What's In A Name?

While doing some research at the NY Public Library I found myself confronted by something in my profession. I was entranced by the Astor room, a gleaming three story entryway of marble and when I read the dedication I saw that it was named in honor of a philanthropist who had sat on the library board for a number of decades. When I first began my career in public libraries I worked at the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library. LeRoy Collins had been a major figure in state politics and the library director was vehement about the full name of the library always being used. "Good afternoon, welcome to the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library, how can I help you" is a mouthful to get out every time you are doing telephone reference.

What I have come to understand is that libraries are not named after librarians. No matter what I accomplish in my career there will never be a Christian Zabriskie Library (unless, as waggish friends have suggested, I quit my job, go out and make a ton of money, then dedicate that to a library). I understand that financiers are crucial to libraries since they provide the cash to do major capital improvements and I also understand that naming a building after someone's mother is a great way of raising cash. It is just a little depressing that if Joe starts a hot dog stand he can call it Joe's Hot Dog Stand and have a sense of ownership over it. I myself grew up in and around my father's business, Zabriskie's Pharmacy, and it made me really proud to have my name up on a sign on mainstreet.

Of course I realize that by the very nature of my profession I cannot OWN the library, it is the public's property not mine and I am a caretaker and facilitator between them and it and will be even when I am a library director. In some cases though this lack of recognition for our profession seems a little ridiculous.

Melvile Dewey is often called the Father of Modern Librarianship. Not only did he invent the Dewey Decimal Classification system which is still used in most American public libraries, he also was one of the founders of the American Library Association, and helped to start Library Journal, to this day the largest professional journal out there. He was one of the great agents of social change in our society as his reinvisioning of the public library made it accessible to people of all classes. He was instrumental in founding the first school of library science at Columbia University and demanded that the school be open to women. He reformed the Library of Congress and made it the national catalogue that it is today. The public library as we know it simply would not exist were it not for this man.

Yet I cannot find a single library anywhere named in his honor...

Apologies

I've been having some trouble logging in to the blog to add new material. All apologies to anyone who has been checking in. More to follow when I am not heading onto the desk for a two hour afterschool marathon.

Games About Librarianship

While doing a random search for Library newsfeeds I came across these two games developed by Carnagie Mellon University Libraries. One is fair, the other is brilliant.

http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/etc/index.html

Within Range is what a lot of people think Librarians do all day, put books back on shelves according to an esoteric classification system. I have used a similar game as part of a training session when I was a library assistant during grad school. It is an OK way to start to understand the mechanics if not the purpose of the Library of Congress classification system. We librarians really don't do all that much of this stuff though, it is usually up to pages and shelvers to handle this kind of book traffic.

I'll Get It though is just brilliant. It creates a nice little flash model of the real life of reference librarianship and public service. If you want to get any sense of what I really do all day (in between class visits, programming, collection development and the like) this is your ticket in. Seriously.

Trading Card

OK, this image tool is pretty fun. I did always want to be on a trading card despite having no skill whatsoever in any sport which would actaully GET me on a trading card. I didn't collect them either, but as a kid you see fame applied in these very tangible ways.

For the record that is me in that suit. I was Libro the Library Lion for the Bermuda National Library. The suit was incredibly hot and impossible to see out of. Having said all that it was pretty fun to get the kids reactions (except for the little bastards who pulled my tail). I do sort of wish that the library could have gotten a tshirt or something made up for me because without the signs I used to carry there is really no way to know that the lion is a LIBRARY lion (except when I made my library RRRRREEEEEAAAAAD roar).

A lot of kids suspected that Mr. Z was Libro. There was a great moment when Mrs. Z wore the suit and the two of us were seen side by side. I liken the looks of shock to those great DC comics moments when Batman would pretend to be Superman so that Supes could be seen with his "good freind" Clark Kent all to throw off the keen witted Lois Lane.

You spend enough time with your head encased in a Lion mask and this is the kind of thing that comes to mind.

Shift in SQL?

As a question regarding technology I am wondering if other lirbarians are finding it harder and harder to make the web dance to thier trickier questions.

Maybe I am just out of the reference habit but it used to be that by running a complex SQL string, something with lots of ANDs, ORs, and NOTs along with the judicious use of truncation and parenthesis, I could pretty much always find any answer I wanted when I wanted it.

There are so many dead ends on the web now, so much purchasing power tied into the search engines that I am finding it increasingly difficult to get answers with the facility that I once did.

