Today's post will be relatively short, because we're combining the review, the main body of the post, and the question of the week into a single monstrous Frankensteinian hybrid post this week!
Before we begin: This blog will be undergoing a few changes over the next few weeks, so keep a close eye on library.gallaudet.edu for any updates that will clear things up. I can't say much more about it right now, but when you hit a weird post, that's why.
Today, it's all about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
It was selected as the Common Reading for campus this year, so I read the book a couple of months ago. It sticks out in my mind mostly because of the story, which is fairly unbelievable.
For the past sixty years or so, there's been a single cell culture underpinning virtually every major advance in medical technology, from the improvement of lab equipment to the polio vaccine. This cell culture is known as HeLa, and it is immortal. Given enough nutrients, it will double its population of cells every 24 hours, forever.
Or at least it has for the past sixty years, with no signs of stopping any time soon. It's been estimated that close to 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have grown over the past six decades, enough for 100 Empire State Buildings. This cell line is descended from a single sample of cervical cancer cells taken from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins University in 1951.
Unfortunately, almost nobody knew her name. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody knew she had a family, complete with a set of five children, some with hearing losses or outright deafness. The doctor who originally sampled her cells discovered their unique properties not long after she died, and gave them away. Some people took those cells, used them to learn how to mass-manufacture cell cultures, and sold more of those cells and made millions. Industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to cosmetic surgery grew from those cells, and they made first millions, then billions, for the people who started out by using those cells. Jonas Salk grew the polio vaccine in his own copies of those cells and saved millions of lives because of Henrietta Lacks, but nobody knew her name, and her family saw none of this money.
Her family didn't even know what their mother -- though long-dead -- was doing to the world until 20 years after she'd been buried, and even then, the truth only came out because they were unknowingly being used for medical research, a common theme in African-American history during the 20th Century.
Skloot weaves together a few strands in her exploration of the story of Henrietta Lacks, propelled in some ways by Henrietta's daughter, Deborah. She digs deep into the history of Henrietta's family, both ancestors and descendants; follows the path of the cells from Henrietta's womb to its first laboratory to its distribution around the country to the world we live in today; traces, in some ways, the history of the African-American community in the early part of the 20th Century; and explores many questions of medical ethics.
For example, Henrietta's cells were taken from her without her permission. They were distributed, used, manufactured, and sold without her family's knowledge or consent. Her name -- and thereby that of her family -- was revealed, again without any agreement on their part. Her descendants were sampled and experimented upon while being told a different story. The list of sins is lengthy.
In the face of all this, the reader has to ask the question: is all of this morally-questionable behavior justifiable in the light of all the good things that have resulted from Henrietta and her cells? As we move deeper into the 21st Century, the question of privacy becomes important, not just electronic but genetic. For example, if your appendix goes bad and you have it taken out, what happens to the appendix? Does it get thrown out, or is it kept because it's useful biological material? Is your name attached to it? Does that mean the DNA in your former appendix can be analyzed, your entire genome decoded, laid bare, and stored in a database so that complete strangers can know everything about you and your body?
The list of ethics questions that arise after you read this book is also lengthy, and it's chilling. Do you have the right to your own body parts after they've been detached from you?
In general, the book addresses a huge variety of issues, from race to God and back again. This is why the book was selected as the Common Reading; that Henrietta's descendants are also deaf brings a new dimension to our discussion and makes the book especially relevant for us here at Gallaudet University.
As the Common Reading this year, all First Year Experience students will be reading it, but several other departments are leaping into the fray as well, because The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks transgresses a large number of disciplinary boundaries in its quest for the truth. Because of the involvement of so many departments, it'll be a big fall semester!
A number of events are being planned, both for the Gallaudet campus community and for the outside community as well. I'll keep you posted on those as the schedules appear, but I hear there are fascinating activities on the docket, so keep an eye out. The Library will also make a LibGuide available about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the various topics it touches upon; when it's completed, I'll let you all know!
Also, please bear in mind that this book is popular; the Library has two copies right now -- which is unusual for a non-deaf-related book -- and they've quite literally been checked out nonstop since the spring. Hopefully, we'll be able to catch one of our copies as it comes back in and place it on reserve so it's available for everyone to look at. If you're not familiar with where to find the reserve materials, ask at the Service Desk -- they're on the shelves behind it! Just remember: an item on reserve can only be checked out for 2 hours at a time, maximum, although it can be renewed if nobody else is asking for it. You also must stay in the Library while using it; we can't allow it to leave the building. This is how we guarantee it's available for everyone.
Truthfully, I'm excited; it's been a while since a book that wasn't Twilight was this popular, and this fall sounds awesome. I'm teaching an FYE class, and am looking forward to exploring all of its implications with my students and with other courses.
In the meantime, come back next week for another round of posts about what students and faculty -- both new and returning -- need to know!
Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
New site and Jane Rutherford's retirement
Thursday post! Yay, jury duty.
Well, I made it back from vacation, and the building's still standing, the collection hasn't been pillaged, and the campus is still here! That's a good thing.
First, one (relatively) minor announcement: With the exception of a page or two, the redesign of library.gallaudet.edu has been completed! I'm feeling pretty good about it at the moment, but -- and this is a big but -- please do feel free to contact me with any feedback, whether through the comments here (which will be moderated, so watch your language if the new design really ticks you off) or through e-mail at james.mccarthy@gallaudet.edu or library.help@gallaudet.edu. The whole idea here is to make things a little more compact and easier to navigate, so it's really important that I hear from anyone who uses the site.
Now, for the books. I read a lot while I was gone, but you're only getting two books out of me -- one for each week. I need to have some stocked up, after all.
First, I read The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. Hmm. I sort of have mixed feelings about this one. A friend recommended it and I was curious about the story, which involves a young woman who's born illegitimately to a Turkish woman in Istanbul in the 1980s. It sounds fairly simple, but there's a lot wrapped up in it. When it was published, for instance, it led to a pretty serious controversy in Turkey because the author -- who is herself a Turk -- makes the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th Century a significant factor in the plot. At its heart, it's a family story, revolving around two siblings, a brother and sister, and the children they raise in the U.S. and in Turkey, respectively, who meet for the first time in their twenties in Istanbul. It's a story of reconciliation -- the American cousin is half-Armenian -- and of closure, when a big family secret is discovered and resolved in fairly short order.
I have mixed feelings about it mostly because it wasn't really my kind of book. I really enjoyed the fantastically engrossing depictions of life in Turkey, especially when contrasted with life in America, but the plot itself, especially the big secret around which it revolves, left me a little cold. That's not to say it's not a good book -- it is, very well-written and enjoyable -- but it's just not my type.
Why write about it in this blog, then? Because I think of my weekly book reviews as just those: reviews. They aren't necessarily intended to be taken as recommendations; they're just a quick peek into what's available through the Gallaudet University Library. If I'm effusive in my praise, though, that's probably a good sign that you should consider picking it up!
The second book I read was The Infinities by John Banville. The story centers on Adam Godley, a brilliant astrophysicist who's discovered a set of equations that have completely changed science and the world's understanding of time. He's dying. His family has installed him in an upper room of the homestead and called everyone back to wait for the end with him. His son, also named Adam, is visiting with his beautiful-but-hollow actress wife Helen, and Petra, sister to the younger Adam and daughter to the elder, who suffers from a severe -- but unnamed -- psychological disorder. Petra in turn brings in Roddy, a young man who claims to be interested in her, but is actually after her father, trying to write his biography. They all stay in the house along with Ursula, the elder Adam's wife, who drinks her way through her grief.
Overseeing all of this -- and this is what makes this novel so much more interesting -- are the Greek gods. The book is narrated by Hermes, the messenger, as he watches over the family and muses about their various idiosyncrasies, while being dragooned into helping his father, Zeus, get into bed with Helen, with whom he has fallen in love. There's even one fascinating episode early in the book when Zeus visits Helen and orders Hermes to hold back the dawn for an hour, which he does, of course, choking roosters and smashing the goddess of the dawn in the face.
Hermes's perspective adds a lot of humor and wry irony to the proceedings, especially when another god shows up in mortal form: Pan, the god of the woods, wildness, and alcohol. Together, the three gods create plenty of mischief over the course of the last day of Adam Godley's life.
