What is up with libraries these days? Part One

I know many of you are not librarians by trade, so you may not be aware of the shake ups happening in our little world these days. I would say it all started back when Al Gore invented the internet. There were people who said, "Wait. That's not true. I need to go to my local library and ask one of those librarians for the real story." And then there were those people who said, "Wait. What's the internet? I need to go to my library and see if I can check that out with my library card." It was this moment in time (or one very near by) that set libraries off on a trajectory into the information age.

Just one second person who coined the "information age" phrase. We're trying to say that there was no information before Al Gore invented the internet? Because I was under the impression that humans have been dealing with information ever since they figured out they could communicate with each other.

Librarians of the 21st century (I claim that title when the hit action-packed, sci-fi movie is released) are faced with an overwhelming task: making all ideas available to all people. Back when printed books were the status quo and we didn't have to worry about all this digital nonsense, it was a bit easier to say with some confidence that, after a diligent search, all of the information on X subject had been found with perhaps a few exceptions that may have been located in musty archives inaccessible to anyone. Now, there is no confidence that any one person could ever find ALL the information available on a topic. As soon as you finish your first go around, dozens of articles, websites, and self-published books could have been released. The idea of a comprehensive literature review should terrify the average person.

But there, you see, librarians are not just "the average person." We have knowledge, we have advanced degrees, we have super secret special powers that allow us to fly... Wait. That last one is a bit too far. But we are able to tap into the collective knowledge of our current and past civilizations to find you the best response for your most pressing questions. Yes, we are awesome. And yes, there is a difference between the library clerk who give you a blank stare when you ask a complicated question and the professional librarian just dying to have someone ask them something that will require more than pointing towards the restroom.

A fellow book lover recently passed along this blog post by a librarian that often has very strong opinions (I would share this persons name, but I only know this person's screen name: the.effing.librarian). Be warned that there is some language both in the post and in the comments. While I think that librarians, generally speaking, have a fuller vocabulary than the rest of the world (we do have unlimited access to all of those dictionaries after all), I think the language displays the passion that we all feel towards this debate. The.effing.librarians was responding to Seth Godin's recent post that has sparked a huge debate about the future of libraries and the librarians who work in them.

So what's the big deal, you may ask? Just move on, librarians, get with the times, you may say. For the most part, libraries lead the way of getting with the times. They used computers regularly before most business recognized their value. They jumped on the Internet bandwagon as soon as possible, sharing and collaborating and making sure that patrons really did have access to everything. Much to the chagrin of the bun-bedecked librarian, we are hip (but perhaps I just reduced our inherent hipness by using the very word). We have ipads and kindles and instant stream movies, music, and audio books. We are digitizing and archiving and programming and whatever. And here is another super power I forgot to address: we do this all with almost no money. I know, right? We're amazing.

But with this push towards all things digital, we forget that first tenant that all librarians swear to upon graduation (it's sort of like doctors making the Hippocratic oath, only not at all): I, (state your name), do so solemnly swear that I will neither discriminate user or resource and will provide access to all people to all information.

Get that? We are not allowed to discriminate against users (which, by the way, is pretty much an American thing. The.effing.librarian makes an excellent point by stating that many countries absolutely DO NOT have anything that even resembles US public libraries open and free to all). We also CANNOT discriminate against our resources. For many decades, that has meant primarily the content of the resources. As librarians, we leave our personal preferences at the door and try to offer our patrons the range of information on all topics. We are not called to decide HOW people think; we are just trying to get them to think. More recently, this discrimination has been more about carrier type (that's an inside joke for catalogers facing the rather catastrophic appearance of RDA which has nothing do do with recommended daily allowances, thank you Google). What does discrimination against carrier type mean? It means administrators and some narrow minded librarians are throwing away their books. Gone. No print. It's obsolete. Everything is on the Internet.

No. False. Much to almost everyone's surprise everything is NOT on the Internet. In fact, most things are not on the Internet. Like all of those books that you just threw away. Google hasn't digitized those yet. And all of those archives that you just tossed. They don't exist any where. And all of those photos and newspaper articles and letters and magazines. Those aren't there either. You may think that everything is on the Internet because (insert your favorite search engine here) just dumped 7 billion websites onto your computer screen when you searched for "economic decline," but looks can be deceiving. I recently saw this rather revealing post On the dangers of personalization. So now we must also consider that search engines are hiding results from you based on your search history in addition to not actually being able to search the entirety of human knowledge in the first place. Google never earned a master's degree in library science. It took no oath not to discriminate against users or resources. And when was the last time Netflix "genres" actually suggested something you might want to watch (sorry, that's another soap box).

