Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
New movies and books
As of October 1st, the 2012 fiscal year is over.
Why mention that? Because it means that new orders are essentially on pause for a short time -- except for urgent items for faculty -- until we shake out what our plans are for 2013. I thought I’d offer a bit of an update.
All told, we ordered over 1,600 books, e-books, and films. It’s a respectable addition to the collection, I think! So I thought I’d quickly review some of the highlights of our recent film and book purchases. I’m focusing on my own purchases for this one; it’s just easier that way. I’ll do some legwork for the next one.
All Joss Whedon, all the time
Admittedly, I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon on general principle (even that one film with Sigourney Weaver) -- Buffy and Firefly are two of my top ten favorite shows of all time, while Dollhouse continues to intrigue, years after its cancellation. He’s moved back into movies, and I have to say you don’t need to be a fan of the man to know what he’s been doing. We just bought Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers (which is being processed as we speak).
Cabin in the Woods is pretty interesting! It starts off as a stereotypical coed horror flick, with a bunch of unrealistically attractive college students (and the requisite stoner in tow) heading off to … you guessed it, a cabin in the woods. But the story takes a strange turn early on, and just keeps getting stranger. Summing it up requires that you look at the old complaints about ridiculously-premised horror films in new ways; what if it’s all deliberate for reasons other than Hollywood’s love of proven tropes? It’s both an homage to, and a tweak on, the horror-movie formula, with an ending that breaks the mold in its boldness.
The Avengers, of course, is widely considered the best comic-book film of the year, if not the last few years, and a big part of that is the way Whedon wrote it. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of his trademark wit and unusual turns of phrases in the script, plus the fight scenes are brilliantly-choreographed. The actors are terrific, too -- Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner still makes me uneasy whenever I think of him, while I get goosebumps when the Hulk emerges.
Lovers, not fighters
We also got The Artist, another award-winner -- and for good reason. People looking for dialogue-heavy films probably should avoid this one. For all but the last five minutes, it’s actually a silent film, the subtitles registering only the type of music being played on the soundtrack. Once in a while you’ll see an intertitle with a summed-up version of the dialogue being mouthed on-screen, but if you’re a good lipreader, you’ll be amused at just how much they vary from what the actors are actually saying. It’s a lovely love story, covering a famous silent-film star at the end of his era and his very slowly-growing romance with an up-and-coming star of the new ‘talkies.’ It’s also worth it for the dog, which is ridiculously cute and extraordinarily well-trained. The entire film is shot in a very appealing black-and-white format that actually makes John Goodman look good.
Last (for this post; we actually purchased 64 films this year) is The Vow. I kept it last because it’s not my kind of film, but I know heartstring-tugging stuff tends to be popular. In this case, it’s the story of Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum (both veterans of Nicholas Sparks flicks) as they rebuild their lives and marriage after a car accident and subsequent coma robs her of her memory. It’s actually based on the true story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter.
Drop everything and read
First, I have to admit to being intrigued by Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books, and it appears I’m not alone. We got the most recent installments -- Aloha from Hell and Devil Said Bang -- and they continue in much the same vein as the first two in the series. James Stark, our resurrected antihero, exists in a Los Angeles where the supernatural abounds and the world is constantly under threat from a race of creatures that favor total destruction of both good and evil. Sort of like the Constantine comic books, except the protagonist of this series doesn’t bother with pretending to help people.
Then there’s Crackpot Palace, a collection of surreal short stories that explore a few different classical tropes ranging from army-as-well-oiled-machine to Dr. Moreau’s Island and the real story of what happened there. It’s hard to describe the way it’s written; the best I can think of is a combination of Harper Lee and Stephen King, with a little of Flannery O’Connor’s highly-calibrated sense of irony.
The fourth and last title I’d like to highlight is The Medieval Python. It’s a collection of essays about the work of Terry Jones, a member of the British comedy troupe Monty Python; it turns out he’s actually been a prolific historian and critic of medieval literature, especially the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries. Jones turned 70 this year, so a bunch of historians and literary critics wrote up essays about the work he’s done and presented the published version to him as sort of a birthday present. A comedian gets a history book as a birthday present; sounds like a joke, right?
I could go on (really, I could; see me in the Library if you don’t think this post was sufficient), but space and time are immutable constraints. Suffice it to say that we’ve all been making interesting -- and useful -- additions to the collection over the past year!
Next week, you can expect a vlog. See you then.
Why mention that? Because it means that new orders are essentially on pause for a short time -- except for urgent items for faculty -- until we shake out what our plans are for 2013. I thought I’d offer a bit of an update.
All told, we ordered over 1,600 books, e-books, and films. It’s a respectable addition to the collection, I think! So I thought I’d quickly review some of the highlights of our recent film and book purchases. I’m focusing on my own purchases for this one; it’s just easier that way. I’ll do some legwork for the next one.
All Joss Whedon, all the time
Admittedly, I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon on general principle (even that one film with Sigourney Weaver) -- Buffy and Firefly are two of my top ten favorite shows of all time, while Dollhouse continues to intrigue, years after its cancellation. He’s moved back into movies, and I have to say you don’t need to be a fan of the man to know what he’s been doing. We just bought Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers (which is being processed as we speak).
Cabin in the Woods is pretty interesting! It starts off as a stereotypical coed horror flick, with a bunch of unrealistically attractive college students (and the requisite stoner in tow) heading off to … you guessed it, a cabin in the woods. But the story takes a strange turn early on, and just keeps getting stranger. Summing it up requires that you look at the old complaints about ridiculously-premised horror films in new ways; what if it’s all deliberate for reasons other than Hollywood’s love of proven tropes? It’s both an homage to, and a tweak on, the horror-movie formula, with an ending that breaks the mold in its boldness.
The Avengers, of course, is widely considered the best comic-book film of the year, if not the last few years, and a big part of that is the way Whedon wrote it. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of his trademark wit and unusual turns of phrases in the script, plus the fight scenes are brilliantly-choreographed. The actors are terrific, too -- Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner still makes me uneasy whenever I think of him, while I get goosebumps when the Hulk emerges.
Lovers, not fighters
We also got The Artist, another award-winner -- and for good reason. People looking for dialogue-heavy films probably should avoid this one. For all but the last five minutes, it’s actually a silent film, the subtitles registering only the type of music being played on the soundtrack. Once in a while you’ll see an intertitle with a summed-up version of the dialogue being mouthed on-screen, but if you’re a good lipreader, you’ll be amused at just how much they vary from what the actors are actually saying. It’s a lovely love story, covering a famous silent-film star at the end of his era and his very slowly-growing romance with an up-and-coming star of the new ‘talkies.’ It’s also worth it for the dog, which is ridiculously cute and extraordinarily well-trained. The entire film is shot in a very appealing black-and-white format that actually makes John Goodman look good.
Last (for this post; we actually purchased 64 films this year) is The Vow. I kept it last because it’s not my kind of film, but I know heartstring-tugging stuff tends to be popular. In this case, it’s the story of Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum (both veterans of Nicholas Sparks flicks) as they rebuild their lives and marriage after a car accident and subsequent coma robs her of her memory. It’s actually based on the true story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter.
Drop everything and read
First, I have to admit to being intrigued by Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books, and it appears I’m not alone. We got the most recent installments -- Aloha from Hell and Devil Said Bang -- and they continue in much the same vein as the first two in the series. James Stark, our resurrected antihero, exists in a Los Angeles where the supernatural abounds and the world is constantly under threat from a race of creatures that favor total destruction of both good and evil. Sort of like the Constantine comic books, except the protagonist of this series doesn’t bother with pretending to help people.
Then there’s Crackpot Palace, a collection of surreal short stories that explore a few different classical tropes ranging from army-as-well-oiled-machine to Dr. Moreau’s Island and the real story of what happened there. It’s hard to describe the way it’s written; the best I can think of is a combination of Harper Lee and Stephen King, with a little of Flannery O’Connor’s highly-calibrated sense of irony.
The fourth and last title I’d like to highlight is The Medieval Python. It’s a collection of essays about the work of Terry Jones, a member of the British comedy troupe Monty Python; it turns out he’s actually been a prolific historian and critic of medieval literature, especially the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries. Jones turned 70 this year, so a bunch of historians and literary critics wrote up essays about the work he’s done and presented the published version to him as sort of a birthday present. A comedian gets a history book as a birthday present; sounds like a joke, right?
I could go on (really, I could; see me in the Library if you don’t think this post was sufficient), but space and time are immutable constraints. Suffice it to say that we’ve all been making interesting -- and useful -- additions to the collection over the past year!
Next week, you can expect a vlog. See you then.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Graphic novel doubleheader
Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
The life and times of Martha Washington in the twenty-first century by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons
The life and times of Martha Washington in the twenty-first century by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Post-summer wrap-up
We’re well into the third week of the semester, and everyone seems pretty well-situated.
Fortunately, so are we. The long work of the summer is over, and we get to shift our focus to more immediately-pressing matters, which usually involves offering in-depth research help to students, posting electronic readings on Blackboard for faculty, wrapping up the last of our orders for this fiscal year, giving presentations to classes, breaking in new student assistants, and generally just keeping things in good working order.
