Author: jessamyn

let the NextGenners shine

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m not a NextGen librarian though I am often in the market for jobs, the same as they are. I’ve been thinking a lot about library schools increasing their acceptance rates at the same time as available jobs are seriously dwindling. Andrea and I were chatting about this on the way back from the library tour.

“Do you think you should be able to go through library school nowadays without knowing how to use a computer?”
“No.”

I’m not even sure who said what. I feel that the profession has enough experienced and able librarians who may not be tech savvy. The shift in the profession is leading us towards more and more technological solutions to library problems. I don’t think everyone has to be a systems librarian, but everyone should be able to competently troubleshoot a public PC and/or use their own computer for basic office and reference tasks at a bare minimum. The next step is letting the NextGens — or anyone who wants to really — really apply these skills to the workplace environment.

The Librarian – one for the history museum?

Posted on by jessamyn

I read about the review of the new book The Librarian a few days back and paid it no mind. Then I got the following email and while I think that flaming the author would be in bad taste, a pleasant email from a modern-day librarian setting him straight might not be out of line.

There is a review in today’s NYT Review of Books of a book called “The Librarian.” I urge you to read the review if you haven’t already. I get the feeling that the author (of the review) is just begging to have the review posted to your site, so that we can flame the living shit out of him.

Lynne Cheneyvp’s wife tells department of ed how to do their job, has educational pamphlets destroyed

Posted on by jessamyn

While I despair of ever getting decent headlines on newspaper stories about books, the words A modern book burning did catch my eye. The story is about Lynne Cheney, wife of the current VP who objected to the content in a pamphlet being published by the Department of Ed. The pamphlet entitled “Helping Your Child Learn History” [old version here, currently out of stock] apparently refers to the National Standards for History Guidelines which advocates a more “lumps and all” approach to history which encourages expanding the history focus to include the contributions of women, minorities, radicals and other less-popular figures of their times. Good news as well as bad news. As a result of her criticism, the Department of Ed, destroyed 300,000 of the pamphlets.

At the time, Lynne Cheney, the wife of now-Vice President Cheney, led a vociferous campaign complaining that the standards were not positive enough about America’s achievements and paid too little attention to figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere and Thomas Edison. At one point in the initial controversy, Cheney denounced the standards as “politicized history.” [thanks lee]