I don't know, people. It's a sad world in which we live. As I sit here typing this, I continue to have the same nagging thought: Who cares? Who cares that people in the United States can't think critically. Who cares that they aren't getting the best answer to their question as long as they get some answer. Who cares that entire sections of our culture and past are being thrown into the dumpsters. The idea of "good enough" permeates our culture from people eating at restaurants that care more about being fast than serving food that tastes good to education systems interested only in the results of a standardized test to corporations that are only interested in the bottom line and ignore the quality of their product.

Well, let's rise above librarians. Let's care. Let's fight this fight until there is no more fight to fight. Let's join together to work with the e-publishers that want to tell us how to be a library. We need to tell them! (If you don't know about that, go sign this petition and go read Andy Woodworth's blog post on why he started the petition). We are Librarians, a part of a long history of subversion, controversy, rebellion, and knowledge. If knowledge is power, we have the power of entire civilizations at our finger tips. Let's use it!

Part Two will more than likely be on why most librarians won't actually step up to the plate and why I hope that I will be proven wrong.

Time to put the crafty in the catalog

Well, I think it's about time that I actually post on something crafty since I've billed myself as such. Background: my mom and I recently attended the Original Sewing & Quilt Expo in Lakeland, FL (which btw, will be happening next Feb. 23-25). I attended the Expo in Tampa couple years ago and was super excited that I would be able to go this year. One of the funnest parts of the expo are the various Make and Take crafts that they have sponsored by various booths. My mom humored me as I eagerly picked three projects:

Disclaimer: For this particular post, I'm not going to go into much detail on the patterns since these were not my own design. I will say they are all super easy, and those that are really crafty can probably figure them out.

Project number one (actually purchased the kit at the Expo and just finally finished it this morning): Reusable snack pack and sandwich sack.
First let me start by saying that I have wanted to make these for many months. I saw them posted on a blog a while ago and tried, without success, to find the fabric needed (granted, I didn't try very hard). I was happy to see that this was one of the Make & Takes at the Expo.

The lining of these two items is PUL fabric, also used many times in lining for cloth diapers. The outside is a laminate fabric as well, but could be simple cotton. The bag is made out of two simple rectangles folded in half. Use French Seams on the sides so that crumbs won't get stuck in the fabric (how gross would that be?). The sandwich keeper has the same lining as the bag. As you sew around the edges (fabrics right sides together) just be sure to leave an opening for turning. The Velcro on both items was sewn on before doing any seams. I can't wait to try them out!

The second project is a fabric cover for those little mini-packs of tissues. I always thought these things were super complicated. Turns out, they are super simple. The key is to cut the lining (the pink fabric) slightly longer than the outside fabric. Doing that gives you the nice little border that looks like bias tape. Use French Seams on the inside of this one as well to give it a nice finished look.

The last kit that I did is a little zippered bag. The clever thing about this one, is that the zipper is only half of a zipper (bizarre to grasp, but true). If I make any more of these (which I will, since I bought a ton of zippers), I'll use whole zippers. It will just require one more seam that way. The assembly of this particular one starts with one half of the zipper, no pull attached. Sew the zipper half to the top, sew the bottom seam, than attach the pull to the zipper (which the lady at the expo did with her teeth... a little gross). Sew the last side seam and voila! A cute little bag for all those little things in our lives.

I love little crafts like this because they make great gifts. What crafty things to you like to give or get?

Book Report: The Pirates! books by Gideon Defoe

My first book report was a bit on the serious side (anyone finished Sacajawea yet?). The book selections for this report go completely in the opposite direction.

I discovered these gems while browsing for books at my local library. I needed to find small, light books to take with me on a plane trip. These are all small and light, but little did I know how hilarious they are. I am talking about laugh out loud (no abbreviations here) funny. And when I say "out loud" I mean I was getting strange looks from the other plane passengers.

The Pirates! in an adventure with scientists (2004)

The Pirates! in an adventure with Ahab (2005)
The Pirates! in an adventure with communists (2006)
The Pirates! in an adventure with Napoleon (2008)

Gideon Defoe has an amazingly ironic, absurd, clean, clever humor that is hard to find in modern fiction. For a great sample of his writing, check out his website where I was pleased to learn that he not only has a new Pirates! book planned for 2012 but also has a movie in the work from the first Pirates! adventure. I am beyond ecstatic.

On to some plot elements. The stories follow the Pirate Captain and his band of dedicated (but completely inept) pirates on their various absurd adventures. In the first adventure, they meet up with Charles Darwin (who was trying to convince the world that monkeys could look like humans if they wore formal attire). Much chaos ensues and ham is eaten.

In the second book (adventures with Ahab or whaling depending on which side of the pond you live), the Pirate Captain and his surly band chase after the elusive white whale (after being tricked by his nemesis once again) so that they can pay for a new ship which they could not afford. At one point they sail to Las Vegas (you heard me) to earn money the way everyone in Las Vegas earns money: start a stage show. Chaos ensues and ham is eaten.