A few weeks ago, we bought two whiteboards on wheels and parked them around the Library; a big one (known as Whitey) went by the Deaf School Yearbooks, and a smaller one (Whitey, Jr., natch) went to the basement, just under the main stairs. We know groups like to work on our study tables and sometimes struggle to find ways to work together without having to tape a bunch of paper up on one of our walls.
So far, we’ve seen people using them fairly well, in addition to some humor. The sign we put up on Whitey, Jr. to encourage people to use the board resulted in an unidentified someone writing a note to poor little Junior, breaking up with the smaller whiteboard in favor of the larger one. He rebounded fairly well, though, so we have every confidence in his ability to pull through!
We also ordered a pretty cool table that’s basically a circular horizontal whiteboard that you can write on. It should arrive sometime in the next few weeks. If anyone has any suggestions for the best place to put it, we’re all eyes! Right now, we’re thinking the seating area with all the couches next to the stairs on the first floor by the Service Desk.
We’ve also finally installed a bunch of Macs in the first-floor public computer area after years of requests. The last straw was a survey we gave out around a year and a half ago, with plenty of demands for Macs. This year, most of our public computers were up for replacement, so we opted to make the switch, reasoning that since they can run either OS X or Windows 7, it wouldn’t be too much of a burden on anyone who has a preference. I have to admit they’re pretty good for making vlogs!
As I said earlier, summer is fairly disruptive to our routines -- fewer classes and students, but more logistical work behind the scenes -- and it’s pretty nice to see everyone coming back and get into the swing of what’s shaping up to be a terrific fall semester!
Later this week, I plan to post another vlog reviewing a pair of graphic novels that aren’t related but ended up complementing each other in very interesting ways when I read them. It should be fun. See you then!
Fortunately, so are we. The long work of the summer is over, and we get to shift our focus to more immediately-pressing matters, which usually involves offering in-depth research help to students, posting electronic readings on Blackboard for faculty, wrapping up the last of our orders for this fiscal year, giving presentations to classes, breaking in new student assistants, and generally just keeping things in good working order.
A few weeks ago, we bought two whiteboards on wheels and parked them around the Library; a big one (known as Whitey) went by the Deaf School Yearbooks, and a smaller one (Whitey, Jr., natch) went to the basement, just under the main stairs. We know groups like to work on our study tables and sometimes struggle to find ways to work together without having to tape a bunch of paper up on one of our walls.
So far, we’ve seen people using them fairly well, in addition to some humor. The sign we put up on Whitey, Jr. to encourage people to use the board resulted in an unidentified someone writing a note to poor little Junior, breaking up with the smaller whiteboard in favor of the larger one. He rebounded fairly well, though, so we have every confidence in his ability to pull through!
We also ordered a pretty cool table that’s basically a circular horizontal whiteboard that you can write on. It should arrive sometime in the next few weeks. If anyone has any suggestions for the best place to put it, we’re all eyes! Right now, we’re thinking the seating area with all the couches next to the stairs on the first floor by the Service Desk.
We’ve also finally installed a bunch of Macs in the first-floor public computer area after years of requests. The last straw was a survey we gave out around a year and a half ago, with plenty of demands for Macs. This year, most of our public computers were up for replacement, so we opted to make the switch, reasoning that since they can run either OS X or Windows 7, it wouldn’t be too much of a burden on anyone who has a preference. I have to admit they’re pretty good for making vlogs!
As I said earlier, summer is fairly disruptive to our routines -- fewer classes and students, but more logistical work behind the scenes -- and it’s pretty nice to see everyone coming back and get into the swing of what’s shaping up to be a terrific fall semester!
Later this week, I plan to post another vlog reviewing a pair of graphic novels that aren’t related but ended up complementing each other in very interesting ways when I read them. It should be fun. See you then!
Friday, September 7, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Quick update!
Two weeks later, we’re back!
If you’re a regular reader, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you may also be a regular user of our Web site. The new version has been up and running for a couple of weeks now (and no, the timing is purely coincidental). We figured right now was a good time to put up a survey -- just three questions and a comment area -- and get people’s thoughts.
We got one comment on the site within an hour of it going live, an IM asking in a rather shocked manner what had happened to our site and that “it’s so … boring.”
I was lucky enough to get that chat -- I’m being sincere; I was pretty amused -- but unfortunately, my identity as the anonymous librarian chatter was sniffed out, so our one bored user remains nameless, perhaps permanently. Still, in case he or she isn’t alone, I’m going to admit something that might shock, surprise, disgust, or even appall some readers.
Are you ready? Here it is: The Gallaudet University Library is not a sexy place.
We have sexy things, certainly, once you figure out where to look -- and if you don’t, one of us will be happy to help you find them.
But we’re a library. With stuff that people use. And there’s a lot of it. Most of it sprawls across the Internet, and a lot of it only works if you go through us. We want to make getting to information as easy on our students, staff, and faculty as possible, which is not really served by whiz-bang graphics or walls of text.
I’m inclined to think that we’re getting closer to pulling it off with each new iteration of the Library’s Web site -- this will be the fourth version I’ve seen -- but as a librarian, I’m not the best judge of that.
In case you’re curious, the Wayback Machine has archived the Library’s Web site all the way back to 2000! If you’re looking for nostalgia, a good laugh, or some satisfaction of your curiosity about how far we -- and the Internet -- have managed to come in the past 12 years, I highly recommend it.
In other news, Lee Murphy, our Circulation Specialist, has retired, after just about 35 years of service. She’s seen the Library, Gallaudet University, and Washington, DC, grow and transform beyond all recognition. We’re sorry to see her go, but wish her well!
August still isn’t over, the Fall semester still hasn’t begun, and we’ve still got some changes coming in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes peeled!
If you’re a regular reader, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you may also be a regular user of our Web site. The new version has been up and running for a couple of weeks now (and no, the timing is purely coincidental). We figured right now was a good time to put up a survey -- just three questions and a comment area -- and get people’s thoughts.
We got one comment on the site within an hour of it going live, an IM asking in a rather shocked manner what had happened to our site and that “it’s so … boring.”
I was lucky enough to get that chat -- I’m being sincere; I was pretty amused -- but unfortunately, my identity as the anonymous librarian chatter was sniffed out, so our one bored user remains nameless, perhaps permanently. Still, in case he or she isn’t alone, I’m going to admit something that might shock, surprise, disgust, or even appall some readers.
Are you ready? Here it is: The Gallaudet University Library is not a sexy place.
We have sexy things, certainly, once you figure out where to look -- and if you don’t, one of us will be happy to help you find them.
But we’re a library. With stuff that people use. And there’s a lot of it. Most of it sprawls across the Internet, and a lot of it only works if you go through us. We want to make getting to information as easy on our students, staff, and faculty as possible, which is not really served by whiz-bang graphics or walls of text.
I’m inclined to think that we’re getting closer to pulling it off with each new iteration of the Library’s Web site -- this will be the fourth version I’ve seen -- but as a librarian, I’m not the best judge of that.
In case you’re curious, the Wayback Machine has archived the Library’s Web site all the way back to 2000! If you’re looking for nostalgia, a good laugh, or some satisfaction of your curiosity about how far we -- and the Internet -- have managed to come in the past 12 years, I highly recommend it.
In other news, Lee Murphy, our Circulation Specialist, has retired, after just about 35 years of service. She’s seen the Library, Gallaudet University, and Washington, DC, grow and transform beyond all recognition. We’re sorry to see her go, but wish her well!
August still isn’t over, the Fall semester still hasn’t begun, and we’ve still got some changes coming in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes peeled!
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Web site update
Well, this is interesting.
It’s been a while.
There’s a simple reason for it, which will appear later today or tomorrow when you head to our Web site, library.gallaudet.edu. We’ve pretty well overhauled it.
A lot of the content remains more or less the same, but it’s been updated and transferred to LibGuides. More on that in a little while.
First, the look of the site is -- we hope, at least -- simpler and cleaner. Not as many long and ambiguous links, and there are fewer Web pages that function as simple lists leading to more Web pages without any more identifying information that explains exactly what you can find there.
The new drop-down menu on top is intended to help people navigate their way to their specific needs more quickly and efficiently. Down below, electronic content is now front and center; this should make life a little easier for people who aren’t in the Library to find what they need.
We also got rid of the announcements and blog areas. The vast majority of our work takes place on a day-to-day basis, so big new databases and other resources come along only a few times a year. The announcements were getting old! Some of the stuff that used to be there, like our mobile site and Facebook page, have been moved to the new electronic resources area.
And no, blog headlines won’t be updated on the new Web site; it’s down to a simple link you can check quickly for any updates. We’re still figuring out how we might be able to make it easier to see when it’s been updated, so stay tuned!
Now, the content. We’ve moved a lot of it to LibGuides. The main reason for pulling this move is to make it easier for us to keep it up to date. Only a few people on staff have access to the content management system that gallaudet.edu runs on, to say nothing of the technical skills needed to present information clearly on a Web page. This is inconvenient, because we all contribute stuff to the Web site, but only one or two people can actually make the changes, so that’s a big bottleneck.