In general, it's beautifully-written and very absorbing.
Now, on with the show. Jane Rutherford, one of our Instruction & Reference Librarians, is retiring at the end of August. I feel like I should put a little sad-face emoticon right about here: :( We're all very curious about what she plans to do and what's going through her head at this point, so I talked with her a little bit about her new adventure.
1) Every time I ask someone who's retiring what they plan to do with their time, they tend to say things like, "Well, I'm going to get up at the same time every day and make my coffee just like I always do, except instead of going off to work, I'm going off to get the newspaper, and then I'm going to sit on the back porch. That's my retirement." But you're Jane! I bet you've got a plan. Is that so? Do you mind sharing what it is?
Well, my plan isn't set yet. I've been too busy working to think about it much. BUT ... a big part of my plan is to not have a big plan for a while. I'm going to give myself 4-6 months to do just what I want, when I want. I also want to get my house in order, literally (cleaning, painting, organizing). During that time, I want to research some of the things I am interested in doing, such as volunteering, traveling, etc. I'm actually afraid I may over-commit myself so when I DO have a plan, it will have to include some downtime to really relax.
2) Will you be sticking around the Washington area, or do you plan to move somewhere exotic, like Raleigh or Macon?
Or Wisconsin? Actually, I plan to stay exactly where I am. I live in Alexandria, just south of Old Town. I have a nice condo that is very accessible, both in location and in the amenities it has for people with limited mobility (which I don't need ... yet) and quite beautiful. Plus, I just don't want to move ever again! I hate moving (well, really I hate packing).
3) Lots of retirees have told me that when they left their jobs, they had one big, outlandish thing in mind that they'd always wanted to do, but never had the time for, totally separate from their general post-retirement plans. I've heard all sorts of things -- skydiving, shark-baiting, building their own house by hand, arranging their bookcases by color, going on a European tour -- so I'm curious: Do you have something like that on your to-do list?
I don't think all of these are "big" or "outlandish," and I don't have just one, but here are a few things I am considering and will research in the next few months:
4) Now we're going to shift to more Library-like things. You've been pretty busy this summer, getting a lot of things out of the way before you take off. Would you share some details about what you've been doing?
Well, one thing I just started recently was taking personal things home. My goodness, one accumulates a lot of stuff after 29+ years! I'm also getting things together to pass on to my library colleagues -- you know, work stuff.
I've been the library selector for education for many years now and I decided I wanted to clean out those books. I've withdrawn a very large number of books, a decent amount of which were well over 30 years old. That means that those left will be more useful, if only because they will be easier to find on the tidy shelves!
Finally (or maybe not if someone comes up with other projects), I've done a thorough inventory of the general periodical (journals, magazines, and newspapers) collection. With the expansion and popularity of electronic periodical access, the librarians have been steadily increasing our holdings of those products for quite a few years now. That means some of the paper and microfilm products have to go so we can reallocate more of our money to electronic. I've determined exactly what we have on the shelves (titles and years/volumes), collected data about those titles (how much they are used, if they are available electronically, past decisions made, which librarian should monitor them, etc.), and put all this in a spreadsheet so it will be easier to make decisions about periodicals in the future.
5) You've had a long, rich career at Gallaudet, spanning almost thirty years. Looking back, what's the one thing that sticks out in your mind the most?
Change.
6) What's something you might miss the most about working at the Gallaudet University Library?
There are a couple of things. First, the interaction with people, students and staff both. I tend to be an introvert, but when I start working with students, individually or in a classroom, my energy soars. Next, I will miss learning things. That is the best thing about being a librarian. New topics come up all the time, and I get to research them and learn things I would never have thought about. It's not that I won't learn new things, but it won't be as serendipitous as it is here at work.
7) And finally, you knew this question was inevitable: What brand of sensible shoes do you recommend?
I believe we all need to be stylish, so I vote for Jimmy Choo! Just kidding ... those might kill or maim me. Really though, I've yet to find shoes that are always sensible (for me that means comfortable), but as my body approaches middle- to late-middle age (this is not a typo), flats are always better and thick soles help cushion these bony feet! Not Birkenstocks!
All joking aside, we're all sad to see Jane go. She's done a lot for the Library and for Gallaudet in general, and it'll be very tough to replace her. By the same token, though, she's certainly earned her time off!
If you've worked with Jane before, please feel free to stop by the Library any time over the next month or so to wish her well!
No question of the week this week; I think this post is quite long enough -- don't you?
Well, I made it back from vacation, and the building's still standing, the collection hasn't been pillaged, and the campus is still here! That's a good thing.
First, one (relatively) minor announcement: With the exception of a page or two, the redesign of library.gallaudet.edu has been completed! I'm feeling pretty good about it at the moment, but -- and this is a big but -- please do feel free to contact me with any feedback, whether through the comments here (which will be moderated, so watch your language if the new design really ticks you off) or through e-mail at james.mccarthy@gallaudet.edu or library.help@gallaudet.edu. The whole idea here is to make things a little more compact and easier to navigate, so it's really important that I hear from anyone who uses the site.
Now, for the books. I read a lot while I was gone, but you're only getting two books out of me -- one for each week. I need to have some stocked up, after all.
First, I read The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. Hmm. I sort of have mixed feelings about this one. A friend recommended it and I was curious about the story, which involves a young woman who's born illegitimately to a Turkish woman in Istanbul in the 1980s. It sounds fairly simple, but there's a lot wrapped up in it. When it was published, for instance, it led to a pretty serious controversy in Turkey because the author -- who is herself a Turk -- makes the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th Century a significant factor in the plot. At its heart, it's a family story, revolving around two siblings, a brother and sister, and the children they raise in the U.S. and in Turkey, respectively, who meet for the first time in their twenties in Istanbul. It's a story of reconciliation -- the American cousin is half-Armenian -- and of closure, when a big family secret is discovered and resolved in fairly short order.
I have mixed feelings about it mostly because it wasn't really my kind of book. I really enjoyed the fantastically engrossing depictions of life in Turkey, especially when contrasted with life in America, but the plot itself, especially the big secret around which it revolves, left me a little cold. That's not to say it's not a good book -- it is, very well-written and enjoyable -- but it's just not my type.
Why write about it in this blog, then? Because I think of my weekly book reviews as just those: reviews. They aren't necessarily intended to be taken as recommendations; they're just a quick peek into what's available through the Gallaudet University Library. If I'm effusive in my praise, though, that's probably a good sign that you should consider picking it up!
The second book I read was The Infinities by John Banville. The story centers on Adam Godley, a brilliant astrophysicist who's discovered a set of equations that have completely changed science and the world's understanding of time. He's dying. His family has installed him in an upper room of the homestead and called everyone back to wait for the end with him. His son, also named Adam, is visiting with his beautiful-but-hollow actress wife Helen, and Petra, sister to the younger Adam and daughter to the elder, who suffers from a severe -- but unnamed -- psychological disorder. Petra in turn brings in Roddy, a young man who claims to be interested in her, but is actually after her father, trying to write his biography. They all stay in the house along with Ursula, the elder Adam's wife, who drinks her way through her grief.
Overseeing all of this -- and this is what makes this novel so much more interesting -- are the Greek gods. The book is narrated by Hermes, the messenger, as he watches over the family and muses about their various idiosyncrasies, while being dragooned into helping his father, Zeus, get into bed with Helen, with whom he has fallen in love. There's even one fascinating episode early in the book when Zeus visits Helen and orders Hermes to hold back the dawn for an hour, which he does, of course, choking roosters and smashing the goddess of the dawn in the face.
Hermes's perspective adds a lot of humor and wry irony to the proceedings, especially when another god shows up in mortal form: Pan, the god of the woods, wildness, and alcohol. Together, the three gods create plenty of mischief over the course of the last day of Adam Godley's life.
In general, it's beautifully-written and very absorbing.
Now, on with the show. Jane Rutherford, one of our Instruction & Reference Librarians, is retiring at the end of August. I feel like I should put a little sad-face emoticon right about here: :( We're all very curious about what she plans to do and what's going through her head at this point, so I talked with her a little bit about her new adventure.
