Book 'em, Danno

Perhaps with enthusiasm, perhaps with trepidation, you pick up a book to read, but as you go along you realize the book is not for you. A decision must be made: should the reading continue, or be given up? It is almost as though there's a fear that somewhere lurked a cadre of reader police waiting to arrest whoever balks at finishing a book.

Very different is the student assigned to read a book. He or she may find deceitful or ethically-challenged means to get around not only not finishing a book, but not starting it. They enlist the internet or maybe Masterplots and its ilk.

But it is the voluntary, reading-for-pleasure persons who feel the mystic obligation to slog on to the final page. Some who won't think twice about slipping aconite into a spouse's coffee will be nudged by guilt to finish a mammoth volume they hate from the get go.

Reading is the single form where this compunction dominates. People switch away from a television program, walk out of a movie, ruthlessly turn off a music CD, surf sporting events, nod during a speech, or daydream as a story is related.

There is a workaround for those who want to proclaim that they finish any book they start. They can follow the example of Forrest J Ackerman. The collector of a vast library of science fiction and fantasy books would tell listeners, “I've read every last word in every book in my collection,” then add “When I get a new book I turn to the last page--and read the last word!”

3D Libraries

Soon you will not be able to tell a library from a shop class. Slowly becoming home to 3D printers, libraries aren't so much a natural fit for them as other places offer a rounder hole for this square  technology peg. However, should 3D printing become popular and profitable enough, established places will accommodate themselves or new niches will crop up, luring away the audience that libraries fostered.

We All Scream

An imposing number of Americans are disconnected from libraries. The cause? Maybe there's too much passive marketing.
  
Sure, libraries do outreach, but it's through the traditional bookmobile. Rather, they should follow the ice cream truck model. As the vehicle goes through a neighborhood it plays a jingle through loudspeakers that will entice the attention of the underserved. A line from the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" can be adjusted from "come and take a look" to "come and take a book." Decorating the truck's outside can be book spines sporting bar codes that enable the contents to be downloaded into smart phones. It's done on the walls of subway stations, so how much more appropriate for a bookmobile.

And you wouldn't have to go inside to borrow a book.

Publisher's Progress (by John Bunion)

As I walked through the Wilderness of this World I came to a Place to lie down to sleep; and as I slept meseemeth to dream the following Dream. A large Publisher was coming down a slippy Slope whose Bottom is the Slough of Despond when He met a little, laden Library struggling up.
Publisher: Let Me assist You.
Library: Oh, thank You.
The Publisher proceeded to reach deep into the Pockets of the Library.
Library: What are You doing?
Publisher: I am lightening your Burden.
Library: How is that?
Publisher: I am removing your heavy Coins. Also your pound Notes. They weigh less, but every little Bit helps.
Library: What of my Bookes and the Rest that I carry?
Publisher: There is a Limit to my Charity.

ALA Anaheim: Escape from Disneyland

Like going down on the Titanic, one way to end your Anaheim trip is a visit to nearby Disneyland Park. At least aboard the ship there wasn't the hordes of baby strollers that roll over your toes and bring pedestrians traffic to a molasses-in-January slowness. If there is such an affliction as stroller trauma, this is the place to catch it.

Once in the park you may be forgiven for thinking that its founder, Walt Disney, should have been named "Wait" Disney, since waiting is the one certain thing that you will do when you visit either Disneyland or California Adventure. Lines are long and slow for rides that are short and quick.

The more the merrier is doubtlessly true at Disneyland, if you're a stockholder. But when you are one among the crowds you begin asking, why did I come here? and end with, when can I get out of here? On the other hand, space may be so constricted that you won't have breathing room to ask.

On the bright side, if you are not a children's librarian and forget what a child looks like, you are in luck, for they are everywhere and at every age.

ALA Anaheim: Rather Short

Among the minor distinctions of Dan Rather's talk was its brevity when compared with other speakers. Allotted an hour, after 45 minutes he was done with his prepared remarks as well as those shied at him during the q and a, when he left the stage for the ordeal of facing fans lined-up for his book-signing. As an audience member I felt as though I had paid for a pound of butter but got three-quarters instead. Since he didn't talk any faster than other speakers, his words had a higher unit price without being better.

ALA Anaheim: Where's Anaheim?

“The city of Anaheim is easily accessible, within 5-10 minutes of the convention center”--American Libraries (May/June 2012, p. 76)

An innocent statement? Hah!

The convention center is in Anaheim, so accessibility is not an issue.

Just to walk a few blocks from the center absorbs more than 10 minutes.

There are parts of the city of Anaheim that are not easily accessible, whatever the transportation.

If "the city of Anaheim" is its downtown, to reach it by car in 10 minutes would require breaking speed limits and running traffic lights.

