librarian.net

The local library is hiring for a three hour per week job because they got some money and decided to expand the library hours. This is great news. Unfortunately, they need to hire a person to help out during some of those hours and it’s hard to find someone who wants to make a commitment for a job that pays less than $25 a week. The library — which I have been working for helping them with their website and their OPAC — asked if I would train to be an on-call librarian there and that’s what I’ve been doing.

The funny joke about all my weird techie/bloggy/travelling stuff is that I started down this path because I wanted to live in the country and I didn’t want to be a teacher, work in the post office or be a police officer. I mean I like books, love to read and love to help people, but first and foremost I wanted to be a small-town librarian. This is the first “job” I’ve had where I actually did that. All my other jobs have been at larger libraries, school libraries or the weird circuit rider library job that I mostly do now. So I got to train on things I’ve never really learned before like how to use the circulation system and the barcode reader, how to operate the lift, how to transfer a call, how to keep teenagers happy but civil, how to call people and leave a message that their books on hold are are in without saying what the book is, you know the drill.

And, it should come as no surprise that this work was hard, and interesting, and engrossing and kept me so busy I didn’t check my email for three hours which is unusual for me during a work day. Michael Stephens and Michael Casey discussed the need for many of us with specialized jobs to switch off with other people, walk a mile in their shoes, or work a shift at their desk, to get an idea of what their real challenges were. Its good advice.

One of the librarians and I had a good laugh over thinking about the idea of IM reference for the YA librarian who has to monitor the teen computer area and is rarely near her own desk. There may be ways of making it work, sure, but in the abstract it was a totally ridiculous idea given how she works. It’s good for techie people like me to know that before we start offering our oh-so-helpful advice. Anyhow, I had a good but tiring day. Apropos of Banned Books Week I also like their title “Going to the Field” which reminds me of this part of one of my favorite poems by Wendell Berry.

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

So, it’s banned books week. I have a few links I’ve been sitting on for a while trying to find a way to look at them together but I think this week has given me the nudge. Banning books is bad. Challenging books is an exercise in free speech and a totally appropriate way of giving community feedback on library selection policies. Lumping challenged and banned books together confuses two different issues, to my mind. For some reason thinking about free speech and libraries makes me think about union issues. There have been a few in the news lately and not so lately and I apologize for not getting to them sooner.

• I read in Library Journal that the Jackson County libraries in Oregon will be re-opening. You may recall these libraries were in in areas hard hit by the drop-off in lumber industry work and general poverty conditions and the county could not keep them open. Now they can. What happened? The county outsourced the running of the libraries to LSSI, a library services company based in Maryland. Library workers from the system have to apply for their old jobs. What does this mean? It means no unions for employees anymore — the union had also submitted a proposal for re-opening the libraries. It means that a larger percentage of the library’s budget will actually be leaving Jackson County, not staying in it.
• In Vancouver BC the librarians have been on strike for 70 days and my apologies for not discussing this sooner. Check out the library website, bleak huh? I’ll be in Vancouver next week. I’d like to go to the library. If I have to cross a picket line, I don’t think I’ll go, or maybe I’ll just go and talk to the picketers instead. Here’s a Flickr photoset from Day 64 of the strike and a nice black and white set. The union, CUPE 391, has their own photo area and have a website and blog to get out not just their message, but responses to the messages put out by their adversaries.

You can read more about this sort of thing over at Union Librarian.

And while I bitch and complain about the name “Banned Books Week” every year [and the BBW acronym just continues to amuse] and think that “Free People Read Freely ®” is some sort of Orwellian catchphrase, there are some people doing some nifty things for BBW on the web. I’m not sure what happened to the logo thing that ALA was doing last year, I sort of liked it. The Office of Intellectual Freedom blog entry has some of the best information about how ALA is moving in to social spaces to discuss and promote BBW.

• The Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor Michigan has made a Flickr photoset of their staff reading banned books. Here’s how they announced it on their website.
• Amnesty International has a page outlining people who got in serious trouble for their writings. This isn’t taking Harry Potter off the shelves, this is getting jailed or killed for speaking out.
• Google Book Search is doing its part. I know a lot of people have weird feelings about Google moving towards something that looks more like an OPAC but I think we should be more concerned that everything they put on the web, pretty much outranks everything everyone else puts on the web.
• The ACLU of Texas has issued a report discussing the status of challenged books in Texas schools (link goes to 2006 report, new one due out real soon now) in the last year. It’s interesting reading. As a result of challenges sixteen books were removed from school shelves entirely including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and a book on how to draw manga.

Feel free to include other projects in the comments here, this is just a few links I enjoyed and thought merited further attention.