This way, we all have access to our information pages and can update it as needed. Those pages are also a lot easier to read; under the old system, we had to essentially write very long pages and use some clumsy workarounds to make them more navigable.
LibGuides also make it easier to tag similar types of pages -- Deaf-related FAQs, for example -- so you can see the relationships between our services, policies, and general public information more clearly.
I won’t say we’re excited -- it’s just a Web site, after all, and bound to present its own quirks in the fullness of time -- but it’s a fairly nice change that will make things easier on everyone in the long run. We’re still making changes and editing, as well as moving stuff over to LibGuides, so it’s a work in progress, to say the least!
This ongoing work also means that you need to provide feedback. We’ll post a survey in a couple of weeks that you can use once you’ve gotten used to the new layout, or just e-mail us at library.help@gallaudet.edu. Compliments, complaints, comments, concerns, we want it all! We’re also curious about what more we can add to the site, so please let us know what you’d like to see on there, too!
And no. This is far from the last big change of the summer. Keep an eye out for more details in the coming weeks. I’m out of the office for a week and a half starting tomorrow, so will be silent for at least that long, but never fear! I shall return.
There’s a simple reason for it, which will appear later today or tomorrow when you head to our Web site, library.gallaudet.edu. We’ve pretty well overhauled it.
A lot of the content remains more or less the same, but it’s been updated and transferred to LibGuides. More on that in a little while.
First, the look of the site is -- we hope, at least -- simpler and cleaner. Not as many long and ambiguous links, and there are fewer Web pages that function as simple lists leading to more Web pages without any more identifying information that explains exactly what you can find there.
The new drop-down menu on top is intended to help people navigate their way to their specific needs more quickly and efficiently. Down below, electronic content is now front and center; this should make life a little easier for people who aren’t in the Library to find what they need.
We also got rid of the announcements and blog areas. The vast majority of our work takes place on a day-to-day basis, so big new databases and other resources come along only a few times a year. The announcements were getting old! Some of the stuff that used to be there, like our mobile site and Facebook page, have been moved to the new electronic resources area.
And no, blog headlines won’t be updated on the new Web site; it’s down to a simple link you can check quickly for any updates. We’re still figuring out how we might be able to make it easier to see when it’s been updated, so stay tuned!
Now, the content. We’ve moved a lot of it to LibGuides. The main reason for pulling this move is to make it easier for us to keep it up to date. Only a few people on staff have access to the content management system that gallaudet.edu runs on, to say nothing of the technical skills needed to present information clearly on a Web page. This is inconvenient, because we all contribute stuff to the Web site, but only one or two people can actually make the changes, so that’s a big bottleneck.
This way, we all have access to our information pages and can update it as needed. Those pages are also a lot easier to read; under the old system, we had to essentially write very long pages and use some clumsy workarounds to make them more navigable.
LibGuides also make it easier to tag similar types of pages -- Deaf-related FAQs, for example -- so you can see the relationships between our services, policies, and general public information more clearly.
I won’t say we’re excited -- it’s just a Web site, after all, and bound to present its own quirks in the fullness of time -- but it’s a fairly nice change that will make things easier on everyone in the long run. We’re still making changes and editing, as well as moving stuff over to LibGuides, so it’s a work in progress, to say the least!
This ongoing work also means that you need to provide feedback. We’ll post a survey in a couple of weeks that you can use once you’ve gotten used to the new layout, or just e-mail us at library.help@gallaudet.edu. Compliments, complaints, comments, concerns, we want it all! We’re also curious about what more we can add to the site, so please let us know what you’d like to see on there, too!
And no. This is far from the last big change of the summer. Keep an eye out for more details in the coming weeks. I’m out of the office for a week and a half starting tomorrow, so will be silent for at least that long, but never fear! I shall return.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Friday, July 6, 2012
Back from ALA
Well, I’m back from California. Have been for over a week, actually! Just jumped right into work and haven’t stopped since.
The good news is that I finally finished one of my major projects for the summer, which was basically cleaning out and evaluating most of the 700s in the General Stacks downstairs. That’s mostly performing and fine arts and design, including everything from the philosophy of art to city planning, with quick stops at Oprah and sculpture along the way.
One of the biggest advantages of doing this is that you get to know the collection much better -- what’s there, what needs to be, and what isn’t. So the rest of my purchases for this year and for next year as well are going to fill in some of the gaps that were either always there or opened up by my weeding older materials.
It’s really an ongoing job; this coming academic year will include weeding our literature areas, both English-language (which I did two years ago) and foreign (I did that last year); then next summer is linguistics, which I did three years ago. The schedule is wonky because I often buy more for one area than another in a given year on a rotating basis.
The deeper knowledge of your collection gained by pruning it down to size dovetails pretty well with one program I went to at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim last week, in fact. It was called, appropriately enough, “Transforming Collections,” and focused largely on how e-books are playing merry hob with tradition.
One speaker on this panel talked about a weeding project she’d started at her library, requiring librarians to clean out the collections for more space and to prepare for more e-book use, and the results. Funnily enough, it has been traditionally held that weeding is healthy for collections, both to keep them up to date and to keep librarians intimately acquainted with the information under their charge. And the librarians who worked on this project reported exactly that: a more traditional relationship with their collection while preparing it for the future!
The truth is -- and this probably won't surprise you -- "the future" is a topic of some interest for librarians in general. It was also the focus of two other panels I attended in Anaheim. The more interesting of the two invited librarians from "innovative" libraries to talk about what they'd done that was so neat.
I started taking notes while watching the interpreter (I'm one of those lucky few who can write without looking at the tablet), but after a while, I stopped following the discussion so closely. It turns out that a lot of those innovative institutions are actually doing things that we've been doing here at Gallaudet for a while! We've done "bookmobiles," cell-phone-based scavenger hunts, reference over text messaging and IM, you name it.
So we're at about the right place on the curve when it comes to trying new things. We’re throwing quite a bit of support behind e-books and other electronic resources, like video streaming and open-access journals (which are open to the public), and adjusting the collection to account for the change. Our Web site is undergoing a major adjustment to reflect all of this, which is coming up soon. We’re snapping up interesting ideas that are coming our way, and figuring out how to put them into practice. We’ve been taking on teaching roles and getting out there. Not too bad!
I also went to a bunch of programs about information literacy and library building design. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, information literacy is pretty important to librarians. So is space planning, especially when it requires some creative thinking. I’ll write more about both in future posts, but it’s too hot outside to write much more right now!
Next week, I’ll get one of my colleagues to contribute their own thoughts about ALA, and a vlog may be coming your way!
The good news is that I finally finished one of my major projects for the summer, which was basically cleaning out and evaluating most of the 700s in the General Stacks downstairs. That’s mostly performing and fine arts and design, including everything from the philosophy of art to city planning, with quick stops at Oprah and sculpture along the way.
One of the biggest advantages of doing this is that you get to know the collection much better -- what’s there, what needs to be, and what isn’t. So the rest of my purchases for this year and for next year as well are going to fill in some of the gaps that were either always there or opened up by my weeding older materials.
It’s really an ongoing job; this coming academic year will include weeding our literature areas, both English-language (which I did two years ago) and foreign (I did that last year); then next summer is linguistics, which I did three years ago. The schedule is wonky because I often buy more for one area than another in a given year on a rotating basis.
The deeper knowledge of your collection gained by pruning it down to size dovetails pretty well with one program I went to at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim last week, in fact. It was called, appropriately enough, “Transforming Collections,” and focused largely on how e-books are playing merry hob with tradition.
One speaker on this panel talked about a weeding project she’d started at her library, requiring librarians to clean out the collections for more space and to prepare for more e-book use, and the results. Funnily enough, it has been traditionally held that weeding is healthy for collections, both to keep them up to date and to keep librarians intimately acquainted with the information under their charge. And the librarians who worked on this project reported exactly that: a more traditional relationship with their collection while preparing it for the future!
The truth is -- and this probably won't surprise you -- "the future" is a topic of some interest for librarians in general. It was also the focus of two other panels I attended in Anaheim. The more interesting of the two invited librarians from "innovative" libraries to talk about what they'd done that was so neat.
I started taking notes while watching the interpreter (I'm one of those lucky few who can write without looking at the tablet), but after a while, I stopped following the discussion so closely. It turns out that a lot of those innovative institutions are actually doing things that we've been doing here at Gallaudet for a while! We've done "bookmobiles," cell-phone-based scavenger hunts, reference over text messaging and IM, you name it.
So we're at about the right place on the curve when it comes to trying new things. We’re throwing quite a bit of support behind e-books and other electronic resources, like video streaming and open-access journals (which are open to the public), and adjusting the collection to account for the change. Our Web site is undergoing a major adjustment to reflect all of this, which is coming up soon. We’re snapping up interesting ideas that are coming our way, and figuring out how to put them into practice. We’ve been taking on teaching roles and getting out there. Not too bad!
I also went to a bunch of programs about information literacy and library building design. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, information literacy is pretty important to librarians. So is space planning, especially when it requires some creative thinking. I’ll write more about both in future posts, but it’s too hot outside to write much more right now!
Next week, I’ll get one of my colleagues to contribute their own thoughts about ALA, and a vlog may be coming your way!
