What Are Your Qualifications?

Common words that form titles are no friend of searchers. Hollywood is rife with them: M, Z, Up, etc. Book titles can be equally sweeping and terse. Desi Arnaz wrote A Book--maybe one should be thankful that he at least included the article "a." That'll narrow the results.

Searching for sweeping titles without resort to qualification by form (movie) or author (Arnaz) or the right database can make for a very long slog.

Library titles share the generic guilt. Just try doing a raw search for journals such as The Library or Searcher.

Books, Bookworms, and Owls (2)

Would a mascot make a library more friendly and approachable? Or would it jeopardize its facade of gravitas and add to a sense of triviality or even juvenility? A library does have an image, and the use of a mascot offers a means of playing with it and re-defining its profile.

Some mascots are probably inadvisable. A dinosaur, for example, might suggest that the library has gone that way.

Whether a library should have a living embodiment of a mascot is debatable. The various types of bookworm would be unwelcome and the majestic owl would be a challenge to maintain. The cat only could be a viable choice, barring the barrier of ailurophobes.

Books, Bookworms, and Owls (1)

Why don't academic libraries typically have mascots? Their school is almost certain to, thanks to their sports team. Animals are most popular, followed by classes of humankind associated with a fighting spirit: the American Indian, Vikings, soldiers from various decades, pirates, etc. Less frequent are gussied up alphabetical letters and creative typography, while among the least common are inanimate objects.

An online search for (public) library mascots shows a preference for brain over brawn, which perhaps clarifies why there are so fewer examples. The bookworm and owl hardly need an explanation, whilst the cat may be one because of its long association with a bookish environment. (Contrary to the thoughts of some, the geek is not an animal.)

The pickings then become slim, so inanimate objects are chosen, notably the book. Apparently scrolls of parchment are considered too old.

Yet with its emphasis on literacy, the library could naturally adopt letters, which would both figuratively and literally represent it.

Ceci N'est Pas une Pipe

In the library world there's been discussion about the re-naming of various library spaces, say the computer commons or the reference desk. The fixed idea is to put them in phrases with the word "information" or "learning" or "research" or the like. But why do they need obvious descriptors? You don't normally put a sign on your door with the word "door" or on your desk with "desk."

You could, for example, call the reference desk Adventures in Learning or LibraryWorks or Librarian's Revenge or anything else. If that makes you nervous, add a traditional subtitle. Keep in mind that most patrons already know they're in the library, so be-laboring the obvious is unnecessary.

Bacon and Mutton

"Some books," stated Sir Francis Bacon, "are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." In The Book of a Naturalist (George H. Doran, 1919) W. H. Hudson tells of a sheep who "would steal quietly in [my home] and finding a book would catch it hastily up and make off with it. Carrying it off to the plantation she would set it down, put her hoof on it, and start tearing out the leaves and devouring them as expeditiously as possible. Once she had got hold of a book she would not give it up—not all the shouting and chasing after her would make her drop it" (p. 124-125).

Thar She Blows (2)

Gushing's opposite is kvetching. (Their bird counterparts would be a bluebird vs. a blue jay.) In favor of the former, it is at least upbeat; while the latter may happen upon an actual problem amongst the many fake ones. Yet both are beaucoup non-discriminating.

The two outlooks may have an uneasy relationship. In the words of Elbert Hubbard "A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist." A library conference or post-conference is much more likely to have--publicly, anyway--gushing rather than kvetching.

Flying Cars of Yesterday (2)

To counterbalance my skepticism in a prior post about the rosy-painted future of 3D printing, I offer this too-good-to-be-true quote attributed to a U.S. Patent Office Commissioner who in 1899 is purported to have said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

(For those who can't get enough of forecasts that went wrong, there is "Incorrect Predictions" at Wikiquote.)