The third book introduces the Pirates to opera and communists. The Pirate Captain has his hands full with this adventure and, as always, chaos ensues. Ham may or may not be eaten.


The fourth of the pirate adventures finds the pirates with Napoleon while he is in exile. Napoleon and the Pirate Captain have a power struggle. Chaos ensues (although perhaps not quite so much), but ham is most definitely eaten.

These books are perfect for a person like myself who can never remember the names of characters in books. Defoe bestows such names as the pirate with the red scarf or the albino pirate or the pirate with gangrene. It's wonderful. Defoe also disperses little gems in each book (like the reader's guide in one and a list of pages and pages of made up titles of other available Pirates! books).

You may be saying to yourself, "These books can't possibly be as funny as this Joy person is saying."

Perhaps.

But I challenge you to read some of the excerpts of the books found here, here, here, and here. If you don't even chuckle, well, perhaps we can't be friends any more.

But seriously, we each have our own reading tastes, and I love these books. And I'll still be your friend even if we don't like the same books. Maybe.

So who is your favorite comedic writer?

Another mini clean

After this weekend's major purge, I wanted to finish another mini-project. So I attacked the downstair's desk (not to be confused with the upstairs desk in previous posts).

Here's a before post that really doesn't do justice to the chaos that this desk has been for the last couple years (that's right, we live with chaos for years):

Before this before shot, there was no laptop because there was no place for the laptop. There was no desk top for that matter. It was a useless piece of furniture that we used to stash EVERYTHING. I'm amazed at times that we didn't kill ourselves walking past the thing with everything as precarious as it was. I can just imagine avalanches of stuff tumbling down upon us. A couple of weeks ago, I cleaned the desk enough to move my computer over here and out of the living room. It's increased my productivity immensely; however, I am falling behind on my Hulu watching. Watching tv shows at a desk just isn't as comfortable as the sofa.

But tonight, tonight I decided that the desk would finally become fully functional. It took me a bit longer than the phone corner, but it is well worth it. My productivity levels may actually go down as I sit and marvel in the beauty of a this newly clean desk.

Tomorrow I hope to have the after picture of the guest room corner on which I've been so diligently working. I have to get that done tomorrow, anyway, since we're expecting my family (and DH's family) this weekend for Easter.

I know that my cleaning habits have pretty much always been motivated by company (can't have a messy house when others are here!). Do you find that you're more motivated to clean if others will be visiting or do you do regular maintenance?

My vertical file

For this entire weekend (well, most of it anyway), I've worked on this corner. This corner has a history. The table you see is our old "dining room" table (we've never actually had a dining room). After my parent's gifted us with their old dining room table, I didn't have the heart to discard this one. It works well as a craft table (most of the time), and you should be able to see my ironing board on the top. The printer (at least one of them) is on the top of the table, too. Along with a bunch of other stuff. But my main focus this weekend was all of that STUFF you see under the table. It's been a lovely little hiding place for a couple years now. I just shoved any old thing under there. It's mostly random power cables (our wire bag), my old laptop, empty folders and binders, and papers. Lots-o-papers. My task this weekend: purge the paper.

The first task was to bring most of it downstairs so I wouldn't be distracted by the other corners of this room (sidebar: I only got distracted once twice. The first time was when I discovered a big almost empty box that was perfect for all of those greeting cards I can't throw away. The second time was when I realized I could put all of our response cards from our wedding (yes, I saved them all... and now I know the people who didn't respond but showed up anyway) into the album we used for our guest book. Great idea, but it did sap quite a bit of time this afternoon). Anywho, here is where we (and when I say we, I mean I) were at sometime early this weekend:

I know that I've been working for a while at this point because I already have two bins almost totally empty. So, the grand tour. Bottom left is my "professional" box filled with all things library. The two black bins contained an assortment of stuff and old files on who knows what. Above that is a box of professional magazines, my personal file box, and a box of empty binders and folders. Back at the bottom in the crate, we have another box of files related to my undergraduate education and random sorting piles for paper (keep, toss, shred).

Everything was going just fine until I reached that box of personal files. Mind you, I haven't opened this thing in years. Years. But what happens when I do? I remember how much care I took when assembling the assortment of materials contained in it's many folders. Just look at it's beauty:

I was sitting there staring at the thing when DH walked up to me and asked if I was ok. It was in this moment that I realized, no, everything was not ok. This box was me. This box (and here was the epiphany) was my vertical file! So, for you non-library folk, that probably doesn't mean much, and you may even need a definition. Basically though, a vertical file is a collection of important (at least to the collector) items that help paint a picture or history of the chosen topic. And in this case, the topic was me. It took me a good 15 or 20 minutes to pull the first file out. I took half a dozen pictures of the thing as it was. And then, I dove in to American Literature. It's a good thing that was the first folder because I didn't particularly care for the topic (nothing against the professor!). By the time I was done, I had purged about half of the materials in the box. To be honest, most of what I threw away was work done by other people (what ever possessed me to keep all of the handouts from all of my classmates... I may never know).