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Information literacy and coming changes
The last few weeks have gone by pretty quickly. Summer started off with a bang with my conference in Columbus, then upon my return I jumped right into some big projects. Sadly, this may become a bit of a pattern this summer, so blog updates may become more sporadic until late August or early September. Some of my colleagues will write posts as well, but we’re all pretty busy!
So I thought I’d start off with the conference I went to. It’s called LOEX, which stands for something most people have forgotten, but which covers a pretty important aspect of life for academic librarians: Information literacy.
It’s important to us, and it’s important to you, too, even though “information literacy” is one of those terms that will probably put you to sleep. It basically covers how you interact with and use information, both in your daily life and in your schoolwork -- not just knowing where to find it, but also how to decide whether it’s appropriate for your purposes, and working with it.
Anyway, information literacy is tricky. It’s an essential skill to have in both research and daily life -- you may not need to think a whole lot about the weather report unless you’re having a picnic, but this year’s presidential campaigns may require plenty of brainpower, depending on your position on the issues and whether you think we’re doomed as a country if a particular guy parks himself in the Oval Office next January.
But the ubiquity of information -- it’s all around us these days, after all -- is a big part of why it’s tricky, because you’re so used to it that you just kind of figure you’ve got a good handle on it all, which is a justifiable attitude if you need to decide which umbrella to bring to campus or which sign to put on your front lawn. In school, though, the immediate, personal stakes are higher, and the information is much more complex and difficult to sort through.
Another part of why information literacy is tricky is that it’s so hard to teach. LOEX -- a 400-librarian conference that’s been meeting annually for 40 years now -- is proof of this. It’s pretty long-lived for something that seems so simple, because the world’s been changing constantly over those 40 years, and so has our relationship to information.
So I went and learned a lot of stuff that I’m sharing with my colleagues and which we plan to apply over the coming months and years. You’ll get to see some reports on this blog about how we’re putting some of it into practice. And, of course, the conference was just a lot of fun! Everyone who goes to LOEX is pretty committed to teaching students and faculty -- and anyone else who’s willing to listen -- how to play around with our stuff. They’re also a little goofy; my last workshop of the conference played off the popularity of zombies and even included a YouTube video called “Zombie Love Song,” which the interpreter pulled off incredibly well on the fly!
Now that that’s past, what’s next? Well, a lot. I already told you about a few of the projects we’re undertaking this summer, but there’s a lot more going on, specifically relating to the Web site and our catalog. Our site is undergoing a massive redesign and the catalog will be very, very different come Fall semester.
I’m not going into a whole lot of detail about what’s happening to the catalog right now, because that’s worthy of an entire post later on, but I can definitely say it’s a very interesting experience, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for feedback from users. Once it hits -- which should be around August or so -- don’t keep your thoughts to yourself!
Last but not least, I’d like to note that Dr. Cynthia King, the Chief Information Officer who oversees not only Library Public Services, but also Gallaudet Technology Services and the Archives and Deaf Collection, announced yesterday that she plans to step down and return to faculty status next November. She’s seen an awful lot of change happen here at the Library; we wish her well!
That wraps it up for this week. I’ll try to return to a weekly schedule, but who knows?
So I thought I’d start off with the conference I went to. It’s called LOEX, which stands for something most people have forgotten, but which covers a pretty important aspect of life for academic librarians: Information literacy.
It’s important to us, and it’s important to you, too, even though “information literacy” is one of those terms that will probably put you to sleep. It basically covers how you interact with and use information, both in your daily life and in your schoolwork -- not just knowing where to find it, but also how to decide whether it’s appropriate for your purposes, and working with it.
Anyway, information literacy is tricky. It’s an essential skill to have in both research and daily life -- you may not need to think a whole lot about the weather report unless you’re having a picnic, but this year’s presidential campaigns may require plenty of brainpower, depending on your position on the issues and whether you think we’re doomed as a country if a particular guy parks himself in the Oval Office next January.
But the ubiquity of information -- it’s all around us these days, after all -- is a big part of why it’s tricky, because you’re so used to it that you just kind of figure you’ve got a good handle on it all, which is a justifiable attitude if you need to decide which umbrella to bring to campus or which sign to put on your front lawn. In school, though, the immediate, personal stakes are higher, and the information is much more complex and difficult to sort through.
Another part of why information literacy is tricky is that it’s so hard to teach. LOEX -- a 400-librarian conference that’s been meeting annually for 40 years now -- is proof of this. It’s pretty long-lived for something that seems so simple, because the world’s been changing constantly over those 40 years, and so has our relationship to information.
So I went and learned a lot of stuff that I’m sharing with my colleagues and which we plan to apply over the coming months and years. You’ll get to see some reports on this blog about how we’re putting some of it into practice. And, of course, the conference was just a lot of fun! Everyone who goes to LOEX is pretty committed to teaching students and faculty -- and anyone else who’s willing to listen -- how to play around with our stuff. They’re also a little goofy; my last workshop of the conference played off the popularity of zombies and even included a YouTube video called “Zombie Love Song,” which the interpreter pulled off incredibly well on the fly!
Now that that’s past, what’s next? Well, a lot. I already told you about a few of the projects we’re undertaking this summer, but there’s a lot more going on, specifically relating to the Web site and our catalog. Our site is undergoing a massive redesign and the catalog will be very, very different come Fall semester.
I’m not going into a whole lot of detail about what’s happening to the catalog right now, because that’s worthy of an entire post later on, but I can definitely say it’s a very interesting experience, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for feedback from users. Once it hits -- which should be around August or so -- don’t keep your thoughts to yourself!
Last but not least, I’d like to note that Dr. Cynthia King, the Chief Information Officer who oversees not only Library Public Services, but also Gallaudet Technology Services and the Archives and Deaf Collection, announced yesterday that she plans to step down and return to faculty status next November. She’s seen an awful lot of change happen here at the Library; we wish her well!
That wraps it up for this week. I’ll try to return to a weekly schedule, but who knows?
Friday, April 27, 2012
It’s getting to be that time of year!
The last week of classes for Spring 2012 is wrapping up, finals are coming, and a bunch of students are graduating. Then school’s out for the summer!
Well, for the majority of students, anyway. Things are as busy as ever here at the Library, which is a year-round condition for us. I have a couple of conferences to go to, myself -- one of which is next week, in fact, which means no blog post. I’m excited about this one, actually, even though it’s in Columbus, Ohio (Honolulu would have been nicer, or my birthplace of Clearwater, Florida), because there’ll be a lot of interesting talks about information literacy, a subject near and dear to my professional heart. And, of course, we’ve got some projects lined up.
Personally, it’s all about the weeding. I’m looking to offload a lot of our really old, outdated books that are a) falling apart, b) not being used, and c) silly. This’ll free up more room in the stacks for new books, plus give us some more flexibility in the future.
Collectively, there are three major initiatives on the agenda for the warm months, all of which have to do with managing the unruly pack of books roaming around our basement.
First, Deaf Copy 1. Fair warning: there’s quite a bit of background to this.
If you’re not familiar with that, here it is in a nutshell: Closed stacks. This room contains what we call the “first copies” of the entire Deaf Stacks you see on the first floor. The Deaf Copy 1 (hereafter abbreviated as “DC1”) stacks are our permanent, final, must-preserve copies. This room is what keeps safe the world’s best, most comprehensive collection of Deaf-related work, so obviously it’s very important.
Up until last year, DC1 -- and the Deaf Collection in general -- had a very broad purview that included everything from Deaf culture to otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat, for those unfamiliar with bastardized Greek roots). This presented a problem, both practically (medical literature has a short shelf life that becomes unmanageable when mixed in with a very large multidisciplinary collection) and culturally -- deafness as a physical state and deafness as a culture are two very different things.
So we relieved the Deaf Collection & Archives staffers of all the stuff that treated deafness as a pathological condition and absorbed it into the General Collection. Since it had all been part of the Deaf Collection up to that point, this also meant cleaning out the first copies of the books affected, which in turn left a ton of empty space on the shelves down there.
So we’re moving the Deaf Copy 1 stacks around a little bit this summer to fill in those gaps and make room for more stuff. It’s actually warm-up for …
The General Stacks. Yup, we’re shifting them again. It’s nowhere near as drastic as last year’s shift, though -- mostly it’s just adjusting the collection to fill in some empty spaces opened up by weeding, and to add more space on the shelves for overcrowded books. They’re distributed pretty unevenly at the moment because when last year’s shift happened, we had to estimate which areas might need more room than others.
A year later, it turns out that a number of factors, including e-books, shifts in departmental focus, and the aforementioned weeding, have solved a lot of the space issues we used to have, so instead of worrying about specific areas, we get to make sure the entire collection has room to grow.
The third thing is, of course, inventory. We’ve spent most of the Spring semester working out a process for what is probably the largest project we’ve undertaken in recent memory: finding out exactly what we have on the shelves.
It sounds funny, I know, as though we haven’t been keeping track all along. But the truth is, even the systems we’ve put into place to track the movement of our stuff -- all 220,000 pieces of it -- aren’t perfect, and the Library’s been through so many technological changes since it moved into the current building that things fall through the cracks.