Databases still function well and they are a terrific source of information of course. The web works for so many timely issues and immediate answers though and it seems as if commerce (the need which opened up the web to begin with) has made the actual use of the web more complicated.

First Library Love

While tooling around Flickr I found an image of the library in my hometown.

This was the place I would hang out and wait for my father to be done with work, where my mom was on the board of trustees, where I would bound up the stairs on all fours to get to the children's room. This is where I discovered the mystery of the stacks and the depth of subjects you could find in them.

Pretty fun how much of your own history you can find through other people's pictures on Flickr.

Why I Believe

Libraries have a unique role in our society. They are a single place where all people regardless of age, gender, religion, socio economic status, or educational achievement can be treated with the same dignity respect and care.

This is not a simple thing, this is a trust that we have been granted in the profession, a code which we need to live by, a mandate to take us through the most difficult days of our service.

It is our responsibility to provide people with the information that they need in their lives whether that be for work or play. We should provide them with it with respect and a level of service on par with any private organization. We should anticipate their information needs so that the materials that they need are available on the shelf before they ask for them.

We have to believe in the library to believe in ourselves as professionals. No other place in society offers as wide a range of support for all persons. Are we willing to rise to fulfill that role daily? To be the best we can, to provide our public with what they really deserve, we must.

Hammer Horror

During the Halloween season I always treat myself to a couple of weeks of horror films. As a lifelong horror flick fan (thank you channel 56 Boston for your Creature Double Feature which capped off my Saturday morning cartoon watching throughout my childhood), I'll watch any horror film anytime but this season makes me really revel in it.

There are good horror films, there are lousy horror films, then there are Hammer horror films. Hammer Studios was a British based film company which, in the sixties and seventies, produced these incredible gothic horror films which reshaped the form. They are lush technicolor tapestries of diaphanous dresses and scarlet red blood populated by British beauties, gullible villagers, and dark production design touches that are just wonderful.

These films have hangings and guillotines, graves are frequently pillaged and vampires get all the girls just by staring at them. The fact that Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, both trained stage actors, form the core of the casting pool means that for the most part they are well acted and both leave their own interpretations on the canon of movie monsters.

Lee's Dracula is rough sex barely held under control, a cruel distant figure with painfully bloodshot eyes (early hard contacts that, covering his entire eye were evidently incredibly painful). Cushing's Dr. Frankenstein turns the mad scientist into the real monster as he goes about cutting up anyone he can find and stitching them back together again. He is a menacing megalomaniac with skin pulled so tight over his lean face and form that he seems to be an animated and malevolent skeleton.

It is really great stuff.

There are dozens of Hammer films out there and they do vary in quality a great deal. Many are hard to track down even with libraries and Netflicks to draw on. For collection development purposes two collections can pretty much do the trick.

The Hammer Horror Collection

http://video.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?z=y&EAN=085393483326&itm=3

is a must have, covering the core films of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy.

The Hammer Horror Series

http://video.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?z=y&EAN=025192833328&itm=1

gets you their iteration of the werewolf and the phantom of the opera as well as a variety of the "Hitchcock" style films they made as B pictures in black and white on the cheap.

Good Afternoon Mr. Wells

That is HG, not Orson. A British researcher is suggesting that mankind will evolve into two seperate species.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=489653&in_page_id=1965

The social activist in me just screams at all this, the idea that there will be genetic haves and have nots is just so wrong to me that it makes me furious.

The scifi fan in me thinks it is kinda cool though.

Lifelong Learner

After taking a run through the lifelong learner slideshow I found that I have been embracing this stuff for years just out of necessity.

The things that I always have the greatest trouble with are finding the time and the patience to do it. There are always other things on my plate, especially at work, and I expect good results while I am still in the "reading the manual" stage of things.

The stuff I embrace is the whole capacity to learn that we keep and get better at the more we do it. I learned auto repair because my 20 yr old Volvo wagon needed it (it was 18 years NEW when I got it!). I learned how to work in fibreglass when I bought a sailboat for a song that just happened to have a couple of gaping holes in the hull (I knew about them beforehand, yes the boat did sink, yes I did get it up off the bottom for under a hundred bucks, yes I did feel like McGuyver when I did it). I am a great believer in the capacity of all of us to keep learning all our live, we just need to stay motivated (and life often provides us with that motivation when we least expect it).