1) Every time I ask someone who's retiring what they plan to do with their time, they tend to say things like, "Well, I'm going to get up at the same time every day and make my coffee just like I always do, except instead of going off to work, I'm going off to get the newspaper, and then I'm going to sit on the back porch. That's my retirement." But you're Jane! I bet you've got a plan. Is that so? Do you mind sharing what it is?
Well, my plan isn't set yet. I've been too busy working to think about it much. BUT ... a big part of my plan is to not have a big plan for a while. I'm going to give myself 4-6 months to do just what I want, when I want. I also want to get my house in order, literally (cleaning, painting, organizing). During that time, I want to research some of the things I am interested in doing, such as volunteering, traveling, etc. I'm actually afraid I may over-commit myself so when I DO have a plan, it will have to include some downtime to really relax.
2) Will you be sticking around the Washington area, or do you plan to move somewhere exotic, like Raleigh or Macon?
Or Wisconsin? Actually, I plan to stay exactly where I am. I live in Alexandria, just south of Old Town. I have a nice condo that is very accessible, both in location and in the amenities it has for people with limited mobility (which I don't need ... yet) and quite beautiful. Plus, I just don't want to move ever again! I hate moving (well, really I hate packing).
3) Lots of retirees have told me that when they left their jobs, they had one big, outlandish thing in mind that they'd always wanted to do, but never had the time for, totally separate from their general post-retirement plans. I've heard all sorts of things -- skydiving, shark-baiting, building their own house by hand, arranging their bookcases by color, going on a European tour -- so I'm curious: Do you have something like that on your to-do list?
I don't think all of these are "big" or "outlandish," and I don't have just one, but here are a few things I am considering and will research in the next few months:
- taking tap dance and/or drum lessons (I love the thought of all the noise these two activities make!)
- holding babies. I did not have children of my own and just love cuddling babies. I am going to look around for opportunities to do that, locally and maybe even internationally!
- going to Africa. I'd like to try working with the orphanage in Zambia which my church supports and where a friend might be going for a year or so. Even though my time there would be limited, probably no more than a month, I admit this still makes me a little nervous -- so far, so exotic, so hard -- but I am truly considering it, maybe as soon as next summer.
4) Now we're going to shift to more Library-like things. You've been pretty busy this summer, getting a lot of things out of the way before you take off. Would you share some details about what you've been doing?
Well, one thing I just started recently was taking personal things home. My goodness, one accumulates a lot of stuff after 29+ years! I'm also getting things together to pass on to my library colleagues -- you know, work stuff.
I've been the library selector for education for many years now and I decided I wanted to clean out those books. I've withdrawn a very large number of books, a decent amount of which were well over 30 years old. That means that those left will be more useful, if only because they will be easier to find on the tidy shelves!
Finally (or maybe not if someone comes up with other projects), I've done a thorough inventory of the general periodical (journals, magazines, and newspapers) collection. With the expansion and popularity of electronic periodical access, the librarians have been steadily increasing our holdings of those products for quite a few years now. That means some of the paper and microfilm products have to go so we can reallocate more of our money to electronic. I've determined exactly what we have on the shelves (titles and years/volumes), collected data about those titles (how much they are used, if they are available electronically, past decisions made, which librarian should monitor them, etc.), and put all this in a spreadsheet so it will be easier to make decisions about periodicals in the future.
5) You've had a long, rich career at Gallaudet, spanning almost thirty years. Looking back, what's the one thing that sticks out in your mind the most?
Change.
- How the University has changed -- Deaf President Now, communication methods, FYS/GSR, the buildings (new ones, long-gone old ones), etc.
- How the Library has changed, not the building but the things we do here and the way we do them.
- How I have changed: When I started I was the Library Systems Analyst and I worked with mainframe computers, then minicomputers, then PCs. About 15 years ago, I switched from computers to people and became a reference and instruction librarian. That change recharged my energy and made it easier to work here happily for almost 30 years.
6) What's something you might miss the most about working at the Gallaudet University Library?
There are a couple of things. First, the interaction with people, students and staff both. I tend to be an introvert, but when I start working with students, individually or in a classroom, my energy soars. Next, I will miss learning things. That is the best thing about being a librarian. New topics come up all the time, and I get to research them and learn things I would never have thought about. It's not that I won't learn new things, but it won't be as serendipitous as it is here at work.
7) And finally, you knew this question was inevitable: What brand of sensible shoes do you recommend?
I believe we all need to be stylish, so I vote for Jimmy Choo! Just kidding ... those might kill or maim me. Really though, I've yet to find shoes that are always sensible (for me that means comfortable), but as my body approaches middle- to late-middle age (this is not a typo), flats are always better and thick soles help cushion these bony feet! Not Birkenstocks!
All joking aside, we're all sad to see Jane go. She's done a lot for the Library and for Gallaudet in general, and it'll be very tough to replace her. By the same token, though, she's certainly earned her time off!
If you've worked with Jane before, please feel free to stop by the Library any time over the next month or so to wish her well!
No question of the week this week; I think this post is quite long enough -- don't you?
Friday, July 9, 2010
What have I been up to?
"I'm a Florida boy."
I have to keep repeating that to myself. "I'm a Florida boy." Sometimes we all need reminders that things could be worse, although after the sweltering weather of this past week, I'm not sure how. We broke triple digits a few times in the last few days, and just when I start to think it's not so bad, the humidity hits. Climate change or good old-fashioned heat wave? Who can say?
In an effort to clear this question -- among many others related to the weather (chief among which is "WHY?") -- from my mind, I read Generation A by Douglas Coupland.
I've heard a lot of stuff about Coupland. Most of the hoity-toity literary blogs I follow have mentioned him from time to time and it's usually in a very positive light, so I figured he must be pretty close to unreadable.
Except it turns out that Coupland is actually really readable. Generation A is the story of five individuals distributed across the world -- New Zealand, India, France, the U.S., and Canada -- who get stung by bees.
Given that the novel is set in a near-future where bees have been extinct for several years, rendering almonds, apples, and other fruits of assisted pollination (pun intended), very, very expensive, this is a global event. Coupland does a terrific job sketching in a future that looks eerily consistent with our present; the first person to get stung is an Iowan corn farmer who has a live Web stream of himself in his combine as he destroys a cornfield full of an "undesirable gene variant." The second is an Indian call-center operator for Abercrombie & Fitch, the third a New Zealander who's using her cell phone to make an "Earth sandwich" with a woman in Madrid, and so on.
So these five people are stung by bees, and this quite literally throws the entire planet into a tizzy. They become instant celebrities, their lives dissected by millions of people who are curious about what it is that attracted the bees to these people. The stung people disappear into quarantine for a few months while -- cue sinister music -- tests are run on them, and then reunite after being set free. However, they discover that there's a lot more to the story, involving a mysterious pharmaceutical called Solon, a native village on a remote Canadian island, and Belgium.
Truthfully, if the world the novel was set in were less realistic, the plot would probably exist on an astral plane with the works of people like Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Dan Brown. But it's weirdly believable, very funny, and completely worth your time.
Also worth my time: The things I've finished so far this summer.
First on the list: Weeding. I've mentioned this a few times over the last couple of months. It's time-consuming and less than wildly enjoyable, but it's necessary and healthy. I set my goal as a specific percentage of the books under my control, and I'm pleased to report that I met -- and exceeded -- that goal. I've focused mostly on older books in the linguistics area of the General Stacks downstairs (call numbers 420-428). Truthfully, a sizable proportion of those books were histories of the English language -- published before 1938! This was before World War II, the 1950s, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon, NASA, greed being good, the Internet, and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration, which gave our language a good workout on a daily basis. Those older books were only good for historical curiosity, but served no real academic purpose, which is our main focus.
Actually, they're perfect examples of books that have fallen through the cracks over the years. We're a busy nest of librarians, and weeding is an activity that we tend to perceive as something that goes on in the background all the time. It happens while we're doing other things, incrementally, and -- in my case, especially -- in one big whoop per year. That doesn't mean it isn't important to us, though. I've gone into detail before about why we weed, so, just as a refresher, let me sum it up: sometimes books are moldering on the shelf, dangerously outdated, never used, and are taking up space for books that have more to offer our students these days, so we get rid of them. It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that books are sacrosanct, especially where librarians are concerned (apparently we worship them; ridiculous! Ignore that altar in my bedroom closet, though); however, we have a specific mission to serve the students, faculty, and staff of Gallaudet University, and it is poorly-served by the neglect of our collection. So we prune the collection in order to encourage healthy growth.