The causes of these problems are surprisingly varied, ranging from obvious theft to cataloging snafus -- records get left in the system for books we weeded years ago, or sometimes it goes the other way: books that clearly belong to us, but which the system thinks don’t exist. Other times, browsing students will pull a book off the shelf, skim through it, and put it back -- somewhere else.
So we’re going to spend the next couple of years going through the entire thing, shelf by shelf.
Yes, years. It’s not as bad as it sounds; the Consortium offers us the ability to scan a whole bunch of books in one fell swoop, upload their barcode numbers, and get back a nicely-detailed report letting us know what’s out of order, what should be there that isn’t, and what shouldn’t be there that is. It’s a little weird to read, but makes the process go fairly smoothly. And because the Library will continue to be used the entire time, of course, it’ll take a long while to get through the full collection.
Actually, we will probably never get through the full collection. By the time we finish going through it, enough will have changed in the rest of the collection that we’ll need to start over again. And again. And again, and again, and …
Believe it or not, this is okay with us. We’re undertaking this huge project -- along with the General Stacks shift -- specifically so people can find stuff more easily. That is, after all, why we’re here.
And it starts this summer, along with our usual day-to-day work. We’re looking forward to getting started!
The last week of classes for Spring 2012 is wrapping up, finals are coming, and a bunch of students are graduating. Then school’s out for the summer!
Well, for the majority of students, anyway. Things are as busy as ever here at the Library, which is a year-round condition for us. I have a couple of conferences to go to, myself -- one of which is next week, in fact, which means no blog post. I’m excited about this one, actually, even though it’s in Columbus, Ohio (Honolulu would have been nicer, or my birthplace of Clearwater, Florida), because there’ll be a lot of interesting talks about information literacy, a subject near and dear to my professional heart. And, of course, we’ve got some projects lined up.
Personally, it’s all about the weeding. I’m looking to offload a lot of our really old, outdated books that are a) falling apart, b) not being used, and c) silly. This’ll free up more room in the stacks for new books, plus give us some more flexibility in the future.
Collectively, there are three major initiatives on the agenda for the warm months, all of which have to do with managing the unruly pack of books roaming around our basement.
First, Deaf Copy 1. Fair warning: there’s quite a bit of background to this.
If you’re not familiar with that, here it is in a nutshell: Closed stacks. This room contains what we call the “first copies” of the entire Deaf Stacks you see on the first floor. The Deaf Copy 1 (hereafter abbreviated as “DC1”) stacks are our permanent, final, must-preserve copies. This room is what keeps safe the world’s best, most comprehensive collection of Deaf-related work, so obviously it’s very important.
Up until last year, DC1 -- and the Deaf Collection in general -- had a very broad purview that included everything from Deaf culture to otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat, for those unfamiliar with bastardized Greek roots). This presented a problem, both practically (medical literature has a short shelf life that becomes unmanageable when mixed in with a very large multidisciplinary collection) and culturally -- deafness as a physical state and deafness as a culture are two very different things.
So we relieved the Deaf Collection & Archives staffers of all the stuff that treated deafness as a pathological condition and absorbed it into the General Collection. Since it had all been part of the Deaf Collection up to that point, this also meant cleaning out the first copies of the books affected, which in turn left a ton of empty space on the shelves down there.
So we’re moving the Deaf Copy 1 stacks around a little bit this summer to fill in those gaps and make room for more stuff. It’s actually warm-up for …
The General Stacks. Yup, we’re shifting them again. It’s nowhere near as drastic as last year’s shift, though -- mostly it’s just adjusting the collection to fill in some empty spaces opened up by weeding, and to add more space on the shelves for overcrowded books. They’re distributed pretty unevenly at the moment because when last year’s shift happened, we had to estimate which areas might need more room than others.
A year later, it turns out that a number of factors, including e-books, shifts in departmental focus, and the aforementioned weeding, have solved a lot of the space issues we used to have, so instead of worrying about specific areas, we get to make sure the entire collection has room to grow.
The third thing is, of course, inventory. We’ve spent most of the Spring semester working out a process for what is probably the largest project we’ve undertaken in recent memory: finding out exactly what we have on the shelves.
It sounds funny, I know, as though we haven’t been keeping track all along. But the truth is, even the systems we’ve put into place to track the movement of our stuff -- all 220,000 pieces of it -- aren’t perfect, and the Library’s been through so many technological changes since it moved into the current building that things fall through the cracks.
The causes of these problems are surprisingly varied, ranging from obvious theft to cataloging snafus -- records get left in the system for books we weeded years ago, or sometimes it goes the other way: books that clearly belong to us, but which the system thinks don’t exist. Other times, browsing students will pull a book off the shelf, skim through it, and put it back -- somewhere else.
So we’re going to spend the next couple of years going through the entire thing, shelf by shelf.
Yes, years. It’s not as bad as it sounds; the Consortium offers us the ability to scan a whole bunch of books in one fell swoop, upload their barcode numbers, and get back a nicely-detailed report letting us know what’s out of order, what should be there that isn’t, and what shouldn’t be there that is. It’s a little weird to read, but makes the process go fairly smoothly. And because the Library will continue to be used the entire time, of course, it’ll take a long while to get through the full collection.
Actually, we will probably never get through the full collection. By the time we finish going through it, enough will have changed in the rest of the collection that we’ll need to start over again. And again. And again, and again, and …
Believe it or not, this is okay with us. We’re undertaking this huge project -- along with the General Stacks shift -- specifically so people can find stuff more easily. That is, after all, why we’re here.
And it starts this summer, along with our usual day-to-day work. We’re looking forward to getting started!
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Graduation season
It’s getting to be that time of year again. Students panicking over graduation, our preparation for the oncoming summer, and the LURP Award.
Just because I’m in that kind of mood, let’s take each thing in reverse order.
First, “LURP” is short for “Library Undergraduate Research Paper.” We do this every year; undergraduates submit their best papers from the last couple of semesters and a group of Library people reviews them and determines a winner in a blind judging. Winning relies on a number of factors, including the use of Library resources in the paper. The prize? A $200 gift card to Amazon.com!
There’s a link to the submission details and form on our home page, but here it is as a Word document anyway.
Second, our summer is going to go pretty much as usual; there’ll be a few projects we’re undertaking. This year, however, they won’t be disruptive to people who want to use the Library.
One thing I’d like to add for students, though: Even if you aren’t registered for the summer semester, you can still use the Library if you’re in town! Just come in after the end of the spring semester (after May 6, in other words) and let us know:
We also get a few people who contact us after a month, upset because they suddenly have fines; maybe they thought they could borrow an item for the entire summer, or someone else placed a hold on their item, so it can’t be renewed, or they just maxed out their number of permitted renewals. After asking some questions, we generally find out they’re not in town, one of the local states, the country, or -- in rare cases -- on this planet*.
Our advice in each case, often given pre-emptively and sometimes far too late, is the same, and here it is: Although we understand the desire for some free vacation reading, books have a nasty habit of being left behind on planes, forgotten under hotel beds, dropped on mountain tops, or buried in beach sand. Depending on how conscientious you are about keeping track of your things while backpacking through Peru, it may be a better idea to spend the money on a new book for yourself. Better safe than sorry!
Third and finally, graduation. If you’re graduating in May and have outstanding fines or fees on your record, please don’t forget to get that taken care of before you leave. Commencement is still more than a month away, but as the victim of two graduations myself, I know those final weeks can be hectic!
That’s three. Vlog next week. Ditto MLB’s Opening Day. Spring is here!
-----
*Just kidding. As far as we know, no one at Gallaudet University has been definitively proven to be an extraterrestrial.
Just because I’m in that kind of mood, let’s take each thing in reverse order.
First, “LURP” is short for “Library Undergraduate Research Paper.” We do this every year; undergraduates submit their best papers from the last couple of semesters and a group of Library people reviews them and determines a winner in a blind judging. Winning relies on a number of factors, including the use of Library resources in the paper. The prize? A $200 gift card to Amazon.com!
There’s a link to the submission details and form on our home page, but here it is as a Word document anyway.
Second, our summer is going to go pretty much as usual; there’ll be a few projects we’re undertaking. This year, however, they won’t be disruptive to people who want to use the Library.
One thing I’d like to add for students, though: Even if you aren’t registered for the summer semester, you can still use the Library if you’re in town! Just come in after the end of the spring semester (after May 6, in other words) and let us know:
- You’re here and want to use the Library
- You’re registered for the fall
- You’re going to be around long enough to return your materials on time
We also get a few people who contact us after a month, upset because they suddenly have fines; maybe they thought they could borrow an item for the entire summer, or someone else placed a hold on their item, so it can’t be renewed, or they just maxed out their number of permitted renewals. After asking some questions, we generally find out they’re not in town, one of the local states, the country, or -- in rare cases -- on this planet*.
Our advice in each case, often given pre-emptively and sometimes far too late, is the same, and here it is: Although we understand the desire for some free vacation reading, books have a nasty habit of being left behind on planes, forgotten under hotel beds, dropped on mountain tops, or buried in beach sand. Depending on how conscientious you are about keeping track of your things while backpacking through Peru, it may be a better idea to spend the money on a new book for yourself. Better safe than sorry!