I finished the paper purge this evening. Check out these pictures:

 It's hard to read the numbers on the tape measure, but that's just over 2 feet of paper. Gone. And a box of empty folders and binders to be sent to a good cause (i.e. middle school)

And look at all that's left:

Two completely empty crates and a much more condensed collection of papers. I still have quite a bit of stuff in my vertical file, and I'm not sure that I'll ever get rid of all of it. But I think I've kept enough to make the memories real. I even kept the page of notes from my Modern Philosophy class that contains evidence of the ONE time I fell asleep in class. The stuff still needs to go back upstairs, but that's for another day. And for the DH. These boxes are heavy!

Question of the post: Do you hold on to ephemera (i.e. stuff) to help you remember the past, or do you ditch the stuff and hope the memories last?

Book report: Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo

I've been thinking about adding regular book reviews to my blog highlighting some of the more memorable things that I'm reading or have read. Since I won't be cleaning again until Thursday or so (I do work some days), I thought I would start with a book that helped jump start all this cleaning in the B-house.

During my elementary school years, I became quite obsessed with all things Native American. I think this all happened when my mom started investigating our family tree and spoke of our Algonquin ancestors.

Needless to say, when it came time to do a book report on a biography, I chose Sacajawea (it may or may not have been this book. The cover looks familiar). While I was imagining myself crossing the Rocky Mountains with a Cabbage Patch kid strapped to my back, my mom was reading Anna Lee Waldo's masterpiece of a novel about this legendary woman. I just recently finished it for myself, and I find myself even more fascinated with this amazing woman.

The novel itself is huge; the paperback is 1359 pages. Ms. Waldo certainly did her research and includes transcriptions of primary source materials, speculations about Sacajawea's life, and plentiful source documents. I loved every word of this novel. The writing paints such a vivid picture of what Sacajawea's life may have been from her kidnapping early in life to her marriage to a French Canadian trapper to her travels with Lewis and Clark and so much more. This woman was inspiring and amazing if only because she did indeed travel across our country on foot with a baby strapped to her back. But her life included so much more than that life changing trip.

What struck me most while reading this book, though, was a continuing recurrence of Sacajawea's small pouch that she always kept close containing her most prized possessions. That's it: one small pouch. It contained a blue bead from her grandmother, a memorable feather, a medal, a bead from another time in her life, and a few other items. That's it. Granted, she had other possessions at various times in her life, but these were the things that she held most dear (at least according to the author). If Sacajawea, arguably one of the most important women in American history, only had need of these few small tokens to savor her momentous life, why in the world do I have an entire house filled with STUFF? Thus began the purge.

I think everyone should read this book. Yes, it took quite a bit of time, but it was time so well invested. I got so wrapped up in it, that I almost forgot to read the last book for the Ledger Book Club. Good thing The Man in Uniform by Kate Taylor (also a good read) was a quick read.

It's (not) a jungle out there

After yesterday's Bird of Paradise fiasco, DH and I were both a little under-excited about today's planned redo of the back yard. Actually, the hubs was in quite the grumpy mood this morning before church. Thankfully, the worship was wonderful, the message was inspiring, and the fellowship was encouraging. That, and we got to think about working with the most horticulturally talented person that we know: the bestest roomie in the world!

Let me refresh your memory about what we were dealing with so that you can fully appreciate the transformation of this space. We started with this:

 The jungle. All told, these BOP were probably about 10-12 feet high.


After yesterday, we ended up with this:

Clean slate!








Our wonderfully talented friend came over around noon, scoped out the place, and made some suggestions and calculations. After a brief stop for lunch (yummy Five Guys!), we headed to our local home improvement store (the one with the blue theme). We found just the plants for us: 4 podocarpus to create a barrier and 2 climbing fig to cover the ugly pink wall. We also ended up taking a trip to the other blue big box store to get a watering can and some veggie seeds on a whim. And then back to the first blue store for mulch. There was much labor, mud, digging, and fun had by all. And because I'm just so excited about the transformation, I'm just going to share the photos.




I think it's beautiful. And the best part about the whole thing (besides being right on budget) is that we were able to reclaim the space that is rightfully ours that one of our neighbors had tried to steal from us. I can't wait to watch these new plants grow. And because this friend who knows my gardening abilities so well chose the plants (as in, if it's in the yard, it's on its own), I know she selected plants that will be hard to kill.

I feel like a garden party may be in order. The question of the post: do you have a green thumb or do plants whither when you come into view?