Then the Deaf Research Help pages on our Web site. Those have needed to be updated for some time; we refreshed a few of them last year, but were barely able to make a dent. This year, we're making a big push to transfer all of that information to LibGuides. I worked on the FAQs about deaf statistics and ASL, which were pretty heavy by themselves. They're both information-heavy. The deaf statistics pages focus mainly on offering starting points for estimates of deafness within a population; the United States in general, then each state, then each country. It took me nearly a week to hunt down and tabulate the statistics for the U.S. alone; the Census Bureau and other data-collecting entities don't do things in as clear-cut a manner as they used to, so some figuring was necessary. The rest of the world took another couple of weeks -- it's not easy trying to find official statistics on the prevalence of deafness in Ethiopia, for instance, or the number of sign-language users in Brazil. Although I managed to put together a decent update, this will have to be an ongoing product as more information becomes available.
Sign language, on the other hand, was a little easier; some quick run-throughs of our catalog and major vendors, along with the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, among others, made life much simpler. All told, maybe a month's worth of work was spent on those two LibGuides, and I'm partly glad it's over and partly glad I was able to learn so much. For example, did you know that 95% of the Japanese deaf population is at age-level literacy? That's something the U.S. can't accomplish even with hearing people. Fascinating!
We've also set up a new chat system for our Meebo widget on library.gallaudet.edu. You'd be bored with the details, but it'll make our lives much easier; the main thing I'm excited about is that now, when we get a question over IM about something specific to someone's subject area, we don't have to run to their office and call them in to the Service Desk so they can answer it -- we can just transfer the IM directly to their office! The new system should also reduce the delays that sometimes occur when the person answering IMs at the Service Desk is busy helping other people and can't respond to an IM right away; someone else, in their office, will also get the same IM and answer it themselves if necessary. Overall, this should help ensure faster and more accurate responses.
I've also been working on a new program we bought earlier this year that'll let us create video tutorials (with captioning, of course) for various aspects of our online resources. I'm starting out with LibGuides, explaining how they work, what each important element is, and how to use them to your advantage. It should be appearing somewhere on the Web site within the next few weeks; I'm just about done, but what with one thing or another, it may take a little while to get up and running.
The ALA Conference was another big thing on my to-do list. It sounds funny, but a few days away from work was definitely included on my list of important things to work on this summer. You saw my post last week; most of those events were selected specifically for key aspects of my work here at the Gallaudet University Library, and I came away super-enriched with more information and ideas!
And then, last but definitely not least, I'm redesigning our home page. Yes, again -- I can hear the groans from the peanut gallery. Although our current design is much nicer-looking than the one we had before, one of the most common questions we've been getting for the past year is, "How do I search the catalog?" It only beats "How do I find e-Journals or databases?" by a very, very slim margin. The answers to both questions are right on the home page, but people are having a hard time finding it. So I'm shuffling things around a little bit, reducing the current number of boxes by a third and reorganizing information so things are a little more unified, grouping like with like. Above it all, I'm sticking a honkin' big search box for our catalog, so you can guess what our emphasis is. The result of all this is that the layout is more compact, logically compartmentalized, and much easier to take in within one or two spins of the scroll wheel on your mouse. Here's a tiny, not-at-all-clear preview of what's to come:
All of the above is what I've been working on for the past month and a half or so, ever since we finished ordering new items and put a nice little bow on the Spring semester. The sad thing is that although I've gotten a large amount of stuff out of the way, I'm still not done. The projects you've been reading about are the ones explicitly related to the Library. Now that they're just about over with, I'm going on vacation next week, and then when I return, it's time to focus on projects that don't involve changing out anything in the Library itself: preparation for the First Year Experience course I'll be teaching in the Fall (if you're an incoming freshman and you're reading this, I may be teaching you starting this August!), gearing up for the Common Reading, which will be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, by preparing LibGuides and planning campus-wide events, and getting started on writing questions for the 2011 Academic Bowl competition. It'll be a busy late July and August!
I'm sure you didn't miss the bit where I said I'm going on vacation next week. There won't be a blog post then. But when I come back, there'll be a Thursday post on the 22nd (unless I don't get called in to jury duty) about Jane Rutherford in anticipation of her retirement, then Friday, July 30, will see more about the Common Reading and what we're doing for it. Following that, the month of August, as it was last year, will be devoted to the incoming class!
Enjoy your weekend!
Question of the Week
I'm here at Gallaudet for a summer program, and I have Library borrowing privileges. But I read the sign you have up on the Service Desk, and it doesn't say anything about me or how long I'm allowed to borrow Library things for. I just checked out a book, and the librarian told me I can only have it for a week. What's up with that?
That sign only addresses regular borrowers: students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of other Consortium universities. When you're on campus for a summer program and have obtained an ID that allows you to use the Library, your borrowing period is determined by your expiration date if it's less than four weeks away. The main program going on right now wraps up on July 17, which is a week from tomorrow, so that's when your ID -- and, by extension, your ability to borrow Library items -- expires. It makes sense: when your program is done, you're likely not sticking around; why risk incurring fines if you'll be in another state long before The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is due?
I have to keep repeating that to myself. "I'm a Florida boy." Sometimes we all need reminders that things could be worse, although after the sweltering weather of this past week, I'm not sure how. We broke triple digits a few times in the last few days, and just when I start to think it's not so bad, the humidity hits. Climate change or good old-fashioned heat wave? Who can say?
In an effort to clear this question -- among many others related to the weather (chief among which is "WHY?") -- from my mind, I read Generation A by Douglas Coupland.
I've heard a lot of stuff about Coupland. Most of the hoity-toity literary blogs I follow have mentioned him from time to time and it's usually in a very positive light, so I figured he must be pretty close to unreadable.
Except it turns out that Coupland is actually really readable. Generation A is the story of five individuals distributed across the world -- New Zealand, India, France, the U.S., and Canada -- who get stung by bees.
Given that the novel is set in a near-future where bees have been extinct for several years, rendering almonds, apples, and other fruits of assisted pollination (pun intended), very, very expensive, this is a global event. Coupland does a terrific job sketching in a future that looks eerily consistent with our present; the first person to get stung is an Iowan corn farmer who has a live Web stream of himself in his combine as he destroys a cornfield full of an "undesirable gene variant." The second is an Indian call-center operator for Abercrombie & Fitch, the third a New Zealander who's using her cell phone to make an "Earth sandwich" with a woman in Madrid, and so on.
So these five people are stung by bees, and this quite literally throws the entire planet into a tizzy. They become instant celebrities, their lives dissected by millions of people who are curious about what it is that attracted the bees to these people. The stung people disappear into quarantine for a few months while -- cue sinister music -- tests are run on them, and then reunite after being set free. However, they discover that there's a lot more to the story, involving a mysterious pharmaceutical called Solon, a native village on a remote Canadian island, and Belgium.
Truthfully, if the world the novel was set in were less realistic, the plot would probably exist on an astral plane with the works of people like Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Dan Brown. But it's weirdly believable, very funny, and completely worth your time.
Also worth my time: The things I've finished so far this summer.
First on the list: Weeding. I've mentioned this a few times over the last couple of months. It's time-consuming and less than wildly enjoyable, but it's necessary and healthy. I set my goal as a specific percentage of the books under my control, and I'm pleased to report that I met -- and exceeded -- that goal. I've focused mostly on older books in the linguistics area of the General Stacks downstairs (call numbers 420-428). Truthfully, a sizable proportion of those books were histories of the English language -- published before 1938! This was before World War II, the 1950s, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon, NASA, greed being good, the Internet, and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration, which gave our language a good workout on a daily basis. Those older books were only good for historical curiosity, but served no real academic purpose, which is our main focus.
Actually, they're perfect examples of books that have fallen through the cracks over the years. We're a busy nest of librarians, and weeding is an activity that we tend to perceive as something that goes on in the background all the time. It happens while we're doing other things, incrementally, and -- in my case, especially -- in one big whoop per year. That doesn't mean it isn't important to us, though. I've gone into detail before about why we weed, so, just as a refresher, let me sum it up: sometimes books are moldering on the shelf, dangerously outdated, never used, and are taking up space for books that have more to offer our students these days, so we get rid of them. It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that books are sacrosanct, especially where librarians are concerned (apparently we worship them; ridiculous! Ignore that altar in my bedroom closet, though); however, we have a specific mission to serve the students, faculty, and staff of Gallaudet University, and it is poorly-served by the neglect of our collection. So we prune the collection in order to encourage healthy growth.
