile till now. Dr. Eze is doing this, and cataloging the 5,000 books, which date from the 14th century through the 20th and include illuminated manuscripts, children’s books, incunabula, and inscribed “association” copies from authors with whom Gardner was friends – Henry James, for example.
In her talk, Eze noted – and seemed disappointed – that Gardner did not write in her books. Here seems to be the difference between a librarian/historian type and a rare book collector: the latter would want the book to be free of underlining and marginalia (unless it was the author’s or another famous person’s own notes, which could increase its value), but Eze would have been pleased to discover some, as a clue to Gardner’s life. I was reminded of a line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s from “Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter,” translated by Franz Wright:
So many things lie torn open
by rash hands that arrived too late,
in search of you: they wanted to know.
And sometimes in an old book
an incomprehensible passage is underlined.
You were there, once. What has become of you?
ALA Annual Conference – Update
I recently received word from the Student-to-Staff program that I will be working with ALA’s Public Information Office (PIO) at the ALA Annual Conference. Someone from the office has already contacted me, and I’m really looking forward to working with them at the conference.
The PIO page on the ALA website offers a PDF download of “quotable library facts,” some of which I thought I’d share here. Spread the word!
- 62% of adults in the U.S. have public library cards (2010 survey)
- There are more public libraries than McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. – a total of 16,604, including branches.
- Americans check out an average of more than seven books a year. They spend $34.95 a year for the public library – about the average cost of one hardcover book.
- More than 65% of public libraries provide services for job seekers.
Simmons GSLIS in the News
Faculty and students from Simmons’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) were featured in this Boston Globe article, “Checking out the future,” by Sam Allis. Here’s an excerpt:
“Tomorrow’s librarians face a two-year graduate school curriculum freighted with technology courses that didn’t exist 10 years ago, courses that will likely be replaced by others within a year or two. The future of libraries is a constantly evolving digital landscape, and technical literacy, as it is in so many other fields, is absolutely essential to find a job in a brutal job market…
…While the core mission of librarians hasn’t changed — they are still committed to provide information to patrons who need it, wherever they are — most everything else has.”
This is more or less what I say when confronted with the “libraries are dying” sentiment. They aren’t dying; the core mission, to provide equal access to information, still remains and is just as relevant as ever. Not all of that information is contained solely in books anymore, however; we have to keep pace with technology and use it to our advantage. Libraries are not dying – they are evolving.
National Library Week
It is officially National Library Week! This year it’s April 10-16, so please find some way to support and/or advocate for your public library this week. I wrote to three government officials via the Massachusetts Library Association site, and have already received two replies: one a formality from one of the Governor’s aides, but another really nice e-mail (personal enough to tell my own letter had been read) from State Senator Patricia Jehlen, agreeing about the importance of libraries in our communities.
It’s easy to think of government as impersonal, removed, and impossibly bureaucratic (and, at present, rather gridlocked). That makes it all the more gratifying to be reminded that the government is made up of people, and those people are there for our benefit. So write to your legislators today, and remember to say thank you!
Welcome New Students!
Today is Advising Day at GSLIS, and about 25 of the 70 or so students who will be starting here in the summer semester (like I did last year) were on campus today for orientation activities and registration. I went to the lunch for the new students to talk to them about ALASC (American Library Association Student Chapter) and answer any other questions they had about classes, the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area, and other library- (or not) related topics.
It has been almost a year since I started this program, and I have learned so much about the library world in general, as well as acquiring specific skill sets: cataloging, web development and design, best practices in public libraries and collection development. To paraphrase Julia Child’s sentiments about cooking, the more you learn, the more there is to know!
Library Snapshot Day
This afternoon I listened to a free ALA webinar about Library Snapshot Day. Before viewing/listening to the webinar, I was familiar with Library Snapshot Day only through the implementation of it planned for April 13 by the ALA Student Chapter (ALASC) at Simmons: the ALASC is asking library students to take photos of the libraries in which they work and volunteer. This is a great event on a local scale, but Library Snapshot Day is a scalable event – the webinar outlined statewide events in New Jersey, Maine, and Kansas.
One of the main ideas behind Library Snapshot Day is to use the statistics that librarians are so fond of collecting (or which they are mandated by state and federal governments to collect) for advocacy purposes. These stats can be helpful in getting legislators on the side of libraries, and they can also have a positive effect on library patrons. As Rob Banks of the Topeka and Shawnee Public Library said, “My personal belief is, a lot of the people who use libraries are also voters.”
As far as printed materials, the really effective format seemed to be a photo of people in a library, paired with a quote from a library patron, accompanied by a powerful statistic, such as the number of people who use the library each day (or year), the number of materials (books, movies, music) loaned out, or the number of people who use computers at the library or receive job search help from library staff. (A great source for library statistics in Massachusetts is the Mass. Board of Library Commissioners site.)
Happy Library Advocating!
The Morgan Library
It is a tad bit embarrassing for me that I lived in New York for almost three years and never went to the Morgan Library. I remedied that this past weekend, and it was absolutely wonderful – I highly, highly recommend it to all book people.
It is a good size for a library-museum; you can see pretty much everything in under two hours without rushing. (Everything on display, anyway; there are treasure troves in underground vaults.) One room had a small Shakespeare exhibit, with early portraits of Shakespeare and a First Folio(!). The Diary exhibit upstairs was also wonderful; it featured quite a range of famous literary people, and showcased their tiny handwriting, inscrutable shorthand, and beautiful sketches.
Most of all, though, the library itself was stunning. On display was one of three(!) of the Gutenberg Bibles in the collection; music manuscripts from Mozart and other composers; beautiful illuminated manuscripts with jeweled covers; and early editions of every major work of fiction you could think of: Chaucer, Dickens, the Brontes, Shakespeare, Jonson. These were locked away, not on display, but the spines are visible behind glass.
As far as I know, Morgan did not spread the literary wealth the way that Carnegie did, but if you do have a chance to visit the Morgan Library, go!
Version Control Saves Lives!
March has been a workshop-rich month: today I attended “Git for Fun & Profit, or How Git May Save Your Life,” presented by Mark Tomko in the GSLIS Tech Lab. He designed this workshop recently with the Digital Libraries class in mind, and it was a great overall as well as practical intro.
In plain English, version control systems (VCS) allow users to keep track of changes to a set of files and directories. For example, if you’re working on a website and you break something but can’t figure out what, you can always revert to a working version and start over from there. VCS also allows multiple users to read and modify the same files simultaneously. Git is available to download for free, and there are lots of web resources for users.
Drupal and UX
The GSLIS Tech Lab offered a follow-up to last week’s CMS workshop in the form of a hands-on Drupal workshop. Unfortunately, due to a technical glitch we weren’t able to do an installation (though we were promised a video tutorial in its place), but we did create sites using Drupal Gardens and learn the basics. It seems a lot less confining than WordPress, and correspondingly a little more complicated, but Drupal 7 is leaps and bounds better in this respect than previous versions, I hear. I look forward to playing with it some more.
This evening was another ALA Brown Bag lunch (offered both during lunchtime and in the evening now, so more people can attend). This time we had a guest speaker, GSLIS alum (’05) Khalilah Gambrell, who is currently a User Experience Senior Requirements Analyst at EBSCO Publishing. Having a guest speaker there focused the discussion a bit more and gave current students a chance to ask questions of a recent grad with experience in the field. A few resources that Khalilah recommended on the topic of user experience (UX) were the book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and the sites Mashable, Read, Write, Web, and Boxes and Arrows.
Jenny Arch 