Lordy, the Taiga Forum is back with more of their so-called “provocative statements,” which usually provoke nothing more than a discussion about why the Taiga Forum worries its pretty little head about this stuff. The Taiga Forum bills itself as “a community of AULs and ADs challenging the traditional boundaries in libraries.“ For those unfamiliar with the structure of large academic libraries, AULs and ADs are the middle managers between the library deans or directors and the people who do most of the work in the library. If there’s any novelty to the Taiga Forum, it’s that a group of middle managers would even be trying to challenge any boundaries. In my experience, impetus for change comes from below, with middle managers only reluctantly going along. This makes sense, because they get blamed for any failure, but not necessarily given the credit for success. That, after all, is what middle managers are for. The TF goes out of its way not to be taken seriously. ...
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The last post was a bit dark. I'd spent the morning with a newspaper, and reading too much news is always depressing. Plus I wrote it after I discovered that the Rapture hadn’t happened after all, so I really was going to have to write another post and go back to work on Monday. Since the last post was about a significant problem with no solution, let’s look at the lighter side of librarianship and consider an insignificant problem with no solution. The great thing about insignificant problems is that it doesn’t matter if they have solutions! What’s this insignificant problem that has bothered some librarians? That 80% of eligible voters didn’t vote in the last ALA election. And this is terribly important because...because...hmm, I’m not really sure. One librarian cared enough about it to put out a survey to find out why people didn’t vote. If the lack of voting mattered at all, she could be congratulated on seeking real evidence about why people didn’t vote, ...
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A depressing opinion article in the New York Times last week highlighted a study showing low access to books among poor children in Philadelphia, as well as a nonprofit organization called First Book that tries to put new books in poor children’s hands. The study shows that there aren’t many books for sale near poor children in Philadelphia, and that if there were a lot of families couldn’t afford them. It also demonstrates that even when there are school and public libraries around, they have many fewer books than such libraries in Philadelphia’s wealthier parts of town. In other words, a lot of time and expense went into proving that poor kids don’t have as much of anything as rich kids. This kind of thing might be truly surprising to tenured professors at big research universities, but not to anyone else. A paragraph from the report shows just how blinkered much literacy research is: Research in early literacy, however, has tended to focus on the immediate ...
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Everyone probably believes I'm a huge fan of Lady Gaga. I just seem like that sort of person, don’t I. It’s not true, though. I didn’t even like her music the first time around when she was Madonna. As I write this, I’m sipping a martini and listening to Chet Baker. I needed the purgative after my foray into Gagaland at YouTube. (The only benefit to the extensive YouTube research necessary to write this post was running across a video of an annoyed librarian in action, or at least one portrayed on That Mitchell and Webb Look. Enjoy The Insulting Librarian.) By now you might be aware that Lady Gaga has written her first magazine column, for V magazine. I have to admit, the smooth if sometimes incoherent prose has a certain Dada charm. It’s like a good dance song, rhythmic without making enough sense to distract one from the rhythm. In it, she says she considers herself a librarian of “glam culture,” and she makes lots of references to library cards. The ...
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On the last post, someone thought I'd be commenting on LITA National Forum / Rosh Hashanah conflict, which sparked quite a furor on the LITA listserv last week. I guess that could be considered religious discrimination by the ALA, or at least by LITA, although it seems to me like unintentional discrimination by the uninformed. Then again, isn’t that what a lot of unwanted discrimination is? However, if you want to see some angry librarians virtually beat an apology out of an ALA employee, you can make up your own mind. All sorts of things have been happening in libraryland. For example, a piece from the Library Journal not even written by me has been making the rounds lately. It’s on revamping reference. I thought reference was dead. At least that’s what I’ve been hearing for years from various librarians. Perhaps it hasn’t been dead, but just asleep. It certainly seems dead at the Annoyed Librarian Flea Libary, where I work. I think the paper forms librarians ...
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