Kicking off Banned Books Week with a Saturdays @ the South Primer

While more features and posts are still in the works (I promise!) I've got another Saturdays @ the South post raring to go: http://www.peabodylibrary.org/freeforall/?p=1895

I'm particularly proud of this one, largely because it made me touch nervous and I posted it anyway. I've gotten some good feedback from colleagues (thank you!) about the content, which is always satisfying. However, considering this post is for a public institution, bringing in materials that aren't really controversial to libraries (or shouldn't be, anyway) but could be touchy with the reading public I was still a little antsy. But I got to post a Neil Gaiman video that turns me into a puddle of mush with admiration so that makes up for a lot.

The whole point of this post is that people shouldn't be antsy about books that push people's buttons, that having discussions about what we don't like about books is not only healthy, but also an important part of free speech. Taking away books not only takes away people rights, but takes away people's opportunity to complain. I find it difficult to believe that people want to give that up, but we all know it happens just the same.  My personal favorite in doing the research for this post was finding out that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was challenged because someone thought the anatomical descriptions were pornographic. Good grief.

One note I do want to add, because I'm not sure it was obvious from the post (even though I did link back to the site where I got the images) was that those amazing paintings of character mug shots were from a Flavorwire article that had more great images and some good things to say against banning books. Book challengers are the original versions of internet trolls and like all trolls, we just need to turn their words against them to shut them down. Even though we should always be speaking out in favor of books and ideas, let's all speak that much louder in favor of books this week, even the ones we don't agree with or like, because in doing so, it keeps the conversation going and protects everyone's rights to read whatever they want.

The Readers' Advisory will be televised... New Saturdays @ the South

OK, so I promise I'm working on some new original material for this blog including a couple of new regular features. But for now, here is another link to my latest Saturdays @ the South posting.

And now for the promised blog extras:

So this post only featured a couple of truly favorite television shows because both space and budget at the South is limited and we don't have too many true TV seasons. FYI- all time favorite shows? Law & Order (the original is the best, am I right?) and Psych.

My primary goal for this post was to get our blog readers to think of the library in terms of more than books. Sure we do books (and do so very well, in my totally biased opinion) but we're also a programming library that has some unusual collections including disc golf sets and some other incredibly cool items coming soon. The library should be a place for fun as well as study or quiet. A place where people can think about planning their weekends, whether that means getting a museum pass, borrowing a stack of books or getting ready to binge-watch a show they might have missed on the first run, not just a place for free internet access when homework needs to be done or the IRS forces people to use the internet.

Hopefully this and future blog posts will start getting people to think a little differently about the awesomeness that is the library. (Plus, it gave me a chance to feature Violet Crawley quips and really, where's the bad there?) Oh, and here's a favorite quip that didn't make it to the post:

New Saturdays @ the South

Here's this week's Saturdays @ the South post:

http://www.peabodylibrary.org/freeforall/?p=1637

I'll be adding more regular features soon, but I hope this feature is as enjoyable to read as it is to write!

Bonus materials:

Books that have the ability to vicariously take me places are some of my all-time favorite to read. My latest obsession, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (both the book by Susanna Clarke and the BBC miniseries) immersed me so entirely into an England in which magic was real and altered the landscape, I'm still not 100% convinced that the Raven King isn't coming back.     

Aside from fiction books like JS&MN that have an enormously strong sense of place, I'm a big fan of travel memoirs. These are my "beach reading," my fun fluff and a great way to appease my wanderlust. Sadly, many of them got left out because many libraries don't seem to carry much of this genre, unless it is wildly popular (Eat, Pray Love; Under the Tuscan Sun, etc.) or has a high-demand backstory (i.e. it's from a famous author who writes other things). A most recently read favorite is Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table by Graham Holliday. This book went down much easier than some of the dishes Holliday devoured in Viet Nam.

If you find that your library offers lots of travel memoirs, what are your population and collection management strategies like? Do you find them popular or are books like There's No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled best kept on private bookshelves?

For some additional recommendations, feel free to peruse my "travel" shelf on Goodreads.
my travel shelf:


Here's a sampling of some favorites there:      

Al's bookshelf: travel

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

Excellent book. Well balanced with a driving, compelling narrative. At times, genuinely thrilling and peppered with charming anecdotes. Would recommend to anyone who likes history, nature or a good adventure story.

