The 11 Rules of Tea

I haven’t been a tea drinker for long, so I love reading and talking about it. George Orwell’s tea tips are a great place to start (even if they make you question your own tea habits).

Does Sean Bean Always Die at the End?

I think I agree with the hypothesis that Sean Bean’s deaths may have occurred in more prominent films, thus perpetuating the idea that he always dies. All in all, an interesting read 🙂

Delight Through Logical Misery

The Alpha Sean Bean, shown here to be still alive.
“Sean Bean TIFF 2015” by NASA/Bill Ingalls. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

There’s a quote from a character in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, and J.R.R. Tolkein’s character from some book or other, that has been doing the rounds as an internet meme for quite some time: “War makes corpses of us all.”  Of course you all know it, it’s ridiculously famous, after all, one does not simply forget a Faramir quote. Much better than Boromir. In Sean Bean’s case however, the quote might as well be “appearing in a role in television or film makes a corpse of me, Sean Bean.” Sean Bean is well known for dying in films. So much so, that there exists a campaign specifically against the further onscreen killing of Sean Bean. At least, I…

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Letters to a Young Librarian

Patrons vs customers? Ah, the eternal debate. It’s come up in a number of my classes. What we call the people who walk through the library doors reflects how our organization treats both the people they serve and the staff. Customers indicates a hierarchy while patrons indicates a relationship.

I came across an interesting blog entitled Letters to a Young Librarian. The author, Jessica Olin, passes on advice and answers questions from new librarians. One post that particularly stood out to me is entitled “The Customer” Is Always Wrong: Managing Community Expectations. It’s all about semantics and dynamics. Olin mentions how it’s important to manage expectations, and that can come down to how we are training staff.

A Splendid History and a Splendid Future

The welcoming smile at the reference desk, the nervous patron with their question, the sigh of relief when the librarian finds the answer. This scenario could be written about 1947 or 2015. And indeed, looking at this vocational video from 1947, many similarities are exhibited. At first glance, it may seem the same, but as we examine it closer, the changes in the field of librarianship are evident. Take for example, the card catalogue. Going to the physical card catalogue or using the library’s OPAC to search the catalogue may make it look like there are fundamental changes in how information is accessed. And yet, if the cataloger has not done their job, unlike in the video, finding the right resource would be difficult indeed. The library is such an interesting mix of old and new.

The narrator in the video introduces librarians as people who have a love of learning and books and are interested in people. I would say that this hasn’t changed. The field of librarianship still needs people who love what they’re doing and love the environment they work in. Libraries may look different from the libraries of the 1940s, but they are still filled with people who are searching for information. Our narrator speaks of librarians as people who bring people and books together. The idea of ‘books’ has undergone a drastic change. With the dawn of the information age, a physical book is not what makes up a library. Instead we focus on the information inside the books. As librarians, we are not simply the gatekeepers of knowledge, we are active seekers of knowledge alongside our patrons.

Niagara Falls librarians, 1955. [Photo via]

The video, all about the vocation of librarianship, mentions five different roles that can be seen. They are: catalogers, reference librarians, school, circulation, and children’s librarians. Even though some of these are coming under fire for being less than relevant, I feel that there is still a strong case to be made for each of them.

If we are doing our job properly, reference librarians will not be at risk of replacement by Google. School librarians will continue to be seen as an important part of any school. Catalogers will silently do their job, and continue to connect people with material. And children’s librarians will continue to create life-long readers. To succeed as a field, we need to continually recruit people who love books and love people. People who are willing to be innovators, to be creative, and to be confident in their handling of a new information society. It is a challenging field no doubt, but I have to agree with our narrator that it is rewarding. Dority wrote in 2012 that “The great thing about a career focused on information work is that there is an almost infinite need for credible, reliable, authoritative information on the part of individuals, communities, businesses, and governments” (11). Watching this video made me consider how far we have come in the profession, and yet how much has stayed the same. What did it make you think of?

 

 

The title was taken from a quote in Sarah Wallace’s So You Want to Be a Librarian?

Dority, G. K. (2012). LIS Career Sourcebook: Managing and Maximizing Every Step of Your Career. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.

Niagara Falls librarians, 1955. [Photo via]

Resume

Here you will find a link to my latest resume. Please feel free to download it. If you have any question, I’d love to heard from you!

Emma Black Resume 2015

Banned book in New Zealand

One of the essential values we discussed in my Perspectives on Library Information and Studies class was intellectual freedom. I just recently learned about the banning of a book in New Zealand. The book is called Into the River by Ted Dawe, and is about a Maori boy who attends a boarding school. Dawe self-published the book with the intent of providing relatable YA content to working class boys. It won several awards in New Zealand and drew the attention of a Christian group called Family First. Family First challenged the book’s rating, due to obscene language and depictions of sex and drug use. Once it was raised to R14, it was removed from shelves and could be taken out from public libraries only if you searched for it and produced ID. Dawe found that borrowing rates in the libraries dropped, and the rating worked as a gag. It seems there’s been a lot of back and forth over the ratings for the past year, but on the 3^rd of September the book was banned until a new decision could be reached. For the next month it is illegal to distribute the book. Distributing could result in a $3,000 fine for an individual. That includes lending it to a friend.

Something that strikes me here is that Dawe mentioned that he wrote this book with a specific audience in mind. He wrote it for the boys that “don’t read” (Guardian article) and yet it’s a completely different group that is pushing for the censorship of the book. In class we discussed the relationship between individual values and group ethics, and the balance that needs to be considered. Because we are uncomfortable with something, should we restrict others’ access to that material?

I’ll be following this over the next month to see what happens. I’ve included several article links below. The first two are general articles about the banning, and the second two are interviews with the author. The link from Reddit is an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the author, where users can submit questions to be answered.

What do you think about it?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11509128

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/71946450/into-the-river-ban-was-in-public-interest-don-mathieson

Interview with the author:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/10/censorship-is-alive-in-new-zealand-i-should-know-my-book-was-banned

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3l0ses/im_ted_dawe_the_author_of_into_the_river_the/

it’s unreasonable for us to require an MLS for anything other than the director’s position

Source: it’s unreasonable for us to require an MLS for anything other than the director’s position

Just reading this hiring survey by a librarian. Interesting to see how the role of their library is changing (no reference?).

The Nomadic Librarian

Well perhaps calling myself a Librarian already is counting my chickens before they hatch, but I firmly stand by the nomadic idea. My life has been a constant string of moves. Between houses, cities, provinces, countries and continents, the longest I have ever lived in one place consecutively is six years. With all that moving comes a continual readjustment of culture. Interactions between people changes with each new place you go. Entering into a new surrounding often prompts you to look for the familiar. And for myself, the familiar was always the library. What I have come to love about libraries is that no matter which library I enter into, I will be able to find what I’m looking for. The sense of continuity is comforting.

But what I have already come to learn, in only a half week of classes, is that we are called as students of the library, to challenge tradition, to change preconceptions and to consider the future. What is necessary to keep a library a library, or what can we change and still retain that libraryness? What will keep libraries relevant while still maintaining traditional roles? Overall I think I will need to challenge myself to not hold onto the past, to what I think makes a good library, but remember to consider the wider picture of what a library should be or could be.