Then the Deaf Research Help pages on our Web site. Those have needed to be updated for some time; we refreshed a few of them last year, but were barely able to make a dent. This year, we're making a big push to transfer all of that information to LibGuides. I worked on the FAQs about deaf statistics and ASL, which were pretty heavy by themselves. They're both information-heavy. The deaf statistics pages focus mainly on offering starting points for estimates of deafness within a population; the United States in general, then each state, then each country. It took me nearly a week to hunt down and tabulate the statistics for the U.S. alone; the Census Bureau and other data-collecting entities don't do things in as clear-cut a manner as they used to, so some figuring was necessary. The rest of the world took another couple of weeks -- it's not easy trying to find official statistics on the prevalence of deafness in Ethiopia, for instance, or the number of sign-language users in Brazil. Although I managed to put together a decent update, this will have to be an ongoing product as more information becomes available.
Sign language, on the other hand, was a little easier; some quick run-throughs of our catalog and major vendors, along with the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, among others, made life much simpler. All told, maybe a month's worth of work was spent on those two LibGuides, and I'm partly glad it's over and partly glad I was able to learn so much. For example, did you know that 95% of the Japanese deaf population is at age-level literacy? That's something the U.S. can't accomplish even with hearing people. Fascinating!
We've also set up a new chat system for our Meebo widget on library.gallaudet.edu. You'd be bored with the details, but it'll make our lives much easier; the main thing I'm excited about is that now, when we get a question over IM about something specific to someone's subject area, we don't have to run to their office and call them in to the Service Desk so they can answer it -- we can just transfer the IM directly to their office! The new system should also reduce the delays that sometimes occur when the person answering IMs at the Service Desk is busy helping other people and can't respond to an IM right away; someone else, in their office, will also get the same IM and answer it themselves if necessary. Overall, this should help ensure faster and more accurate responses.
I've also been working on a new program we bought earlier this year that'll let us create video tutorials (with captioning, of course) for various aspects of our online resources. I'm starting out with LibGuides, explaining how they work, what each important element is, and how to use them to your advantage. It should be appearing somewhere on the Web site within the next few weeks; I'm just about done, but what with one thing or another, it may take a little while to get up and running.
The ALA Conference was another big thing on my to-do list. It sounds funny, but a few days away from work was definitely included on my list of important things to work on this summer. You saw my post last week; most of those events were selected specifically for key aspects of my work here at the Gallaudet University Library, and I came away super-enriched with more information and ideas!
And then, last but definitely not least, I'm redesigning our home page. Yes, again -- I can hear the groans from the peanut gallery. Although our current design is much nicer-looking than the one we had before, one of the most common questions we've been getting for the past year is, "How do I search the catalog?" It only beats "How do I find e-Journals or databases?" by a very, very slim margin. The answers to both questions are right on the home page, but people are having a hard time finding it. So I'm shuffling things around a little bit, reducing the current number of boxes by a third and reorganizing information so things are a little more unified, grouping like with like. Above it all, I'm sticking a honkin' big search box for our catalog, so you can guess what our emphasis is. The result of all this is that the layout is more compact, logically compartmentalized, and much easier to take in within one or two spins of the scroll wheel on your mouse. Here's a tiny, not-at-all-clear preview of what's to come:
All of the above is what I've been working on for the past month and a half or so, ever since we finished ordering new items and put a nice little bow on the Spring semester. The sad thing is that although I've gotten a large amount of stuff out of the way, I'm still not done. The projects you've been reading about are the ones explicitly related to the Library. Now that they're just about over with, I'm going on vacation next week, and then when I return, it's time to focus on projects that don't involve changing out anything in the Library itself: preparation for the First Year Experience course I'll be teaching in the Fall (if you're an incoming freshman and you're reading this, I may be teaching you starting this August!), gearing up for the Common Reading, which will be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, by preparing LibGuides and planning campus-wide events, and getting started on writing questions for the 2011 Academic Bowl competition. It'll be a busy late July and August!
I'm sure you didn't miss the bit where I said I'm going on vacation next week. There won't be a blog post then. But when I come back, there'll be a Thursday post on the 22nd (unless I don't get called in to jury duty) about Jane Rutherford in anticipation of her retirement, then Friday, July 30, will see more about the Common Reading and what we're doing for it. Following that, the month of August, as it was last year, will be devoted to the incoming class!
Enjoy your weekend!
Question of the Week
I'm here at Gallaudet for a summer program, and I have Library borrowing privileges. But I read the sign you have up on the Service Desk, and it doesn't say anything about me or how long I'm allowed to borrow Library things for. I just checked out a book, and the librarian told me I can only have it for a week. What's up with that?
That sign only addresses regular borrowers: students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of other Consortium universities. When you're on campus for a summer program and have obtained an ID that allows you to use the Library, your borrowing period is determined by your expiration date if it's less than four weeks away. The main program going on right now wraps up on July 17, which is a week from tomorrow, so that's when your ID -- and, by extension, your ability to borrow Library items -- expires. It makes sense: when your program is done, you're likely not sticking around; why risk incurring fines if you'll be in another state long before The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is due?
Friday, July 2, 2010
Reporting in from ALA
I'm back!
On this unnaturally cool week, we've got a doubleheader for you: The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.
They're two books that were going to be a trilogy, except Butler died before she had time to focus on the third book. Both Parables follow one Lauren Olamina, a Californian woman who lives near Los Angeles in a society that resembles both a postapocalypse and a dystopia. The United States has collapsed, existing in name only, jobs have evaporated, and runaway inflation has put most needs out of reach for a significant percentage of the American population. Lauren and her family cling to survival in a walled enclave built out of a suburban cul-de-sac, subsisting on food grown in backyards and traded among neighbors and practicing their shooting -- just in case. The outside world is filled with the poor, the violent, and the addicted. There's a new drug, known as pyro, that's spreading throughout the country and creates in its users the desire to light things on fire. Millions of Southern Californian refugees, victims of a nonexistent economy, police forces that charge exorbitant fees for their services, and violence from the poor, are streaming their way up I-5, on their way to Oregon, Washington, Canada, or a newly-seceded Alaska.
In the midst of all this chaos, Lauren is busily planting the seeds of a new religion, called Earthseed, which says that the only thing worth venerating is change and that it's the destiny of the human race to colonize other worlds; this is her attempt to reunify the human race in pursuit of a single goal. She's interrupted at the age of eighteen when her walled neighborhood is finally overrun, her family is killed, and she's sent walking up the interstate with two of her neighbors. As they fight their way up the Pacific coast, they accumulate followers, people who join up for protection, fellowship, and, eventually, the tenets of Earthseed. At the end of the first book, they've settled on a few dozen acres of isolated woodland north of San Francisco, owned by one of her followers, and begin the process of building a community, named Acorn. The Earthseed religion strongly emphasizes learning over education with special attention paid to reading, math, and the sciences. It's a communal way of living; people look after each others' kids and share their food.
In the second book, Lauren's daughter takes over the narrative and pieces together the story of the rest of her mother's life after settling down in Acorn. A new president is elected, a Christian fundamentalist who -- wink, wink, nudge, nudge -- loudly decries the actions of vigilante bands of Christians who have been attacking poorer communities and killing or enslaving anyone who doesn't subscribe to their creed. The country appears to be devolving into a theocracy, and Acorn is one of the last holdouts. Unfortunately, they are finally invaded and Acorn's residents -- including Lauren -- are enslaved, their children taken away and adopted into good Christian homes, away from their "heretic" parents. Lauren's daughter is one of those kids, as she tells us years later while sharing her mother's story. A fortunate landslide leads to an uprising, the extermination of the slavers, and the scattering of the people of Acorn. Lauren, during her flight, begins to think that she needs to grow her system another way; instead of centralizing it into a single community that can be attacked, she should teach people, who can then go out and teach others. The story then skips forward a few years, when we find out that not all of Lauren's family was killed in the initial invasion of her enclave-neighborhood; her younger brother has survived and is now a minister in the church supported by the new president. He manages to hunt down Lauren's daughter in her good Christian home -- where she has been abused and neglected for being black and unlike her adoptive parents' real daughter -- and take her home with him.