ALA Anaheim: Say It with Flowers

    It is almost de rigueur for any conference speaker to devote a few words acknowledging their audience of librarians. The words are neither unflattering nor insincere.  To speak of librarians is equivalent to judging the merits of mom and apple pie. As much media makes plain, the public has a consensus of good will toward them. 
     However librarians might enjoy the plaudits they receive from celebrity speakers, when it comes to considering their own, the view is far from appreciative. Think of the Far Side cartoon where one part of a panel shows flowers and has the caption "How we see flowers"; and the other shows these flowers with grotesque physiognomies, the caption being "how flowers see themselves".

ALA Anaheim: Don't Go Away

After librarians have made the effort to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to reach the conference, one of their ambitions seems then to be to put in an equal effort to depart the same in order to see the nearby sights. This temptation is recognized and formalized by tours offered through the convention center. Nevertheless, odds are that once the librarian decides she has to get away, and spends hours deliberating which tour is most appealing, she will find that it has been canceled. Tour offerings are as substantial as mirages.
  
If it's going to be canceled anyway, a tour should be offered to really off-beat locales--say Barsoom or Oz or Arkham. Nothing compares with being able to boast of the places you would have gone to, if only there'd been a tour.

ALA Anaheim: Now Hear This

An audience is split into two types of people--those who microphone and those who don’t. Those who don't have as much to say as those who do; while those who do have as little to say as those who don't. Phenomenally, the better a speaker is known, the longer the microphone queue and (sometimes) the longer the questions or comments.

The microphone stand comes in all heights--except that of the questioner. Some questioners provide autobiographies (some are so long that you wonder who the featured speaker is) while others have decided that they are in a debate and are taking the opposing side.

ALA Anaheim: The Late Show

Some speakers deliberately (it seems) begin a program late out of fear it will otherwise run short and as a result they'll be implicitly accused by an audience that it's not getting its money’s worth. Talking to the end also suggests that the speaker had so much more to say but ran out of time. Such a talk has one of two effects on the audience. People observe either, "The subject was getting warmed up, and the speaker just couldn't cram everything in"; or, "At long last that's over."

ALA Anaheim: Exit Strategy

At every session an observer will find that the most coveted place to sit is at the end of a row. It's a position of least effort, though it is hardly a formidable inconvenience to slide to the middle. Body bulk in itself doesn't explain it, for many practitioners were not waist-challenged. Presumably the sitter wants an unimpeded exit strategy should she wish to depart early. Among the reasons for this: the subject or speaker isn't what she hoped, a prior engagement, fatigue, unfathomable eccentricity.

Being at the end corks up the row. People who come in later will have to brush past the end-sitter to get to a seat. It's a dissuader and mild hindrance to those who might otherwise choose that row. On the other hand, some of these later comers might be the ones who'd have wanted to preempt that end seat.

ALA Anaheim: The Throne Room

Though the science fiction and fantasy session featured three speakers, I suspect that many in the audience had come especially to see the last--author of Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin. With few unfilled chairs, It was sro--or maybe HBO. Who'd have thought that there were that many subscribers? Maybe the fact that this was a library conference meant that readers added to the viewers.

ALA Anaheim: Votes for Women (Carnegie 2)

Maybe the winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Non-fiction were foreordained. The fiction winner was about a woman's extramarital affair. The non-fiction was a biography of Catherine the Great, a powerful woman who was not unacquainted with a large number of lovers.

While the winners were determined by librarians, who are in a profession where the majority are women, it seems unlikely that the protagonist of either book was seen as a role model.

ALA Anaheim: The Dog Ate My Homework (Carnegie 1)

"Eighty percent of life is showing up."--Woody Allen

     The ceremony for awarding the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Non-fiction was to begin on Sunday evening at “8”--but it was a soft 8, a ragged 8, a late 8, a several minutes after 8.

     There were six nominees, split between fiction and non-fiction. Only two of the six authors were present, and neither received the prize. Of the four who weren't on hand, their excuses were:

a sick family member (one of the winners);
was in Ireland, where she lived (the other winner);
was in Europe, where she was traveling (but she did give a cute talk, via an internet transmission)

The last nominee had the best excuse. He had died.

ALA Anaheim: President Unprecedented

At the opening session the new ALA president spoke. When I began my library career (said she) I never expected that one day I would be head of ALA.

Now, if you are walking down the street and suddenly you are clobbered by a meteor, you may say honestly that you never expected that. Or if you learn that you are actually the long-lost heir to the Russian throne, after your faint you can dazedly admit that you never had the least idea that this would happen. Or if one morning you wake up to discover you have been transformed into a cockroach or Mickey Mouse, that is something never expected.

But an ambitious person beginning in librarianship probably thinks about future advancement to a high position.

Between Two Bales of Hay

The ALA conference in Anaheim offers many programs, an embarrassment of opportunities. Yet meetings cannot be too attractive, for they have a competitor; not so much from other meetings but from the semi-euphemistically named exhibitors (i.e., sellers), who partly sponsor the conference.

If there are too many attractive meetings, the exhibitors lose their customers, who have a time budget. On the other hand, if too many meetings appear dull or irrelevant, fewer library people will attend the conference.

