I am reminded why I don't use my public library more often for homework. Was the photocopier abuse that rampant when I worked there, or have I just blocked it out over time?

I will admit, though, as much as I hate the echo-chamber quality of the renovations they did, it's got a certain elegance to it.

Now if someone could explain to me the justification behind asking if my selected person in Who's Who for my Ready Ref assignment is real... Has Who's Who ever listed fake people? I'm just sort of boggled by that.

Wow, two in one day. This is from the excellent library_grrls community here on LiveJournal, posted here by nerak_g. I don't think I need to explain why I think this is worth passing on.

Library of Congress African & Middle Eastern Reading Room to close permanently

Dear H-Africa colleagues -

Effective late December 2006, the Library of Congress will close its
African and Middle Eastern Reading Room. This reading room is the
public
service point within the Library of Congress for Africa, the Near East
(including Central Asia and the Caucasus), and for Hebraica (including
Jewish studies and Biblical studies, ancient and modern Israel, the
ancient Near East and pre-Islamic Egypt).

The AMED Reading Room is being closed to accommodate a permanent
exhibition gallery showing the recently-acquired Jay I. Kislak
Collection of early Americana materials.

The Library of Congress plans to move its Africa-related reference
service to a reading room shared with its European Division (ED),
according to
Dr Mary-Jane Deeb, director of LC's African and Middle Eastern Division
(AMED).

The current AMED and ED Reading Rooms hold 20,000-volume reference
collections - dictionaries, handbooks, statistical publications,
atlases, and bibliographic tools. To share the same reading room, both
core
collections will need to be reduced by half.

Dr Deeb told me yesterday that she believes public floorspace in the
Library of Congress is available for a stand-alone AMED Reading Room.
She has started negotiating within the Library of Congress for this new,
separate reading room.

Closing the AMED Reading Room diminishes the Library of Congress's
mission
to make its resources available and useful to the American people.
Alongside other recent decisions, this appears to be more evidence that
the Library of Congress's leadership sees the world's largest library as
merely a museum for books rather than a living research facility
encouraging knowledge and creativity.

Librarian colleagues have suggested that deleting or concealing
"Africa"
from among the Library of Congress's public service points insults or
denigrates Africa, that visiting dignitaries from African states might
read this move as US state policy. But I am amazed that the Library of
Congress leadership would reduce or constrain public reference support
for African research at a time when public interest in the continent is
at
a peak. It goes without saying that cuts in reference collections on
Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine make absolutely no sense
during this time of national awareness, involvement, and sacrifice.

Please help to preserve the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room!
Please speak out to affirm the importance of research support for
African studies at the Library of Congress.

There are several ways to help - but all ways involve letter-writing or
e-mailing.

( Contact information beneath the cut )

Hoped for classes next semester: Law librarianship and records management. Commencing the crossing fingers now...

I spent a good part of yesterday in a Barnes and Noble (taking advantage of the Starbucks and its sweet, sweet caffeine) prepping for this week's midterms. And I started contemplating, while I was there, if it's wise for libraries to refer to their patrons as "customers." Part of this might just be grumpy old librarian syndrome: the library I grew up with, and was a page in for many years, used the term "patron," not "customer." But I'm also becoming comfortable with "user," which is the term many of my readings use.

So whence this use of "customer?" I see it a lot on listservs and lj-communities. I can understand the motivition behind it: we are, essentially a service industry, even if we are not for-profit. Many tenents from the profit-making world hold true, in terms of interacting with our patrons. But saying 'customer' implies a transaction where money is changing hands -- should customer really apply when the currency is information? Do we want to be contributing to that mindset that information should only be available to those willing to pay the price set on it, instead of freely available? That is, to my mind, the long-term implication: "customer," especially when used in the public library context, removes the implication of free-access. Is that somethign we want? Is the need for "customer service" so dire that we can't come up with a more situationally-appropriate phrase? What's wrong with "user" or "patron"?

I'm curious, and I invite comments -- which term (customer, user, patron) do you find most appropriate? Or do you have a different preferred term?