We jump forward a few years again, and we see that Earthseed has spread far and wide; there are communities everywhere, and the religion, centralized under Lauren's authority, has become wealthy enough to build schools everywhere and invest in industries that promote spaceflight; the goal here is still to find other worlds to live on. Lauren's daughter finally meets her, 20 years after her birth and subsequent seizure by the fanatics, and discovers that although her mother loves her, she loves Earthseed more: her first child. The book ends there; the series will never be finished.
I find myself disappointed by that. It's pretty different from Butler's other books, which are much more overtly science-fictional -- people with super-powers and all that -- but it's still typical of her writing, which I love. She had a singular talent for uniting a whole slew of issues -- from gender to race to politics to religion -- into a single story. Her protagonists tend to be African-American women, which is a welcome change from most of the science fiction of her era, which was -- and still is -- overwhelmingly white-male-dominated. I have no desire to read only books that are narrated by characters just like me, and Butler's work is a perfect example of the difference I seek.
Then there's the epic nature of the Parables' plot (epic in scale, not as in "epic win"); this one woman in a collapsing society creates a whole new belief system that, after years of struggle, hard work, and horrifying violence, sweeps the world and begins to change it. It's good stuff! I strongly recommend both books, as well as the rest of her work that we hold: Bloodchild and Other Stories, Dawn, Wild Seed, Kindred, and Fledgling. Out of these five, plus the Parable books, I guarantee there's something for everyone. Vampires, aliens, immortals, time-travelers, or budding High Priestesses, it's all good.
Now, I skipped a whole week. What's going on with that?
Well, I attended ALA, or the American Library Association's annual conference. We call it "ALA" because it's so big, it doesn't need much more of a name. 20,000 librarians descended on Washington, DC between last Thursday and this Tuesday to attend workshops, seminars, discussion groups, and the exhibit hall. I -- as well as most of my colleagues here in the Library -- was among that 20,000.
First, the exhibit hall. It's like most conference exhibit halls; big fancy booths rented by the major movers in the industry and small cookie-cutter booths rented by the smaller, independent companies. Nearly all the database vendors we know of were there -- ProQuest, Ebsco, SAGE, and so on. Also like most exhibit halls, it was full of giveaways; little branded trinkets that open beer bottles, illuminate a small section of wall, or offer an outlet for stress. And books. Lots of free books. Besides the vendors, the rest of the exhibit hall was occupied by publishers like Scholastic, Random House, Hyperion-Disney, Dark Horse (they do comics like Hellboy and Scott Pilgrim vs. the Rest of the World), and Wizards of the Coast (Dungeons & Dragons). I came away from this weekend with more than 40 new books, most of which will end up in the Library. Many of those books are uncorrected printer's proofs or advance reading copies, which means that most of them have not been released on the market yet and won't be for a few months; the rest is just the publisher's attempt to unload surplus inventory that can't be sold. So that was nice. I loved the exhibit hall.
Now that that's out of the way, on to the more important stuff. ALA is very, very large; the conference occupied all of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center here in town, and took over several nearby hotels as well. Dozens of workshops, seminars, lectures, discussion groups and panels are available for registered participants. To make things a little easier on me, here's a list of the stuff I went to, along with summaries of each and what I learned.
H.W. Wilson Breakfast
H.W. Wilson is a database vendor; we subscribe to their Biography Reference Bank. I thought it might be a good idea to attend this breakfast and see what they've been up to, which turned out to be a lot. Bearing in mind that the disciplines I work with consists of the fine arts, literature, and language, I got excited by their new A Social History of the 20th Century, which is a database of art defined within the context of the 20th Century; what social changes do they express? What questions did they bring up for the people of their time? It's a good resource for fine arts, history, and sociology. They're also offering the Art Museum Image Gallery, which is a collection of several thousand scanned images available on the Web from museums all over the world, collected in a single place.
Beyond Library Guides
This was a workshop about LibGuides, which we started using last year and which has been growing steadily in use. This particular talk focused on using LibGuides as a project for students in a first-year course on the history of New York; new features that have been added by the company that owns LibGuides are now enabling more collaboration from people who don't have their own accounts, and turning the guides into a wiki-like project. I'm teaching an FYS class in the fall, and am thinking more about how this could apply; this might also be good for the Library. Allowing people to contribute content would be good for LibGuides like the one that covers free things to do in Washington, DC, or the LibGuide for GSR 150: City as Text. I'll be talking with some faculty as we get closer to the fall for some ideas about what we could do with this.
Ebsco lunch
Yes, database vendors offer a lot of free meals in exchange for permission to spend an hour or more talking to us about how great their company is. Usually, this is justifiable: For example, Ebsco talked about its new Discovery tool, which would allow libraries to include results from their Ebsco databases in with their catalog records; this means that if you're looking for books on a specific topic, you'd also be able to see journal articles that are relevant to your topic. This would save a lot of time and make research a lot easier. Something like this might be in the Library's future, in fact; more on that later!
The Open Access Debate
A panel of advocates for open access, along with a librarian from the National Library of Medicine and a representative from Elsevier, another database vendor, discussed what's been going on lately with the movement toward open access. I've talked about it on this blog before; most of the things I mention in that previous post were kicked around in this meeting, and it was very informative. In general, publishers and database vendors are struggling to figure out how to make open access a viable business model; how do you make information available for free and still earn a profit without going down the credibility-destroying path of advertising? It was a heated debate, actually, mostly centering around the Elsevier representative, and it ended with a huge surprise from a Springer (yet another database vendor) representative, who announced Springer's own open-access initiative. More details about that will be forthcoming within the next few months.
Science Fiction and Fantasy: Informing the Present by Imagining the Future
Actually, this one was just for fun. After a long Saturday, you just want something light to finish off the day. The highlight involved Cory Doctorow, an author I've spoken about on this blog a few times before, and a name my coworkers have grown tired of hearing. What can I say? I love the guy and his work. He's always been a huge advocate for libraries, although he's more known for ranting against copyright, his work for BoingBoing, and as a fan-favorite character on xkcd.com (read all the way to the end; the whole strip is worth it!). Also, they gave out more free books at this talk. I'd say I came out ahead.
Strategic Future of Print Collections in Research Libraries
This one was very interesting. The basic question centered around things like Google Books. Do print books have a future in a society where everything's migrating online? Most of the panelists said yes; one speaker from the University of Michigan has been working with Google to scan the university's collection of rare books, and she said something very interesting: "Don't forget microfilm." See, when microfilm was becoming popular at libraries everywhere, the thinking was that microfilm was not a perishable storage medium. Because of this, thousands of books and journals were converted to microfilm and destroyed, whether in the conversion process (pages had to be taken apart to be scanned individually) or afterward (because they were no longer necessary). Unfortunately, a few years later, it turned out that microfilm actually decays; the vast majority of the stuff that was produced between the 1930s and 1980s were produced from cellulose acetate, an organic material that decomposes quite readily in fairly common conditions. Worse still, because they're made from acetate, they give off a vinegary stink and generally make life difficult for everyone. This problem was compounded by microfilm's rapid obsolescence as digital analogues arose during the 1970s, rendering all that expense useless and the destruction of the original texts pointless. There's a lesson to be learned from this. Another speaker echoed the U Michigan librarian; he said the future was more likely to see both print and digital texts supplementing each other, rather than being all one or the other.
Question, Find, Evaluate, Apply
A sort of seminar about ways to assess information literacy. It all sounds like impenetrable Librarianese, I'm sure, but basically, one of our missions here at the Gallaudet University Library involves teaching students and faculty how to navigate information systems to find what they need to do their work. It involves knowing how to use Google and what its limits are, how to perform searches in databases in order to find articles that are relevant to your topic, and when to ask for help. In order to find out whether or not we're successful at this, we have to ask students to fill out papers testing what they just learned, so if you've ever had to do that after a Library presentation, you now know why. It's not to test you; it's to test us. And this seminar offered a bunch of really useful ideas about how we can do this better.