Whatever You Do, Don't Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide

by Peter Allison

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

Amazing! Insightful, humorous and easy to read. Steinbeck has a way of capturing the essence of someone/something in only a few words.

A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal

by Anthony Bourdain

French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew

by Peter Mayle

Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France

by Peter Mayle

Toujours Provence

by Peter Mayle

A Year in Provence

by Peter Mayle

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

by Bill Bryson

Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy

by Frances Mayes

In Tuscany

by Frances Mayes

Eat, Pray, Love

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table

by Graham Holliday

Driving over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucía

by Chris Stewart

McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland

by Pete McCarthy

Amsterdam Food and Travel Guide

by Laura Siciliano-Rosen

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson

In a Sunburned Country

by Bill Bryson

Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life

by Frances Mayes

New Regular Feature! Welcoming Saturdays @ the South

As part of my plan to update this blog more regularly, I'm in the process of adding some regular features. Welcome to the first one! I've been adding content to my library's blog with a weekly feature: Saturdays @ the South. (Since I run the South Branch and the blogmaster and I are both fans of alliteration, the title was deemed appropriate.) I'm going to be sharing my post from the Library here every Saturday. I'm proud of the content I've added (and may post a couple of throwbacks; fair warning) and hope that my adding it here will help add the topics I've discussed to the ongoing library conversation. This is also a good forum to add the little tweaks that I thought of too late...

I also hope that, should you read the Saturdays at the South posts, you'll take some time to poke around the Library's blog and check out some of the other great content that gets posted.

So without further ado, I present the link for this week's Saturdays @ the South: Book Hangovers:
Saturdays @ the South: Book Hangovers

Bonus material: 
I can't believe I didn't remember to add Drood by Dan Simmons to this list! Simmon's tome gave me an enormous book hangover. It was rough picking a book to follow this one as it had so much going for it. After 800 pages following Wilke Collins on supernatural adventures (trust me on this one), I wasn't ready AT ALL to join the real world again.

Well that didn't work...

Here in my final semester of my MLIS, I've realized that this blog has been woefully neglected, mostly because I transitioned from being a library student with a full time job, to a full-time librarian finishing her degree. I'm about a year and a half into a dream of a job running a small branch of a larger library community. So, instead of spending time writing about my library school experience, I've been trying to keep ahead of the (steep) learning curve that's part of becoming a practicing librarian.

Things are settling down as my schoolwork is occupying less of my mind, so I'm hoping to start adding some regular features of my library work. Feedback is welcome! Most of my ideas have come from plundering the web and others' ideas, so if my contributions inspire someone to do something, let me know!

So here's to chatting more often and learning more.

All the Lonley Acronyms, Where Do They All Belong?*

The library blogs I read are all useful to me in a myriad of ways, whether it’s informative about the current state of librarianship or just to provide some humor to keep from getting bogged down. Regardless of purpose, however, I’ve noticed that there is a disparate mixture of spelling out acronyms vs. letting acronyms stand on their own.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m OK with acronyms on principle. I did my undergrad at a university that had an acronym for absolutely everything; if something had more than one word, it was abbreviated. The problem was, particularly as an incoming freshman, I was wading through an alphabet soup of nonsense-words with no context. It only added to the natural jitters that came with starting at a new school in a completely new environment. It’s funny how life parallels itself sometimes. Now that I’m entering another new environment and experiencing online education for the first time with my MLIS, I’m feeling a bit of the same freshman jitters that accompany the excitement of starting a new chapter in life. And I’m again in the position to become familiar with a horde of new acronyms.

Now, if I didn’t have the wherewithal to use my resources to find out what the acronym stands for, I have no business trying to be a librarian. For the most part, Google is at least a quick fix. Plus the AmericanLibrary Association (ALA) has a great glossary of acronyms that I’ve found useful as well. But when I come across an acronym I’m unfamiliar with, those old jitters creep up and incite a feeling that is in stark contrast with everything else I’ve encountered in my steps toward a career change. 