Third and finally, graduation. If you’re graduating in May and have outstanding fines or fees on your record, please don’t forget to get that taken care of before you leave. Commencement is still more than a month away, but as the victim of two graduations myself, I know those final weeks can be hectic!
That’s three. Vlog next week. Ditto MLB’s Opening Day. Spring is here!
-----
*Just kidding. As far as we know, no one at Gallaudet University has been definitively proven to be an extraterrestrial.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Review: Mr. Darwin's Shooter
So I’m sickish this week and because coughing would make a vlog more or less unpleasant, I’m going to review a book using words.
I just finished Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and in spite of the title turning out to be enormously misleading, really enjoyed it.
It sounds like the book’s about a person who shot Charles Darwin. It’s actually about a person who shot for Charles Darwin; specifically, animals that Darwin subsequently used to formulate his theory of natural selection.
Syms Covington was a scion of a lower-class family that ran a tannery in Bedfordshire, England, in the early 19th Century. Religious by nature, he gets recruited by a traveling Congregational evangelist named Phipps, who makes his living as a sailor.
Leaving his family -- including a very loving stepmother -- at the age of twelve (his father allows this because competition from South America has depressed the local market for animal skins sufficiently that he can no longer afford to feed a growing boy), he joins Phipps on several voyages around the world.
The pair stick together for several years, but Phipps and Covington drift apart as Covington discovers the joys of being a globetrotting young man. Still, their relationship remains close, and they continue to work together, even after tragedy strikes both men.
By chance, this tragedy occurs just as their latest voyage is ready to leave harbor, aboard the good ship Beagle, which is setting off on a surveying mission under the direction of a gentleman naturalist named Charles Darwin.
Covington, being naturally curious and rather ambitious, immediately begins to jockey for the opportunity to serve Darwin in any capacity possible, and is ultimately successful. He starts out as a scribe for Darwin’s notes, translating the gent’s chicken-scratch into a very nice copperplate, and eventually begins to collect strange specimens from the New World and the Pacific Islands for himself. Over the course of the five-year voyage, he begins to lose his hearing and returns to England completely deaf.
Covington’s personal collection turns out to be a boon when the specimens collected by Darwin himself are damaged in transit to England; Covington’s set of finches is co-opted for study, which he not-so-graciously agrees to, and eventually, On the Origin of Species is published.
One problem: Covington is not mentioned anywhere in the book for his help in bringing in wild animals for study or even for the “donation” of his personal collection.
This is important because the book takes the form of a series of flashbacks coming to Covington as an old man in 1859. He’s grown old and wealthy, holding vast lands in Australia’s interior, with children and a wife. He serendipitously meets a young doctor in a small village near Sydney who saves his life and eventually …
Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
In any case, it’s a fascinating look at not only a woefully-underexamined side of Darwin’s story, but also life in a great era of discovery. Although the official Age of Discovery had passed by the end of the 18th Century, the New World and Pacific Islands had only just begun to yield their biological wonders. Much of the Amazon had still not been mapped, and Australia alone still held many surprises.
You also get a very good idea of what it was like in those days of sailing, when you spent months at sea on a rickety wooden tub that was vulnerable to just about everything out there. There was no GPS, no radar or sonar, no radio, no entertainment or Internet or anything. Just long, hard work, questionable maps, and the stars.
I especially appreciated the way the story unfolded, switching between the life of the younger Covington and that of the same man long after his voyaging had ended. The evolution of his personality -- from brash young man to curmudgeonly geezer who can still outclimb most younger man -- is a lot of fun to watch.
Nevertheless, his bitterness and disappointment -- poor old guy -- at being underappreciated by Darwin and not being given credit for all the work he did despite an intense professional relationship that lasts for decades is hard to take, but adds a great deal of depth to his character. On the Origin of Species doesn’t arrive at his house until about halfway through the book, so the chapters about old Covington before that point include little details that betray his anxiety and anticipation; the chapters after that point really come down hard on his sense of betrayal and loss.
The language is also wonderful; it gets a little flowery at times, and the author slips into a kind of annoying habit of using sentence fragments to convey elements of the scene, but for the most part, it does a great job of getting the setting across. My favorite passage explains why the young doctor doesn’t think it odd that Covington collects small animals left and right in the wilds around Sydney:
In general, fantastic book. It’s a nice piece of historical fiction that reveals much about a relatively-simple theory that nevertheless completely transformed how we understand life itself. Strongly recommended.
I just finished Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and in spite of the title turning out to be enormously misleading, really enjoyed it.
It sounds like the book’s about a person who shot Charles Darwin. It’s actually about a person who shot for Charles Darwin; specifically, animals that Darwin subsequently used to formulate his theory of natural selection.
Syms Covington was a scion of a lower-class family that ran a tannery in Bedfordshire, England, in the early 19th Century. Religious by nature, he gets recruited by a traveling Congregational evangelist named Phipps, who makes his living as a sailor.
Leaving his family -- including a very loving stepmother -- at the age of twelve (his father allows this because competition from South America has depressed the local market for animal skins sufficiently that he can no longer afford to feed a growing boy), he joins Phipps on several voyages around the world.
The pair stick together for several years, but Phipps and Covington drift apart as Covington discovers the joys of being a globetrotting young man. Still, their relationship remains close, and they continue to work together, even after tragedy strikes both men.
By chance, this tragedy occurs just as their latest voyage is ready to leave harbor, aboard the good ship Beagle, which is setting off on a surveying mission under the direction of a gentleman naturalist named Charles Darwin.
Covington, being naturally curious and rather ambitious, immediately begins to jockey for the opportunity to serve Darwin in any capacity possible, and is ultimately successful. He starts out as a scribe for Darwin’s notes, translating the gent’s chicken-scratch into a very nice copperplate, and eventually begins to collect strange specimens from the New World and the Pacific Islands for himself. Over the course of the five-year voyage, he begins to lose his hearing and returns to England completely deaf.
Covington’s personal collection turns out to be a boon when the specimens collected by Darwin himself are damaged in transit to England; Covington’s set of finches is co-opted for study, which he not-so-graciously agrees to, and eventually, On the Origin of Species is published.
One problem: Covington is not mentioned anywhere in the book for his help in bringing in wild animals for study or even for the “donation” of his personal collection.
This is important because the book takes the form of a series of flashbacks coming to Covington as an old man in 1859. He’s grown old and wealthy, holding vast lands in Australia’s interior, with children and a wife. He serendipitously meets a young doctor in a small village near Sydney who saves his life and eventually …
Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
In any case, it’s a fascinating look at not only a woefully-underexamined side of Darwin’s story, but also life in a great era of discovery. Although the official Age of Discovery had passed by the end of the 18th Century, the New World and Pacific Islands had only just begun to yield their biological wonders. Much of the Amazon had still not been mapped, and Australia alone still held many surprises.
You also get a very good idea of what it was like in those days of sailing, when you spent months at sea on a rickety wooden tub that was vulnerable to just about everything out there. There was no GPS, no radar or sonar, no radio, no entertainment or Internet or anything. Just long, hard work, questionable maps, and the stars.
I especially appreciated the way the story unfolded, switching between the life of the younger Covington and that of the same man long after his voyaging had ended. The evolution of his personality -- from brash young man to curmudgeonly geezer who can still outclimb most younger man -- is a lot of fun to watch.
Nevertheless, his bitterness and disappointment -- poor old guy -- at being underappreciated by Darwin and not being given credit for all the work he did despite an intense professional relationship that lasts for decades is hard to take, but adds a great deal of depth to his character. On the Origin of Species doesn’t arrive at his house until about halfway through the book, so the chapters about old Covington before that point include little details that betray his anxiety and anticipation; the chapters after that point really come down hard on his sense of betrayal and loss.
The language is also wonderful; it gets a little flowery at times, and the author slips into a kind of annoying habit of using sentence fragments to convey elements of the scene, but for the most part, it does a great job of getting the setting across. My favorite passage explains why the young doctor doesn’t think it odd that Covington collects small animals left and right in the wilds around Sydney:
There was a special pride among the takers of the place, because the plants and animals were so strange. Everything so queer and opposite. There must have been a separate act of Creation, it was maintained, and as Darwin had said on visiting there, to bring them into being. Swans were black. A mammal, the platypus, laid eggs, although nobody had ever seen one do it …The fact that Covington goes deaf as an adult adds an interesting twist to how his particular personality copes with the world around him. He never learns to sign, of course, but lip-reads so well that the young doctor has no idea he’s understood every time he says something insulting Covington without making an effort to speak clearly.
In general, fantastic book. It’s a nice piece of historical fiction that reveals much about a relatively-simple theory that nevertheless completely transformed how we understand life itself. Strongly recommended.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Spring break update and ILL
Spring break is here!
Well, not for much longer. But it’s still been a very quiet week as far as helping students is concerned. I’ve taken the opportunity to finish a few projects and clean out my office. If you’re reading this and have visited my office, you know how cluttered it’s been for the past three years. It was about 75% donated books and films I was considering adding to the collection and about 25% my own natural messiness.