Recruiting Undergraduates to the Library Profession: A Mellon Success Story
Yes, I admit it. I'm actively trying to get students to consider librarianship as a possible future career. This panel consisted of current or former library-school students who had been recruited by the Mellon Foundation into a program that let them go on library-related internships as undergraduates and earn scholarships for grad school. It was actually a pretty enjoyable talk; the proto-librarians were all very interesting -- and funny -- people. One of them said that the thought of being a librarian never entered her mind until one day when she was coming out of the bathroom and spied a poster on the wall opposite her that said, "Ever thought about being a librarian?" And she was hooked. In general, being a librarian requires a few specific traits that aren't easy to find all together, so if I say, "Hey! You should think about becoming a librarian," you should start looking for library schools like now.
Privacy, Libraries, and the Law
This was a fairly sober discussion. Whether we like it or not, the surveillance of our daily activities -- whether by the government or the corporations whose products we consume -- is increasing quickly. As Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, famously said, privacy is no longer the social norm. So what does this mean for libraries? We're still figuring that one out, even as we recover from the storm that the USAPATRIOT Act kicked up around us after 9/11.
For the Love of Reference
This one was kind of fun. Another panel -- there are lots of those at ALA -- discussed reference as an important part of being a librarian. "Reference" is Librarianese for "answering people's questions." Whether it means sitting at the Service Desk for a few hours a week or answering IMs coming in late at night, reference tends to get overlooked in favor of other aspects of working in a library -- electronic resources, cataloging, or larger issues like, as listed above, privacy and assessment. Nancy Pearl, who is probably the first and only librarian ever to have her own action figure, was on the panel, and it was a treat to listen to her discuss how aspects of reference are both changing and staying the same as new technologies and methodologies emerge.
Closing Session: Amy Sedaris
I learned nothing from this, other than the fact that Amy Sedaris is a drunk and possibly slightly insane. Also hilarious. This was the wrap-up session for the ALA Conference itself, a sort of official period at the end of a long sentence about workshops, free books, and new vendors to think about. And yes, it was book-related -- Sedaris wrote I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence.
And that was my weekend. I'm tired. Luckily, this is a three-day weekend!
Next week is the deadline I've set for myself for most of my summer projects. I'll let you know more about those next Friday. Enjoy your 4th!
Question of the Week
How come the books on the display tables at either entrance to the Library haven't changed in a while?
Because it's summertime, mostly. There are fewer people here to look at them and maybe think about checking them out. That doesn't mean they aren't getting looked at, though -- I catch two or three people reading the dust-jacket blurbs every day. They're also being checked out, somehow; they seem to disappear when I'm not looking! You'll see some fresh stuff on there in mid-to-late July, though, for Jump Start, CPSO summer programs, and brand-new and returning students. I guarantee they'll be interesting.
On this unnaturally cool week, we've got a doubleheader for you: The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.
They're two books that were going to be a trilogy, except Butler died before she had time to focus on the third book. Both Parables follow one Lauren Olamina, a Californian woman who lives near Los Angeles in a society that resembles both a postapocalypse and a dystopia. The United States has collapsed, existing in name only, jobs have evaporated, and runaway inflation has put most needs out of reach for a significant percentage of the American population. Lauren and her family cling to survival in a walled enclave built out of a suburban cul-de-sac, subsisting on food grown in backyards and traded among neighbors and practicing their shooting -- just in case. The outside world is filled with the poor, the violent, and the addicted. There's a new drug, known as pyro, that's spreading throughout the country and creates in its users the desire to light things on fire. Millions of Southern Californian refugees, victims of a nonexistent economy, police forces that charge exorbitant fees for their services, and violence from the poor, are streaming their way up I-5, on their way to Oregon, Washington, Canada, or a newly-seceded Alaska.
In the midst of all this chaos, Lauren is busily planting the seeds of a new religion, called Earthseed, which says that the only thing worth venerating is change and that it's the destiny of the human race to colonize other worlds; this is her attempt to reunify the human race in pursuit of a single goal. She's interrupted at the age of eighteen when her walled neighborhood is finally overrun, her family is killed, and she's sent walking up the interstate with two of her neighbors. As they fight their way up the Pacific coast, they accumulate followers, people who join up for protection, fellowship, and, eventually, the tenets of Earthseed. At the end of the first book, they've settled on a few dozen acres of isolated woodland north of San Francisco, owned by one of her followers, and begin the process of building a community, named Acorn. The Earthseed religion strongly emphasizes learning over education with special attention paid to reading, math, and the sciences. It's a communal way of living; people look after each others' kids and share their food.
In the second book, Lauren's daughter takes over the narrative and pieces together the story of the rest of her mother's life after settling down in Acorn. A new president is elected, a Christian fundamentalist who -- wink, wink, nudge, nudge -- loudly decries the actions of vigilante bands of Christians who have been attacking poorer communities and killing or enslaving anyone who doesn't subscribe to their creed. The country appears to be devolving into a theocracy, and Acorn is one of the last holdouts. Unfortunately, they are finally invaded and Acorn's residents -- including Lauren -- are enslaved, their children taken away and adopted into good Christian homes, away from their "heretic" parents. Lauren's daughter is one of those kids, as she tells us years later while sharing her mother's story. A fortunate landslide leads to an uprising, the extermination of the slavers, and the scattering of the people of Acorn. Lauren, during her flight, begins to think that she needs to grow her system another way; instead of centralizing it into a single community that can be attacked, she should teach people, who can then go out and teach others. The story then skips forward a few years, when we find out that not all of Lauren's family was killed in the initial invasion of her enclave-neighborhood; her younger brother has survived and is now a minister in the church supported by the new president. He manages to hunt down Lauren's daughter in her good Christian home -- where she has been abused and neglected for being black and unlike her adoptive parents' real daughter -- and take her home with him.
We jump forward a few years again, and we see that Earthseed has spread far and wide; there are communities everywhere, and the religion, centralized under Lauren's authority, has become wealthy enough to build schools everywhere and invest in industries that promote spaceflight; the goal here is still to find other worlds to live on. Lauren's daughter finally meets her, 20 years after her birth and subsequent seizure by the fanatics, and discovers that although her mother loves her, she loves Earthseed more: her first child. The book ends there; the series will never be finished.
I find myself disappointed by that. It's pretty different from Butler's other books, which are much more overtly science-fictional -- people with super-powers and all that -- but it's still typical of her writing, which I love. She had a singular talent for uniting a whole slew of issues -- from gender to race to politics to religion -- into a single story. Her protagonists tend to be African-American women, which is a welcome change from most of the science fiction of her era, which was -- and still is -- overwhelmingly white-male-dominated. I have no desire to read only books that are narrated by characters just like me, and Butler's work is a perfect example of the difference I seek.
Then there's the epic nature of the Parables' plot (epic in scale, not as in "epic win"); this one woman in a collapsing society creates a whole new belief system that, after years of struggle, hard work, and horrifying violence, sweeps the world and begins to change it. It's good stuff! I strongly recommend both books, as well as the rest of her work that we hold: Bloodchild and Other Stories, Dawn, Wild Seed, Kindred, and Fledgling. Out of these five, plus the Parable books, I guarantee there's something for everyone. Vampires, aliens, immortals, time-travelers, or budding High Priestesses, it's all good.
Now, I skipped a whole week. What's going on with that?
Well, I attended ALA, or the American Library Association's annual conference. We call it "ALA" because it's so big, it doesn't need much more of a name. 20,000 librarians descended on Washington, DC between last Thursday and this Tuesday to attend workshops, seminars, discussion groups, and the exhibit hall. I -- as well as most of my colleagues here in the Library -- was among that 20,000.
First, the exhibit hall. It's like most conference exhibit halls; big fancy booths rented by the major movers in the industry and small cookie-cutter booths rented by the smaller, independent companies. Nearly all the database vendors we know of were there -- ProQuest, Ebsco, SAGE, and so on. Also like most exhibit halls, it was full of giveaways; little branded trinkets that open beer bottles, illuminate a small section of wall, or offer an outlet for stress. And books. Lots of free books. Besides the vendors, the rest of the exhibit hall was occupied by publishers like Scholastic, Random House, Hyperion-Disney, Dark Horse (they do comics like Hellboy and Scott Pilgrim vs. the Rest of the World), and Wizards of the Coast (Dungeons & Dragons). I came away from this weekend with more than 40 new books, most of which will end up in the Library. Many of those books are uncorrected printer's proofs or advance reading copies, which means that most of them have not been released on the market yet and won't be for a few months; the rest is just the publisher's attempt to unload surplus inventory that can't be sold. So that was nice. I loved the exhibit hall.
