Month: June 2005

Well, if you’ve ever given it any thought and you’re going to ALA, here’s your chance. Not quite ready to commit to your own blog? The Free Range Librarian details how you can blog (and party) with LITA, no experience required. Over at the Unofficial ALA Wiki, Luke of lbr blog has started a central directory for reports on various events at ALA and invites any and all to contribute. Even if you’re not going to the conference, the reports will be an excellent place to get a sense of what’s going on. (And heck, even if you are going, it’ll be a great way to see what happened at all the panels you couldn’t go to because they conflicted with the ones you did attend).

Not going to the conference? Still want to get in on the action? Well, I still have one free pass to the exhibits to give away, and if you come to the Counterpoise booth (#2745) on Monday, June 27, from 2-4 pm, you can attend the Radical Reference Skills Share, where you’ll learn how to decipher cop-speak, how to file a FOIA, and how to be a blogger, too, among other things.

I just took the radical information-gathering step of calling the GSLIS office directly to see if I could learn anything more about registration for fall courses. Here’s what I learned:

• the fall scehdule of courses will be available sometime in the beginning of July
• registration starts, like, the 3rd or 4th week of July
• none of this is set in stone

If I get any more information on the topic, you’ll be, like, the first to know.

When I was little and went to other people’s houses, I often wandered around, poking my head into whatever nooks and crannies I could find, wondering where these people kept their books. I often feel the same way in library school. I don’t have a place that I keep the books on this blog yet, but I thought I’d start with this meme.

Total number of books I’ve owned: Ever? It would be hard to say. I have perhaps 100 of my books with me, and another 8 or 10 boxes of books in storage. I grew up in a house with over 2000 books–that’s after we gave away 108 boxes when I was eight. (My parents both had PhDs, and my father had inherited the library of a friend, also a Classics professor, also from (sort of) Enosburg Falls, Vermont. I grew up with the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and LC classification (my mother still has the card catalog somewhere, I think), except for the period when my father decided to rearrange the books by date of author’s birth. Susan Sontag, I have read, arranged her books this way, although she additionally divided them by country, which seems like a good system to me.) My grandmother, with whom I live now, has perhaps 1000, which are divided by genre and are sort of alphabetical. I was, perhaps, fated to become a librarian.

Last book I bought: Classic Rough News, a book of poems by Kenneth Fields, purchased as a present for a friend. I have a great many opinions about and complicated systems and rules for buying books, but that’s another topic for another time. (If you are buying books online, though, may I recommend Powell’s, your friendly union bookstore?)

Last book I read: Swollen, by Melissa Lion.

Last book I finished: Same as above. . . like Jessamyn (from whom I got this meme), I don’t read many books I don’t finish. At any rate, I have plans to finish them someday, really I do.

Five books that mean a lot to me: A somewhat representative collection.
The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley.
A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell. To my taste, one of the two greatest prose writers in English in the 20th century.
On Stories, by C.S. Lewis. The other one.
Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. Why I love Utah, and many other things.
Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. I was sick a lot as a kid, and this was the book my mother always brought with us to the doctor’s office. Once she forgot it, so we sat there and recited the whole thing from memory.

Five (more or less) people I’d like to see do this as well: Anybody reading this, plus my blogging friends: Sara, Felicia, Caitrin, Meg

Aaron Schmidt, Dominican graduate, author of walking paper and librarian at the Thomas Ford Library in Western Springs (they’ve got wi-fi and green lamps and a job opening for a magazine reference person (so head over there and apply!) has an excellent post about being user-centered instead of library-centered. If you’ve taken Reference, you’ve probably noticed that when people talk about doing reference work, they spend a little time on the importance of serving patrons and following RUSA guidelines, but then they spend a lot of time talking about annoying patrons.

If you are excited about the idea of doing reference work, if you believe that everyone has the same right to your assistance, regardless of how strange or kooky or misguided they* seem, if you think that we ought to be looking for ways to make the library more useful to patrons instead of making patrons more accomodating to us, Aaron’s post is encouraging. And if you want to see someone providing that kind of reference service on a daily basis, with compassion, intelligence, and humility, I urge you to become a disciple of the Feel-good Librarian.

*I have decided, at long last, to favor gender neutrality over grammatical accuracy.

Two reasons to be glad you don’t live in Oklahoma–although in all fairness, I have a friend who lives there, and the second link shows there at least a few signs of hope. Anyway, I mention this not only to keep you up-to-date on the Dustbowl but also to point out that American Libraries, the in-house organ of the ALA, now has an RSS feed.

Elsewhere in the world of book-burning, a conservative rag has polled a group of “scholars and public policy leaders” on the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries, which I present without further comment. [via Information Wants To Be Free]

Closer to the home front, Dominican is having an event at ALA, although apparently its only for alums. All of us, however, are welcome at the GSLIS Book Group discussion on Tuesday. I have never actually managed to make it to one of these, and I can’t go to this one either, but if anyone does go or has been in the past, drop me a line or post a comment here (to do that, click on the link below that says “0 Comments,” which will take you to a form that will allow you to up that sad number) if you think it’s at all good.

And out in digital library land, Siva Vaidhaynathan (of The Anarchist in the Library fame) is collecting opinions on Google’s various book and library enterprises. Head on over if you want to comment. (I’ve linked to Alane’s note on this at It’s all good; she’ll send you over to sivacracy.net, where you can also read a long excerpt of Michael Gorman’s latest tirade [reported on here by the Free Range Librarian].