Why Weeders Have Nightmares

"A good book can wait for a reader hundreds of years. Once lodged in the Library, it is unexpensive & harmless while it waits."--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Emerson in His Journals, p. 553)

Pity the poor librarian whose duty it is to weed. Then (wouldn't you know it) along comes a reader who asks for the title that the librarian has just, after much delay and procrastination, sent to that library in the sky. If there is an afterlife, maybe this is one of the punishments for librarians who were too zealous in their duties.

Gotcha

CAPTCHA: a program with the unerring ability to make letters and numbers unrecognizable to the human eye. On the other hand, its thwarting of internet bots is debatable.

If the legend of Sisyphus were updated, instead of futilely rolling a stone, the task of the victim would be to submit successfully a single CAPTCHA.

Definition from The Librarian's Weird Hoard (2012- )

Brarians

Since the neologism "cybrarian" combines "cyber" with "librarian" to mean a librarian who organizes cyber information, let's consider other combinations that would define aspects of the profession. Here are a few possibilities:

A crybrarian finds release in romance novels
A drybrarian is in charge of collections about deserts
A flybrarian knows a lot about entomology
A frybrarian gives answers in short order
A guybrarian champions brawny books with buckskin binding and rugged prose
A highbrarian works in airplane libraries
A mybrarian delivers personal service
An oybrarian is in a continuous state of exasperation
A prybrarian is constitutionally nosy
A shybrarian is difficult to locate
A slybrarian is on an administrative path
A stybrarian is messy
A sprybrarian acts younger than she or he is
A wrybrarian sees things as they are--but wishes they weren't

Words for Your Strategic Plan

I've been looking at six university library strategic plans and analyzing the frequency of their words through Word Frequency Counter. Through looking at the nouns that have appeared in the top ten of each, I've discovered:

The winning words for frequency were "library" and "libraries", which were tied as #1 on two separate lists; however,"library" was on all six lists, "libraries" reduced to four.
"Users" was #1 on one list, and appeared on one other down a way; the variants "user" and "use" appeared on one or two lists.
"Objectives" was #1 on one list, #6 (as "objective") on another.

Other words appeared in the top ten:

• In 6 of 6 lists: "services"; "research"

• In 5 of 6 lists: "resources"; "information"; "university"; "support" 

• In 4 of 6 lists: "digital"; "staff"; "learning"

• In 3 of 6 lists: "collections" (although "collection" was in 1 of 6); "strategic"

• In 2 of 6 lists: "goal" and "goals" (both in 2 of 6); "plan"; "campus"; "state"

One word only appeared in the top ten of one list but in none other, nor in any variant form--and that was "needs".

Now that you know which words to use in your strategic plan, you are welcome to mix them in the document. Follow the advice of author Timothy Dexter, whose book lacked periods, commas, etc., and so ended it with lines of punctuation marks in order that dissatisfied readers "may peper and solt it as they plese."

Fast [In(fo]od)

With messaging services such as Meebo now used to answer reference inquiries, patrons are encouraged into a fast food mentality. In this instance, fast info.

This way of doing business makes for the Creation of False Expectations--getting something immediate and reliable and without effort.

(At a fast info counter)
"What'll you have, sir/madam?"
"I want a complete-answer with a side order of right-away and, to drink, an easy-to-understand."
(A millisecond later) "Here it is--and it's free."

Library workers cannot compete with Google and company when it comes to speed, but may when it comes to relevance. They can personalize interaction and through an interview get a feeling for what the user wants and maybe what the user ought to have. Ironically, one of the attractions of Google, and perhaps Meebo, is its impersonalization. The user is free from being judged by the intelligence or type of a question.

Pig Win

"Penguin halts e-books sales to libraries" is a recent sample newspaper headline concerning the discontinuation by the publisher Penguin Group (USA) of selling e-books to libraries. Yet these headlines could be much more invigorating. Here are some possibilities.

"Penguin Gives Libraries the Bird"

"Penguin Cold Shoulders Libraries"

"'Let Them Eat (Fish) Cake' Penguin Tells Libraries"

"Question: What Do Penguins and Libraries Have in Common? Answer: Nothing"
"Penguin Wings Away from Libraries"
"March of the Penguins--and They're Carrying Away E-Books with Them"
"What's Black and White and Red All Over? It's No Longer a Penguin in a Library"
"'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish'"--Penguin Leaves Libraries in Lurch

Weed This

“A library is not just a building full of books. It is a garden to cultivate individuals” —Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon (quoted in American Libraries Direct).

With this quote in mind, consider how some terms associated with the library relate to the garden and horticulture:

• annual

• arChives

• browsing

• carr(ot)els

• currant periodicals

• dew date

• I pea address

• jour(mi)nal

• kaleword searching

• microfarm

• newspepper

• on vine database

• peariodical

• refe-reed

• serial

And would those who dig into text, but remain uncultivated, be "weeders"?

Different Versions

Reading about the value of being an introvert at the American Libraries column, I was reminded of this Doctor Johnson quote:

"When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune."

That is, people praise introversion because they instinctively know it requires a defense, whereas extroversion does not.