Now that that's out of the way, on to the more important stuff. ALA is very, very large; the conference occupied all of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center here in town, and took over several nearby hotels as well. Dozens of workshops, seminars, lectures, discussion groups and panels are available for registered participants. To make things a little easier on me, here's a list of the stuff I went to, along with summaries of each and what I learned.
H.W. Wilson Breakfast
H.W. Wilson is a database vendor; we subscribe to their Biography Reference Bank. I thought it might be a good idea to attend this breakfast and see what they've been up to, which turned out to be a lot. Bearing in mind that the disciplines I work with consists of the fine arts, literature, and language, I got excited by their new A Social History of the 20th Century, which is a database of art defined within the context of the 20th Century; what social changes do they express? What questions did they bring up for the people of their time? It's a good resource for fine arts, history, and sociology. They're also offering the Art Museum Image Gallery, which is a collection of several thousand scanned images available on the Web from museums all over the world, collected in a single place.
Beyond Library Guides
This was a workshop about LibGuides, which we started using last year and which has been growing steadily in use. This particular talk focused on using LibGuides as a project for students in a first-year course on the history of New York; new features that have been added by the company that owns LibGuides are now enabling more collaboration from people who don't have their own accounts, and turning the guides into a wiki-like project. I'm teaching an FYS class in the fall, and am thinking more about how this could apply; this might also be good for the Library. Allowing people to contribute content would be good for LibGuides like the one that covers free things to do in Washington, DC, or the LibGuide for GSR 150: City as Text. I'll be talking with some faculty as we get closer to the fall for some ideas about what we could do with this.
Ebsco lunch
Yes, database vendors offer a lot of free meals in exchange for permission to spend an hour or more talking to us about how great their company is. Usually, this is justifiable: For example, Ebsco talked about its new Discovery tool, which would allow libraries to include results from their Ebsco databases in with their catalog records; this means that if you're looking for books on a specific topic, you'd also be able to see journal articles that are relevant to your topic. This would save a lot of time and make research a lot easier. Something like this might be in the Library's future, in fact; more on that later!
The Open Access Debate
A panel of advocates for open access, along with a librarian from the National Library of Medicine and a representative from Elsevier, another database vendor, discussed what's been going on lately with the movement toward open access. I've talked about it on this blog before; most of the things I mention in that previous post were kicked around in this meeting, and it was very informative. In general, publishers and database vendors are struggling to figure out how to make open access a viable business model; how do you make information available for free and still earn a profit without going down the credibility-destroying path of advertising? It was a heated debate, actually, mostly centering around the Elsevier representative, and it ended with a huge surprise from a Springer (yet another database vendor) representative, who announced Springer's own open-access initiative. More details about that will be forthcoming within the next few months.
Science Fiction and Fantasy: Informing the Present by Imagining the Future
Actually, this one was just for fun. After a long Saturday, you just want something light to finish off the day. The highlight involved Cory Doctorow, an author I've spoken about on this blog a few times before, and a name my coworkers have grown tired of hearing. What can I say? I love the guy and his work. He's always been a huge advocate for libraries, although he's more known for ranting against copyright, his work for BoingBoing, and as a fan-favorite character on xkcd.com (read all the way to the end; the whole strip is worth it!). Also, they gave out more free books at this talk. I'd say I came out ahead.
Strategic Future of Print Collections in Research Libraries
This one was very interesting. The basic question centered around things like Google Books. Do print books have a future in a society where everything's migrating online? Most of the panelists said yes; one speaker from the University of Michigan has been working with Google to scan the university's collection of rare books, and she said something very interesting: "Don't forget microfilm." See, when microfilm was becoming popular at libraries everywhere, the thinking was that microfilm was not a perishable storage medium. Because of this, thousands of books and journals were converted to microfilm and destroyed, whether in the conversion process (pages had to be taken apart to be scanned individually) or afterward (because they were no longer necessary). Unfortunately, a few years later, it turned out that microfilm actually decays; the vast majority of the stuff that was produced between the 1930s and 1980s were produced from cellulose acetate, an organic material that decomposes quite readily in fairly common conditions. Worse still, because they're made from acetate, they give off a vinegary stink and generally make life difficult for everyone. This problem was compounded by microfilm's rapid obsolescence as digital analogues arose during the 1970s, rendering all that expense useless and the destruction of the original texts pointless. There's a lesson to be learned from this. Another speaker echoed the U Michigan librarian; he said the future was more likely to see both print and digital texts supplementing each other, rather than being all one or the other.
Question, Find, Evaluate, Apply
A sort of seminar about ways to assess information literacy. It all sounds like impenetrable Librarianese, I'm sure, but basically, one of our missions here at the Gallaudet University Library involves teaching students and faculty how to navigate information systems to find what they need to do their work. It involves knowing how to use Google and what its limits are, how to perform searches in databases in order to find articles that are relevant to your topic, and when to ask for help. In order to find out whether or not we're successful at this, we have to ask students to fill out papers testing what they just learned, so if you've ever had to do that after a Library presentation, you now know why. It's not to test you; it's to test us. And this seminar offered a bunch of really useful ideas about how we can do this better.
Recruiting Undergraduates to the Library Profession: A Mellon Success Story
Yes, I admit it. I'm actively trying to get students to consider librarianship as a possible future career. This panel consisted of current or former library-school students who had been recruited by the Mellon Foundation into a program that let them go on library-related internships as undergraduates and earn scholarships for grad school. It was actually a pretty enjoyable talk; the proto-librarians were all very interesting -- and funny -- people. One of them said that the thought of being a librarian never entered her mind until one day when she was coming out of the bathroom and spied a poster on the wall opposite her that said, "Ever thought about being a librarian?" And she was hooked. In general, being a librarian requires a few specific traits that aren't easy to find all together, so if I say, "Hey! You should think about becoming a librarian," you should start looking for library schools like now.
Privacy, Libraries, and the Law
This was a fairly sober discussion. Whether we like it or not, the surveillance of our daily activities -- whether by the government or the corporations whose products we consume -- is increasing quickly. As Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, famously said, privacy is no longer the social norm. So what does this mean for libraries? We're still figuring that one out, even as we recover from the storm that the USAPATRIOT Act kicked up around us after 9/11.
For the Love of Reference
This one was kind of fun. Another panel -- there are lots of those at ALA -- discussed reference as an important part of being a librarian. "Reference" is Librarianese for "answering people's questions." Whether it means sitting at the Service Desk for a few hours a week or answering IMs coming in late at night, reference tends to get overlooked in favor of other aspects of working in a library -- electronic resources, cataloging, or larger issues like, as listed above, privacy and assessment. Nancy Pearl, who is probably the first and only librarian ever to have her own action figure, was on the panel, and it was a treat to listen to her discuss how aspects of reference are both changing and staying the same as new technologies and methodologies emerge.
Closing Session: Amy Sedaris
I learned nothing from this, other than the fact that Amy Sedaris is a drunk and possibly slightly insane. Also hilarious. This was the wrap-up session for the ALA Conference itself, a sort of official period at the end of a long sentence about workshops, free books, and new vendors to think about. And yes, it was book-related -- Sedaris wrote I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence.
And that was my weekend. I'm tired. Luckily, this is a three-day weekend!
Next week is the deadline I've set for myself for most of my summer projects. I'll let you know more about those next Friday. Enjoy your 4th!
Question of the Week
How come the books on the display tables at either entrance to the Library haven't changed in a while?
Because it's summertime, mostly. There are fewer people here to look at them and maybe think about checking them out. That doesn't mean they aren't getting looked at, though -- I catch two or three people reading the dust-jacket blurbs every day. They're also being checked out, somehow; they seem to disappear when I'm not looking! You'll see some fresh stuff on there in mid-to-late July, though, for Jump Start, CPSO summer programs, and brand-new and returning students. I guarantee they'll be interesting.
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