No more! By the end of Spring Break, it’ll all be either in the collection or for sale on the Book Sale shelf we use to re-home any donations we don’t need. My office feels so much larger now.
We’ve also been adjusting the DVD shelves; for the past few weeks we’ve replaced nearly all of the security cases with a new batch we ordered last summer specifically for this reason. Before this project, we had three or four different kinds, requiring about the same number of magnetic unlockers, and that was a bit of a silly headache. Now we’re down to two kinds -- one for DVDs and one for VHS tapes.
Of course, the new DVD cases are a little funny in comparison to others we’ve had in the past; they’re thicker at the top than they are at the bottom. This leads to some shelving weirdness where half a shelf is tilted one way and half is tilted the other. Although it all takes up about the same amount of space, it needed to be arranged differently, so we’ve spread them out. We're also working on a better way to store DVDs in those cases that might alleviate some of these issues.
Complicating matters is the weather. It’s so incredible! Perfect temperatures, blue skies, blooming flowers, lovely breezes. Spring has arrived a little ahead of schedule, and it’s making it tough to work in the Library all day long.
It’s also been a busy semester. On top of everything else, I’ve added inter-library loan (ILL) work on a temporary basis, and it’s been an eye-opener!
Truth is, ILL is a pretty fascinating portion of what we do here. Since so much of the Deaf Collection consists of publications that are pretty tough to find -- theses, for instance, or non-profit organization reports on services to populations with hearing loss -- a good deal of ILL has to do with fulfilling requests from outside libraries for our stuff, providing nobody at our Library needs it right then. We also do a fairly brisk business for Gallaudet students and faculty who need stuff that manages to slip through the cracks in the Consortium -- those cracks are small, given our huge collective holdings of around eight million items, but do exist!
There’s a pretty good system in place that allows libraries nationwide, sometimes even worldwide, to share their stuff. It includes everything from simply being able to see that another library has what you want, to managing the shipping of those items, down to providing labels that you can print out and use for mailing.
The sheer scale of this system is mind-boggling. We’ve been using Rolodexes -- kind of like this one from Staples if you’re young and clueless about these things -- for years to keep records of institutions that have requested things from us in the past, using cards with all the information we need for shipping and bar codes for each one. This way, it’s easier to lend to them again if they ask: scan, drop in envelope, stick on label, and go. Those things are huge by now, which means there are hundreds of libraries in there.
That just covers institutions that have borrowed from us in the past. On top of that, we still get one or two new ones every other week that don’t have a card in either Rolodex and have to add one for them.
This lends itself to a new sort of perspective on how this whole library thing works. Funny, isn’t it, to think of the staggering investment involved in providing people the information they need?
Well, not for much longer. But it’s still been a very quiet week as far as helping students is concerned. I’ve taken the opportunity to finish a few projects and clean out my office. If you’re reading this and have visited my office, you know how cluttered it’s been for the past three years. It was about 75% donated books and films I was considering adding to the collection and about 25% my own natural messiness.
No more! By the end of Spring Break, it’ll all be either in the collection or for sale on the Book Sale shelf we use to re-home any donations we don’t need. My office feels so much larger now.
We’ve also been adjusting the DVD shelves; for the past few weeks we’ve replaced nearly all of the security cases with a new batch we ordered last summer specifically for this reason. Before this project, we had three or four different kinds, requiring about the same number of magnetic unlockers, and that was a bit of a silly headache. Now we’re down to two kinds -- one for DVDs and one for VHS tapes.
Of course, the new DVD cases are a little funny in comparison to others we’ve had in the past; they’re thicker at the top than they are at the bottom. This leads to some shelving weirdness where half a shelf is tilted one way and half is tilted the other. Although it all takes up about the same amount of space, it needed to be arranged differently, so we’ve spread them out. We're also working on a better way to store DVDs in those cases that might alleviate some of these issues.
Complicating matters is the weather. It’s so incredible! Perfect temperatures, blue skies, blooming flowers, lovely breezes. Spring has arrived a little ahead of schedule, and it’s making it tough to work in the Library all day long.
It’s also been a busy semester. On top of everything else, I’ve added inter-library loan (ILL) work on a temporary basis, and it’s been an eye-opener!
Truth is, ILL is a pretty fascinating portion of what we do here. Since so much of the Deaf Collection consists of publications that are pretty tough to find -- theses, for instance, or non-profit organization reports on services to populations with hearing loss -- a good deal of ILL has to do with fulfilling requests from outside libraries for our stuff, providing nobody at our Library needs it right then. We also do a fairly brisk business for Gallaudet students and faculty who need stuff that manages to slip through the cracks in the Consortium -- those cracks are small, given our huge collective holdings of around eight million items, but do exist!
There’s a pretty good system in place that allows libraries nationwide, sometimes even worldwide, to share their stuff. It includes everything from simply being able to see that another library has what you want, to managing the shipping of those items, down to providing labels that you can print out and use for mailing.
The sheer scale of this system is mind-boggling. We’ve been using Rolodexes -- kind of like this one from Staples if you’re young and clueless about these things -- for years to keep records of institutions that have requested things from us in the past, using cards with all the information we need for shipping and bar codes for each one. This way, it’s easier to lend to them again if they ask: scan, drop in envelope, stick on label, and go. Those things are huge by now, which means there are hundreds of libraries in there.
That just covers institutions that have borrowed from us in the past. On top of that, we still get one or two new ones every other week that don’t have a card in either Rolodex and have to add one for them.
This lends itself to a new sort of perspective on how this whole library thing works. Funny, isn’t it, to think of the staggering investment involved in providing people the information they need?
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
How new books work
I’m going to swap out the vlogs for a bona-fide blog this week.
It’s been an interesting semester so far. I still can’t quite account for the fact that midterms are already coming next week.
Just what have I been doing? Well, stuff. Ordering books (not many movies, though, just yet -- I’m waiting for the spring DVD rush of films released during the holidays), coping with the cataloging challenges presented by some of those books, navigating the wilds of our e-books with anyone and everyone who’ll hear from me, getting our new Digital Campus service off the ground, and figuring out ways to work with the English Language Institute here on campus. I’ve also temporarily added inter-library loan processing to the list while our specialist is out for a few weeks. There’ll be another post on that new experience soon!
On an interesting note, someone who managed to walk into my office a week or two ago and noticed a new-book cart full of, well, new books, wanted to know exactly what it is that I do with them. The silly thing actually mentioned writing about it on the blog, because he thought it was always interesting to really get a look behind the scenes.
If you disagree, turn back now. Otherwise, abandon all hope.
We do the majority of our purchases through a single vendor with which we have a very good long-standing relationship. They take care of just about everything for us, from providing information about each book to load into the catalog, to putting the barcode sticker on the front of the book. They’re a major time-saver.
9 times out of 10, new books arrive in perfect shape and head straight to the shelves within a week of arriving. The rest of the time is where I come in.
Sometimes the record loaded doesn’t include enough information (a frequent-enough occurrence for less-mainstream titles like She seized the balls), or sometimes the systems involved get a little confused about what goes where. The end result is usually a record that only has the title and ISBN number (that mess of 13 digits you usually see above the barcode on a book’s back cover), or a record that’s really fine, it just needs a little extra information. Other times, the source of those records -- a national database of published items associated with the Library of Congress -- just has a weird call number we can’t use because the library that created the original record uses a different system.
In case you’re curious, the most common wrong-call-number issue we deal with involves biographies. Lots of public libraries tend to just put “B” for “biography” on the spine and alphabetize by the last name of the person the book’s about.
We always use Dewey, of course. When any of the above happens to a given book, I hunt down the information we need and add it to the record. Sometimes it’s easy -- the national database may have what I need, just in a different version of the same item -- other times it’s hard, like when there are no Dewey call numbers available for a particular book. Then I have to make it up from scratch, using a set of four ridiculously-complicated books that include instructions like:
These cataloging issues are relatively rare. Out of a cart of 90 books or so, we’ll pull maybe four or five. Once or twice a year, the systems involved decide to stop speaking to each other -- maybe the Consortium just so happens to shut our system down for maintenance, or the Sun gets trigger-happy -- so we’ll get a cartload or two of books that apparently don’t exist. Fortunately, there’s some redundancy built in, like weekly updates that include downloadable packages of records that we can load manually fairly easily.
Sometimes we order books and films from Amazon because they aren’t available through our primary vendor, and those arrive completely naked. No record, no physical processing, nothing. For those, I grab the records from the same national database, check them over for accuracy, double-check the call number, and load them into the catalog. Then they’re physically processed and come back out, ready for shelving.
It probably sounds like a bunch of things that can go wrong, but truthfully, that’s the only thing I really need to do: deal with what goes wrong. It’s a testament to the services we use that it’s rare enough to leave me time for all the other things I do.
Next week, you’ll get another vlog, just as soon as I decide which “classic” to review. I also take requests; just e-mail me or post a comment!
It’s been an interesting semester so far. I still can’t quite account for the fact that midterms are already coming next week.
