Tag: librarians

intellectual freedom: yours mine and ours

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been slow on posting lately. There have been big topics that I’ve been chewing on and haven’t known quite what to do with. One of the stories that I keep hoping will get more in the way of legs is the the Scott Savage/OSU story. Savage is an Ohio State University librarian. The undisputed facts of the situation read like this

Scott Savage, an OSU research librarian, was on a committee selecting a book for incoming freshmen to read. Savage, a Quaker, thought the books that were initially suggested all have a liberal bent, so he proposed four conservative ones, including The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian.

More detail is here. What happened next is the subject of the dispute. Two professors objected to Savage’s strenuous support of a book that they felt was antagonistic towards gay people and filed harassment charged against him. You can read the official complaint here [large pdf]. There were a lot of angry reports of censorship mainly on conservative sites but the story didn’t get picked up by national media in any big way. Savage wrote about the incident for American Libraries but declined to edit it when they said they would not publish his article in full. I emailed him to ask him about the situation and the email I got from him was odd and not clarifying. According to Library Journal and American Libraries, the matter is mostly worked out and harassment charges [not sexual harassment] have been dropped, though the ACRL blog claims that Savage is now filing a complaints against his accusers. One participating faculty member has outlined his interpretation of events including stating that this is not the first time that this librarian has provoked controversy by promoting anti-gay literature.

But the news media’s coverage has missed a crucial point: the discrimination reports did not focus on the book suggestion so much as the librarian’s unyielding defense of the book, even after the revelation of its bigotry, his disparagement of faculty expertise and his forwarding of others’ e-mails to an outside organization. The claim that his proposal was tongue-in-cheek is belied by the fact that when he was employed at Lakeland Community College in 2004, he displayed an antigay book prominently, provoking controversy there, as well.

I was sort of waiting to see if the “hive mind” of the blogosphere would chew on the facts of this issue and arrive at some wisdom-of-crowds type conclusions that both sides could get behind but it seems like that is not going to be the case so I figured I’d just link it up and write it down here.

fifty ways to lose your techie librarians…

Posted on by jessamyn

I am sorry I was busy with houseguests this weekend while a lot of these posts hit the blogosphere but I have to say I’ve found myself nodding in agreement to a lot of them. The topic is tech staff and the loosely phrased question was: how do I lose my tech staff at the library? Here are some answers

Ten Ways to Lose Your Techie Librarians from Michael Stephens
How to Lose your Tech People by Karen Schneider
Ten Ways to Lose Your Techie Librarians by Sarah Houghton
Fifty Ways to Lose Your Techies (actually six) by Dorothea Salo

I have a few more for my own personal list. Yes I used to be a semi-technical person in a non-technical library.

  • Make sure you never give them any sort of real ownership of tech projects; once everyone signs off, it’s as if everyone built it.
  • Involve them only tangentially in your technology plan as a “special guest” and not someone who should be driving the technology directions.
  • Criticize them for not training up everyone to wizard-level skills in the new item. Make sure that you blame any failure of staff to use and learn technology on the tech librarian directly.
  • Refuse to learn the new tools, not directly, but indirectly by simply ignoring them.
  • Let them build the technological tools inside the library but continue to make all the technology purchasing decisions elsewhere in the hierarchy without consulting them.
  • When they have a new web-based tool to roll-out make sure you test them on the computers in the basement that are running seven year old browsers and then make “tut tut” noises if the web content doesn’t look identical to how it looks upstairs. Ignore their explanations.
  • Call the Gates Foundation just to check if it’s okay if they install Firefox on the Gates computers.
  • Give them a workstation that is shared with other staff members in a room where they are frequently interrupted. Stare at their screen often and try to puzzle out what they are working on, or comment that it doesn’t look like work.
  • Don’t give frontline staff the password to do basic maintenance and troubleshooting of public computers and insist that they call the tech staff to reboot or log in to computers. If tech staff is on vacation or otherwise unavailable, hang an Out of Order sign on the computer and be surly when the tech staff returns. If the tech librarian wants to give the passwords out to more people, thwart them. If they want to train staff on maintenance of the computers, disallow it.
  • Disallow computerization of any forms or tallysheets (though you might want to straighten out your skewed and fuzzy photocopies of last decades ILL forms so they’ll stop trying)
  • Don’t let them buy any books. Don’t let them teach any classes. Don’t let the patrons get attached to them. Don’t let them give you the old “best practices” flimflam.

This is only sort of intended to be amusing.

nuns vs. librarians spelling bee cage match of dooooooom

Posted on by jessamyn

When nuns are using the Internet to practice for the spelling bee, do the librarians stand a chance, especially when the nuns know a lot of Latin? The librarians have won the last two years in a row, but the nuns haven’t been in the running since 2001. The ninth annual bee happens tomorrow and is a benefit for a Northern Kentucky Community Action Commission helping adults with literacy skills. update: check the comments, librarians win!!

books fountain, etc.

Posted on by jessamyn

My Mom sent me a link to this book fountain photo on Flickr and I figured I’d spend some more time looking around at various tags: book, library [with this book chopper, and this inter-tidal loan] and librarian where I found these Bibliotecária figurines. There are 449 groups that contain the word library and 39 with the word librarian. Keep in mind that many of these photos are published under a Creative Commons license which means that they can be used by you or your library for many different purposes. Check the rights information underneath the “Additional Information” heading in the lower left.

Rivkah Sass—Librarian of the Year 2006

Posted on by jessamyn

Rivkah Sass, Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year for 2006, talks about what she’s done with Omaha Public Library, and where she’s come from. Of particular note: she came from Multnomah County Public Library in Portland, OR which has spawned other great library directors like Seattle Public’s Deborah Jacobs (and one of my favorite librarians and friend Sara Ryan)

Rivkah Sass is a librarian unafraid of, indeed energized by, risk, happy to force change, and rooted in a library philosophy of service and “give ’em what they want.” A teller of truth, willing to risk the consequences. A person boiling over with enthusiasm for people and passion for librarianship. Couple these with a career odyssey that has taken her to all kinds of libraries, both as manager and front-line worker, and you have the ingredients for an exceptional “Librarian of the Year.”