Personal blog: All opinions are only my own, unless you want to borrow them. (he/him)
One of the primary functions of libraries – and librarians – especially in our current Information Age, is to sort through the ocean of information available to us and find the truly worthwhile bits. We talk about “tsunamis” of information, “deluges” of information, and we’re acutely aware of how easily people can get lost and drown in it all.
I recently had an experience that made all this very real to me.
When I got to work this morning, I had an email from a co-worker sitting in my Inbox. He’d sent it to all staff in our Library. It was a link to the following video interview:
Father’s Pride, Support Brings 10-Year-Old Son To Tears During Emotional Interview [VIDEO] (posted by NewsOne on June 9, 2013)
My co-worker’s message to go along with this video was simple and powerful:
I hope this message finds everyone in good spirits. I am sharing this video link because, every once in a while, I think we all need a reminder of why we decided to enter the world of literature and education.
[This is] a link as to why we as a library system are so vital in the 21st century. … I hope your takeaway is the one I had as to why all of our jobs are so important.
Scroll down in the article to watch the video. For some sense of the part libraries play in the lives of children everywhere, the power we have to contribute to the transformative process of education, see how they talk about the role of of reading at 2:30 and again at 3:00.
This is a message we need to hear and it’s one that we need to communicate to our communities. This is the role we play in people’s lives.
Given my concerns over the current state of copyright law, it shouldn’t be any surprise that I’m a fan of Creative Commons licensing. The main issue I – and many others – encounter with CC, though, is proper attribution. Attribution of CC material can get rather confusing.
This infographic helps clarify the issue for photos:
Continue reading “How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos”
The Lies You’ve Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard by Alexis C. Madrigal (posted by The Atlantic, May 2013)
This article strikes me for two reasons:
It’s so tempting, once a design project is pushed out to the public, after a lengthy development and feedback process, to say, “We’re done!” This is what happens with many, many websites in particular. But really – once it’s public, that’s just the beginning of the next stage. The user feedback should never stop.
It would seem that this is going to be the year for Romeo and Juliet. There’s a new movie coming out (starring the wonderful Hailee Steinfeld) and the Kansas City Repertory Theatre has a production slated for their 2013-2014 season.
I’ve never particularly liked Romeo and Juliet. I feel like I should but I’m always disappointed by productions of it. For this, I blame a professor from my freshman year of undergrad. The reason I’m consistently disappointed by productions of Romeo and Juliet is because I have yet to see a production of it based on his interpretation.
This professor’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet starts with the line Juliet says to Romeo after they have their first kiss – she tells him, “You kiss by the book.”
She’s not speaking metaphorically – she’s referring to an actual book. And she obviously doesn’t think that kissing by it is a good thing.
Continue reading “Shakespeare and the Notion of Love”
I have to take a moment to brag – Rebecca Joines Schinsky, associate editor and community manager at one of my all-time favorite bibliophile blogs Book Riot, has named the Kansas City Public Library’s Central Library the most beautiful public library in America! w00t!
America’s Most Beautiful Public Library (posted February 25, 2013)
How much do I love that I get to come to work here everyday?
I imagine that by now everyone in Library Land – and in Book-Lover Land more generally – has seen this news story:
Horrible Histories Author Terry Deary On Libraries: ‘No Longer Relevant’ (posted on the Huffington Post on February 14, 2013)
Such attitudes toward libraries make me sad and angry. Of course, I’m highly biased on this subject, but it’s more than that. It’s the way his whole argument perpetuates misinformation, encourages overwhelmingly selfish principles, and his understanding of how communities and social systems actually work is frighteningly simplistic.
Not only does he completely ignore the massive pile of evidence that libraries are an incredibly effective venue for reader discovery and a leading driver of book sales, I’m personally disgusted by his unmitigated self-interest.
And he’s absolutely, 100% wrong about the “concept behind libraries”.
Never forget – the intent of public libraries is to provide all citizens with access to information in service of maintaining an informed democracy. The purpose of libraries is to enable self-improvement and drive social progress. This is true throughout modern Western culture.
He considers his paycheck more important than civic duty and the communal good, and I think that’s pathetic.
Actually, now that I think of it – people holding their paychecks as more important than civic duty and the communal good is the source of most of our current social ills…
Recently, I was perusing Cracked, just randomly clicking through the linked articles at the bottom of the page, wasting time as is my wont, and I came across this:
5 Mind-Blowing Ways Animals Display Human Emotions
This reminded me of a movie review that one of my coworkers wrote last year for the Disneynature documentary Chimpanzee.
Both of these articles illustrate a near-universal attitude toward the subject of animal and human behavior and emotions: Namely, the assumption that human and animal behaviors are essentially different.
Both of these articles make me want to ask:
Just where do you think human behavior and emotions come from?
Continue reading “The Virtues of Anthropomorphization”
At my library, we’re currently working on a project in conjunction with several other regional knowledge institutions to put online our full collection of historical documents regarding the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas. One piece of functionality we’re creating is a way to visually represent the relationships between people, places, and things within this pool of data. These visualizations are based on a relationship database that we constructed, using a basic semantic structure: “Object A [relationship] Object B” and we can verify this relationship with “Document X”. Thus, for example:
Iskabibble Jones is married to Bridgette Jones and we know this because of information contained in Bridgette’s letter dated …
Only, instead of statements, we represent this all graphically with links to images and documents. It’s a pretty nifty function!
The way we’re building the database for this relationship visualization tool is representative of how online data gets handled in general. It illustrates the fundamental paradigm that has governed computer development from the beginning – and, indeed, the development of mechanized data handling even before the advent of computers.
Continue reading “Data Handling in Electronic Systems – Inspiration for a Paradigm Reassessment”
As is typical with the changing of the year, librarians and watchdog groups take some time to look back and reflect on the past year in censorship. Here are two such articles that I ran across recently:
Censorship drives me insane. It’s stupid. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.
Continue reading “Censorship Is Stupid”
John the Librarian 