Just what have I been doing? Well, stuff. Ordering books (not many movies, though, just yet -- I’m waiting for the spring DVD rush of films released during the holidays), coping with the cataloging challenges presented by some of those books, navigating the wilds of our e-books with anyone and everyone who’ll hear from me, getting our new Digital Campus service off the ground, and figuring out ways to work with the English Language Institute here on campus. I’ve also temporarily added inter-library loan processing to the list while our specialist is out for a few weeks. There’ll be another post on that new experience soon!
On an interesting note, someone who managed to walk into my office a week or two ago and noticed a new-book cart full of, well, new books, wanted to know exactly what it is that I do with them. The silly thing actually mentioned writing about it on the blog, because he thought it was always interesting to really get a look behind the scenes.
If you disagree, turn back now. Otherwise, abandon all hope.
We do the majority of our purchases through a single vendor with which we have a very good long-standing relationship. They take care of just about everything for us, from providing information about each book to load into the catalog, to putting the barcode sticker on the front of the book. They’re a major time-saver.
9 times out of 10, new books arrive in perfect shape and head straight to the shelves within a week of arriving. The rest of the time is where I come in.
Sometimes the record loaded doesn’t include enough information (a frequent-enough occurrence for less-mainstream titles like She seized the balls), or sometimes the systems involved get a little confused about what goes where. The end result is usually a record that only has the title and ISBN number (that mess of 13 digits you usually see above the barcode on a book’s back cover), or a record that’s really fine, it just needs a little extra information. Other times, the source of those records -- a national database of published items associated with the Library of Congress -- just has a weird call number we can’t use because the library that created the original record uses a different system.
In case you’re curious, the most common wrong-call-number issue we deal with involves biographies. Lots of public libraries tend to just put “B” for “biography” on the spine and alphabetize by the last name of the person the book’s about.
We always use Dewey, of course. When any of the above happens to a given book, I hunt down the information we need and add it to the record. Sometimes it’s easy -- the national database may have what I need, just in a different version of the same item -- other times it’s hard, like when there are no Dewey call numbers available for a particular book. Then I have to make it up from scratch, using a set of four ridiculously-complicated books that include instructions like:
“Add to each subdivision identified by * the numbers following the numbers following 671 in 671.2-671.8, e.g., welding aluminum 673.72252.”Or:
“Add to 01 the numbers following 781 in 781.1-781.5, e.g., Spanish folk music for springtime 781.6261015242, rhythm in Spanish folk music for springtime 781.62610152421224.”These are unusual cases, I admit; it isn’t often you see a sentence that says, “the numbers following the numbers following …” or call numbers that are 17 digits long focusing on a specific aspect of a specific type of folk music used during a specific time of year.
These cataloging issues are relatively rare. Out of a cart of 90 books or so, we’ll pull maybe four or five. Once or twice a year, the systems involved decide to stop speaking to each other -- maybe the Consortium just so happens to shut our system down for maintenance, or the Sun gets trigger-happy -- so we’ll get a cartload or two of books that apparently don’t exist. Fortunately, there’s some redundancy built in, like weekly updates that include downloadable packages of records that we can load manually fairly easily.
Sometimes we order books and films from Amazon because they aren’t available through our primary vendor, and those arrive completely naked. No record, no physical processing, nothing. For those, I grab the records from the same national database, check them over for accuracy, double-check the call number, and load them into the catalog. Then they’re physically processed and come back out, ready for shelving.
It probably sounds like a bunch of things that can go wrong, but truthfully, that’s the only thing I really need to do: deal with what goes wrong. It’s a testament to the services we use that it’s rare enough to leave me time for all the other things I do.
Next week, you’ll get another vlog, just as soon as I decide which “classic” to review. I also take requests; just e-mail me or post a comment!
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
We're back with some new books!
I’m applying the defibrillators to this blog.
It’s been over a month since the last post. There are a few reasons for this, including a two-week vacation, a new semester to prepare for, a dearth of time to read for the vlog, and the sheer number of new books coming in.
So I offer this post up as an apology for my neglectful ways. It’s a return to tradition: New book cart!
Truthfully, they aren’t all that new, and I plan to only cover the three that have stuck in my mind the most. Here we go ...
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Stephen King is one of those writers who’s so much a part of our culture that each new book he produces is an Event-with-a-capital-E, regardless of how good it may or may not be. His output took a wrong turn sometime in the mid-1990s, but has since bounced back with new creepfests like Duma Key. This upturn continues with 11/22/63, which anyone over the age of 45 and history buffs knows is the date of the Kennedy assassination.
Actually, this book is interesting in a number of ways. It’s less horrific than the work he’s known for and seems to encompass a few new themes. A GED teacher finds out that a local friend who owns a diner has discovered a portal to 1958 in his storeroom. Together, they come up with a plan to avert the Kennedy assassination. Since the other side of the portal is anchored five years before then, it’s a long plan indeed. Fascinating idea, and a terrific execution (no pun intended). Bonus points for a significant librarian character!
Erasure by Percival Everett
An under-the-surface evaluation of exploitative publishing, this novel follows the story of a fairly-successful African-American author who’s spent a few years being rejected by publisher after publisher. The dissolution of his success and its fallout, including an elderly mother who needs care that he can no longer afford, is made all the worse by a best-selling novel by an African-American woman who rides the life out of every stereotype in the book.
In response to this injustice -- why is this minstrel show so successful when his own work can’t get published? -- he writes what he thinks is a scathing parody called My Pafology, but which a publisher and, eventually, the world, think is a hugely-popular bestseller. As our main character becomes wealthier and wealthier, he struggles with the ethics involved in exploiting prejudices without seeking to break them down, and the darker side of popular entertainment. This book manages to be wickedly funny, cringe-inducing, and above all, thought-provoking.
Mrs. Nixon: A novelist imagines a life by Ann Beattie
I suppose this book should come with a disclaimer: Don’t read it if you’re a history buff. Beattie writes what amounts to a fictionalized biography, which is to say it’s not actually a biography. It’s a story about Pat Nixon and the life Beattie imagines she may have led as Richard Nixon’s wife through every scandal and misdeed that plagued his administration and marriage.
In general, Beattie doesn’t worry too much about historical accuracy; she based most of the story on already-extant published sources instead of personal papers that would have revealed insights into the First Lady's interior world. She also doesn’t worry about writing a conventional novel; the book reads like a collection of short stories starring the same main character, interspersed with Beattie’s own examination of the craft of writing itself. The result is interesting because you come away with the sense that there are really three main characters in the book: both Nixons and Beattie herself.
That about covers it for the moment! More to come next week.
It’s been over a month since the last post. There are a few reasons for this, including a two-week vacation, a new semester to prepare for, a dearth of time to read for the vlog, and the sheer number of new books coming in.
So I offer this post up as an apology for my neglectful ways. It’s a return to tradition: New book cart!
Truthfully, they aren’t all that new, and I plan to only cover the three that have stuck in my mind the most. Here we go ...
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Stephen King is one of those writers who’s so much a part of our culture that each new book he produces is an Event-with-a-capital-E, regardless of how good it may or may not be. His output took a wrong turn sometime in the mid-1990s, but has since bounced back with new creepfests like Duma Key. This upturn continues with 11/22/63, which anyone over the age of 45 and history buffs knows is the date of the Kennedy assassination.
Actually, this book is interesting in a number of ways. It’s less horrific than the work he’s known for and seems to encompass a few new themes. A GED teacher finds out that a local friend who owns a diner has discovered a portal to 1958 in his storeroom. Together, they come up with a plan to avert the Kennedy assassination. Since the other side of the portal is anchored five years before then, it’s a long plan indeed. Fascinating idea, and a terrific execution (no pun intended). Bonus points for a significant librarian character!
Erasure by Percival Everett
An under-the-surface evaluation of exploitative publishing, this novel follows the story of a fairly-successful African-American author who’s spent a few years being rejected by publisher after publisher. The dissolution of his success and its fallout, including an elderly mother who needs care that he can no longer afford, is made all the worse by a best-selling novel by an African-American woman who rides the life out of every stereotype in the book.
In response to this injustice -- why is this minstrel show so successful when his own work can’t get published? -- he writes what he thinks is a scathing parody called My Pafology, but which a publisher and, eventually, the world, think is a hugely-popular bestseller. As our main character becomes wealthier and wealthier, he struggles with the ethics involved in exploiting prejudices without seeking to break them down, and the darker side of popular entertainment. This book manages to be wickedly funny, cringe-inducing, and above all, thought-provoking.
Mrs. Nixon: A novelist imagines a life by Ann Beattie
I suppose this book should come with a disclaimer: Don’t read it if you’re a history buff. Beattie writes what amounts to a fictionalized biography, which is to say it’s not actually a biography. It’s a story about Pat Nixon and the life Beattie imagines she may have led as Richard Nixon’s wife through every scandal and misdeed that plagued his administration and marriage.
In general, Beattie doesn’t worry too much about historical accuracy; she based most of the story on already-extant published sources instead of personal papers that would have revealed insights into the First Lady's interior world. She also doesn’t worry about writing a conventional novel; the book reads like a collection of short stories starring the same main character, interspersed with Beattie’s own examination of the craft of writing itself. The result is interesting because you come away with the sense that there are really three main characters in the book: both Nixons and Beattie herself.
That about covers it for the moment! More to come next week.
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