Tag: librarians

Men of the Stacks: why this isn’t just another wall calendar

Posted on by jessamyn

I was happy that I caught the tweet early when the Men of the Stacks calendar came out because it’s been fascinating to watch this project grow and blosson. If for some reason you haven’t heard of it, the website is here and they have a facebook page here. Thanks to some nice photography, some cute librarians and a good message, this project has taken off, been mentioned in international news outlets, hit boingboing, Oprah and the Village Voice. The calendars cost $5 to produce through MagCloud and are sold for $20 which means for every calendar that gets purchased $15 goes to the It Gets Better Project. There’s a thoughtful post by the MotS administrator Megan about bullying and jerks online and why this sort of thing is so important. My favorite thing is probably close to what Will Manley says, this is “an image buster with a sense of humor.” My second favorite thing about this is, hey, I know those guys! A lot of the fellas in the photos are librarians we’ve known online for years and years–Brett and Trevor and Von and Gabe are people I know, and the others seem like people I’d like to know–and so we can smile along with them and say “Way to go guys!” Can’t wait to see how this evolves.

Dataviz you can get behind, librarians as sees through a census lens

Posted on by jessamyn

“Today, the marriage rate among librarians is the highest it has ever been with 62 percent of librarians married in 2009.”

There is a lot of data in the world. Librarians are good at using census data to help people find families, get local information and just learn something about the way the world used to be. Here’s a neat post about using hte census data from the last 120 years to learn something about librarianship as a profession. Did you know that the number of self-reported librarians peaked in 1990 and has declined almost 30% since then? I am somewhat curious if this is just because people with library and information science backgrounds are calling themselves all manner of things now [Is a taxonomist a librarian? How about a metadata specialist?]. You can read the full post, with graphs, over at Oxford University Press’s Social explorer.

Brenda Elizabeth Moon – chief librarian, University of Edinburgh, RIP

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve paid particular attention to obituaries since finishing Marilyn Johnson’s excellent book Dead Beat. There are some great librarian obituaries; a life of pulbic service seems to lend itself to this. A local librarian pal pointed this one out to me and I thought it was worth sharing: Brenda Moon: University librarian who had a clear vision of the transformative effects of digitisation, here is a personal rememberance of Ms. Moon at The Guardian. [thanks Barbara!]

She Was A Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West at Bitch Magazine

Posted on by jessamyn

Bitch magazine has a lending library in Portland Oregon. The library has a blog and they would like your zine donations. They make posts about books in their collection and today’s post is about Celeste West and a new book out on Library Juice Press celebrating her life. [via]

She Was A Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West is a collection of essays, excerpts, and photos that attempt to capture the spirit of Celeste West, a woman whose influence on feminist librarianship, publishing, journalism, and activism was monumental. After West passed away in 2008, a few friends and admirers (Toni Samek, Moyra Lang, and K.R. Roberto) decided to embark on a project that would honor West’s work and life. This book, which acts as a comprehensive and compassionate obituary, was the result.