I have just read three posts nearly in a row on comms from librarians who had a patron complain about the amount of Spanish materials available -- not that it was too little, but that it was too much, and it's got me so annoyed I had to log out for a bit.

English is not the only language spoken in the world. There are six billion people on this planet, and more of them are native speakers of Spanish than English. More people are native speakers of Chinese than of English. (And yet, ironically, I speak German for my second language, which ranks below French, Russian, and Bengali, among others.)

Why is it assumed that if you know one language you have to stop using all the others? Where did this come from? I spent one semester abroad, living in a student dorm in Austria. My floormates were from Austria, Germany, France, Slovenia, and Bosnia. Two languages was the minimum: Everyone spoke German or English. Most spoke both those, and at least one other. I was the odd one out. I arrived thinking I was a hotshot for knowing German and going abroad --compared to the rest of them, I could barely communicate.

Do I think people moving to the US should learn to converse in English? Sure. Do I think that implies giving up their other languages? Not at all. That's not how language works. And I'm sure it would shock those patrons, but my understanding and appreciation of English has been immensely enriched by my knowledge of German. Imagine that.

FYI: I'm having trouble accessing one of my past entries, so the comment there isn't unscreened only because I can't get to it. I opened a support request and hopefully the 500 Server Error (do I even want to know what exactly that means?) will be resolved.

And passing on a few links about banned books, in the wake of Banned Books Week (I might be a little behind...)

Georgia Mother Seeks Harry Potter Ban. I would just like to state, for the record, that there are no acceptable reasons for pulling Harry Potter from the shelves. I could be talked into some warning stickers, in the style of Kansas' anti-evolution warnings. For example, volume 5: This Book Contains Poorly Edited Sequences of Overwrought Teenagerhood And An Overuse Of Capslock. Or, for all the books: Warning: This Book Contains Fake Latin Phrases. Or possibly: This Is A Gateway Book That Could Lead To Reading Other Literature.

Although, perhaps not that last, because I heard a story not to long ago about a mother who angrily rounded into a Children's librarian for recommending The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when she asked for good Christian literature for her child, because everyone knows good Christian books don't have witches. Sigh.

To add to the fun, this Georgia county was the same one that tried to eliminate the funds set aside in the budget to purchase Spanish-language materials. And they're hardly the only one. From Tennessee, Bilingual Employee, Spanish Books Outrage Community. The part that really made me want to hit my head against something heavy was the quote from the local social studies teacher in favor of purchasing only English-language material. Apparently this teacher never learned about the fallacies of the slippery-slope argument, because it's displayed in all its glory here. But the best part? They wanted to investigate a newly-hired librarian, because she speaks Spanish. Apparently speaking Spanish automatically means you're an illegal alien now. I wonder what the cut-off is for that: I have about five words of Spanish, and I can count to fifteen. Buenas dias, buenas noches, el dia de las muertos. I can ask where the bathroom is. Does that make me ineligable to apply for a job in Marshall County, TN? I wonder what they'd say if I mentioned if I speak German; I've been called a Nazi more than once for that. There's irony there, somewhere, but I'm not sure Marshall County would see it.

I find it both curious and disturbing that censorship has now gone beyond simply what materials are on the shelf, but now extend to who the librarians are. But the last sentence is somewhat reassuring: The controversy has drawn the attention of the Tennessee Human Rights Commission, which is going to be keeping an eye on the situation.

But before everyone thinks I'm all gloom and doom, this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has been making the rounds: Show Your Librarian Some Love. It's directed at academia, but it's certainly not restricted to that.

Every library I use to do homework in is closed for Columbus Day, save my local public. I could not be more pleased about the two-second commute down the street tomorrow.

Query: Classmates of mine in 700: are any of you using RSS to follow along with classmates' blogs? Is it worth creating/posting new feeds of non-LJ blogs?

This is probably pushing it, but...those of you working with Blogger/Bloglines, if you could enable RSS or Atom feeding, that would be a definate lifesaver. I can walk people through it as well, if anyone needs.

According to work, today is Tuesday. According to school, today is Monday (thanks to yesterday's classes being cancelled for Yom Kippur). The end result of this is that I'm feeling a wee bit schitzophrenic.