Everyone I’ve spoken to about getting into Library Science has been nothing but encouraging and welcoming to me, which is why it’s so surprising when I come across an acronym without much context. I realize that there is a certain level in any career where acronyms just come naturally (10 years later, I still use the acronyms of my alma mater) but for those of us entering the field, it can give an air of exclusivity. In a field that is adapting to changing times, getting broader in scope and is trying to become more user-friendly, it’s always helpful to have an acronym spelled out on its first use just to get everyone on the same page. After that, feel free to abbreviate away for the rest of the post. (Or, if you’d prefer to save word space, Gava Libraria has used an elegant solution.) This is particularly useful when (as I’ve found on Google) some acronyms can have more than one meaning. While context usually eliminates the outlandish possibilities, a newbie can harbor a fair amount of lingering doubt as to whether he/she is using a term properly. 

So I offer this as a plea to all the librarian bloggers to be your encouraging, welcoming and educating selves and help out the newbies. Please explain your acronyms. It helps clarify any misunderstandings plus offers those of us unfamiliar with your terms another way into your awesome field. Once we learn the lingo, we can only be more helpful to you! Plus, for any non-librarians who may read blogs or articles because they are trying to understand just what the library is good for nowadays (for funding purposes, perhaps?), it’s helpful to wipe away some of the opaqueness that can shroud the profession in the eyes of the general public. Spelling out acronyms is a simple yet profound way of letting people in and I think letting people in is a good way to keep libraries accessible to all.

If you have any other resources for acronym translations, please post it in the comments. If you have a preferred way of explaining an acronym, or if there’s an industry standard I’m unaware of, let me know that, too!

*Adapted from “Eleanor Rigby,” with, of course, greatest deference to The Beatles.

There's a Giraffe at the Library!! *

This is the first of what I’m sure will be many posts that begin with me exclaiming, “Libraries are awesome!” mostly because, well, they are. I love their thinking-out-of-the-box approach to community engagement and I’m lucky enough to have more than one in my area taking this approach. The impetus for this particular exclamation occurred on what would otherwise have been a fairly mundane Monday.  As I drove to the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers, I saw that its entire front lawn had been turned into a sculpture garden. There must have been a dozen or so sculptures dotting the landscape in front of the building giving the entire area the feeling of a casual, modern art museum. 

It turns out this library is pairing with the Barn Workshop Gallery for a limited-time presentation of sculptures. It’s a fantastic way to meld community and culture and the location is perfect. Where else do community and culture come together on a regular basis? At the library, of course! 

I must have been too deep in my reverential musings about the natural pairing of libraries and culture because what I saw next nearly made me drive off the road. As I turned the corner to enter the parking lot I was greeted with this:

Surprise!

This detailed sculpture is an unexpected contrast to the mostly abstract collection leading up to the entrance. The giraffe is so lively it looks like it’s simply passing through on its way to downtown, pausing briefly to look both ways before crossing the street (safety first, naturally).  If the appearance of a life-sized giraffe in suburban Massachusetts wasn’t enough make the average onlooker gawk, the perfect positioning of the sculpture will. As you’re driving by, the giraffe’s head is tilted so it looks directly into the car, as though it’s curiously examining you while you’re taking in the sculpture (or, in my case, regaining control of the car).  I don’t know precisely who worked on placement, but whoever did is a diabolical genius. Not only was I startled out of my post-work haze, but once I regained my senses, I felt like, just for a moment, I was transported to a wild animal park, suddenly on safari instead of my errands. 

Since I’m an animal lover at heart, it may be that this sculpture spoke to me more than it will to other people, despite its brilliant placement. The sculpture that looks like a double-sided slide might be the one that makes other passers-by slam on their brakes in astonishment. But I won’t forget that feeling, a mixture of awe, delight and “holy crap!” anytime soon. 

The feeling may have been triggered by seeing the art piece, but it was brought to me by the library. Without the library’s collaboration with the gallery, I would never have known any of the pieces I saw existed and I would have been deprived of the experience of a giraffe greeting me at the end of my day. It’s easy to forget how much of an impact libraries can make on our lives, offering intangible, but nevertheless important encounters beyond the physical housing and distribution of materials. I sometimes forget that when I simply search the catalog online for a specific title to borrow. But because of this library, I have a picture and a memory that will make me smile for a long time. This curious, copper giraffe is my reminder of how libraries can offer great experiences to their patrons. 

More information about “Celebrating the Art of Sculpture” can be found at:

www.danverslibrary.org

www.barnworkshop.com

*Doesn’t that sound like a children’s book title?