I'm observing the growth of postings on lj_biz with greater interest than I normally would, having just examined some of the other popular blogging formats for a lab assignment for 700. Actually, I think I might need to put an addendum on that lab, since features keep changing around on LJ, although that would mean I'd have to check the other sites for updates as well, to be fair. I'm not terribly surprised by the growing pains going on (for the uninitiated, LiveJournal was taken over by SixApart, a company that runs several other blogging services as well, about a year ago), but at this point I'd be very surprised if the site comes through those growing pains with the features that make it unique still intact. I'm curious both to see how the site's managers plan to resolve the PR situation, but I'm also curious to see what the effect will be on sites like GreatestJournal and JournalFen, which were developed from LJ's open source code into LJ-like communities devoted to more fandom-specific pursuits. (Anyone reading this who plans on doing children's or YA librarianship and isn't familiar with the term fandom: ping me. We definately need to chat.) In fact, now I am wondering if LJ's source code is still open -- at some point I'll have to check that out.

I'm also wondering what the effect of the addition of outright corporate sponsorship of communities is going to have on more professional happenings on this site, such as author blogs, or informal communities of professionals -- such as libraries, for example. Overlooking more obvious issues such as astroturfing, I can only wonder how severe any chilling effect on discouse might be. Obviously, we'll find out, since the postings coming down from LJ's management seem to indicate sponsored communities are happening regardless of user input, but I can't help be curious.


In a more academic-related vein, I found this post on gradstudents to be extremely useful. It discusses "Gutting a book," or as it's more informally known, "efficient reading methods." There's some informative links to guides on book gutting (even if the nickname makes me cringe!), which I wish I'd read before I started in on all my reference source evaluations.

For my classmates from 700 who are reading this:

I've noticed there are a few other LJers in this blogging assignment, so I thought I would share the feeds I created for the journals of our classmates that have RSS or Atom feeds available:

aggregate_ed: The Aggregating Educator
animemiz: Scribbles on moe things and times.
childlitreview: Children's Literature Review
miss_storie: Miss Storie

List will be updated if necessary, of course.
As for incunable, anyone using an aggregator who would like feed details, they are as follows:
Atom: http://incunable.livejournal.com/data/atom
RSS: http://incunable.livejournal.com/data/rss

In other news, I am passing up a Yankees game to go home and finish a paper for 702. See what a good student I am?

So we're not supposed to be naming names for the User Questions assignment for my Reference class. Which is a good thing for some, I'm sure, because after all the positive press I've seen the telephone reference service of this terribly iconic local institution get in the last six months or so, the reality was rather disappointing. Here's a hint, future telephone-reference-workers who might be reading this: If you're going to put me on hold for nigh on 15 minutes, tell me so before you hit the hold button, especially if your system doesn't have hold music or even that annoying beep to let me know I'm still connected.

Just the little things, y'know.

And in the associated-with-libraries-by-virtue-of-involving-a-really-gifted-author category, John M. Ford died today. He wrote science fiction/fantasy (see also: the best Star Trek published novels to ever grace my bookshelf, and yes I did just admit quite a bit about myself there), and lovely poetry. Perhaps you read his poem 110 Stories, written in response to 9-11. I did, and I cried over it, and wished I'd been brilliant enough to channel my emotions then into something so poignant.
I've passed some of today reading posts on various blogs from people who knew and loved him, and am much more affected by it all than I'd expected, and now I am contemplating that curious bond between writer and reader, and the things we come away with, even when we don't know the person. But I also think I should email my aunt, who is responsible for things like feeding me Mike Ford's books when I was an impressionable young girl -- oh, and that Star Trek thing -- and tell her this, because she loved his words as much as I did.

On my way out of the office for class but I just spotted this during a quick perusal of CNN.com:

Court bars religious group from using library for worship services.

I'm trying to decide what I think about that -- because I can certainly see both sides of the argument. But overwhelming any opinion is a niggling feeling that this will not be good publicity for libraries, in this ultra-religous time. Flame on, real life, flame on...