Are You Out There?

I was innocently walking through the children's room. Actually, I was watching our artist paint our mural, which is turning out incredible (pictures soon, I think), and suddenly I spotted a book by Dar Williams on one of our new slat-wall displays.

Dar Williams? Are there two humans named that? Quick look at author bio confirms it is the singer-songwriter. I try to shed my fangirl nature, but I actually think Dar Williams is important. I encountered her and her music while I was in divorce transition. Actually, I saw her performance at a rather rinky-dink street fair. It was thundering and threatening rain, but she kept on standing on the little raised stage with her guitar, amplifier, and microphone. She was really pushing herself, explaining that one song was still a work in progress because she couldn't reach all the notes she wanted. Some of her songs really hit the nail on the head in terms of what my daughter and I were experiencing at the time: Are You Out There, When I Was A Boy.

Lights, Camera, Amalie is a middle school so-called "problem book", one of my favorite flavors. A good problem book can truly change your life. A few changed mine. Amalie's mother died while Amalie was very young. Her father has created an alternafamily of friends. Recently, he has been very ill, and the friends have been very active in co-raising Amalie. Suddenly, Amalie's mother's mother requests to meet her granddaughter for the first time. Amalie goes on the visit, taking a tape recorder and the oral history interview techniques she learned recently in her English class. Amalie is one smart girl.

Grandmom dies very soon after the visit. She has left Amalie a huge champagne Nebuchadnezzar that the grandmother filled with coins and receipts from over forty years of emptying pockets. When the money is counted (a story in itself), it comes to $2, 081.32. Of course, Amalie keeps the receipts, and they tell a bit of a story themselves.

Amalie sets out to make a movie over her summer vacation, using the inheritance. She wants to talk about endangered species. She enlists her friends, her dad and his friends, teachers, and it seems like most of New England. That's not true. If I have one bone to pick, the networking was just too easy. One person (or more) should have been mean and rotten and not helpful. A bit more conflict could have helped both the characterizations, plot, and maybe the dialogue.

This is pretty much a feel-good story, which is just fine. Amalie's inheritance from her grandmother turns out to be more than money. If reading books that slam home such themes is painful for you, then you shouldn't be reading middle school chapter books. But if you still enjoy reading something knowing how it is going to end long before the third chapter (and you romance readers know who you are), I can give you a good list. Amalie is not best of breed, but a good quality product. Dar Williams is a smart lady and this is a smart book. Now, I strongly suggest you go listen to The Babysitter's Here or I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono--more good stories, for all ages.

Referring to reference

I am at the point with the reference collection at MPOW that I fantasize about running amok with a machete through it. My very first duty when I arrived in the job was to weed it by one-third, down to one range, as part of a major branch space reshuffle. This was rather daunting, since I had no experience with the collection or the community on which to base my decisions.

My branch is out of space. Weeding is a daily obligation. (Jesus wept.) We did get reference down to one range last year, but it is sardine tight. Every new title the reference committee adds bring yet another search for something less than incredibly useful or necessary on some level. (I am on the reference committee, and I protest almost every new multi-volume set.)

How much use does our reference collection get? Well, do not walk over there expecting the following sections to be neat and tidy in perfect Dewey order: spirituality, legal, foreign language, military, cars, collectibles, antiques, music, indigenous peoples, history.

I am the designated shelf reader for reference. In theory, I go from 000 to 999 in its entirety every month, and it's all in apple pie order. In practice, all of the above-named subjects need daily maintenance. Of course, there are also the temporary but huge disturbances due to school assignments, i.e., endangered California animals and plants, the missions, black history, etc. So in fact, the section you need might be in some order at some point in the month. Of course, next month is always looming at the door.

Well, I tell myself it is a good upper body and mind workout for me.

One of the basic traits of a successful library worker is a desire for order. Create order, impose order, enforce order. It is what we do. Another highly desirable trait is accepting without daunt that creating order is truly and ever and ever a sisyphean task.

I was all excited to hear that RFID can assist with shelf reading and inventory. However, of the libraries I have visited that use RFID, none are using it for shelf reading or inventory. Is the library-vendor-marketing hype machine working overtime?

800 lb gorilla=electronic reference: I am not going to argue about whether all reference interactions can/should be handled with computer-based tools. Yes, I go there first, but mainly because the reference collection is roughly 45 feet from the reference desk. (Did I mention that I am not the author of last year's huge shifting plan?) Going to a database or a search engine has some attraction, since surfing does beat walking, mostly. But as we all know, not all content is online. Or it's there in a user-unfriendly format. Or this customer in front of me wants a big fat book with nice graphics and a good index, and does not want me to hand them a one-page printout that answers just the beginning of their questions.

On to how am I going find more space in the reference range: Purge some of the elderly local history materials? There's a bad idea. Move the science encyclopedia to the circulating collection? What! That thing cost how much and will be how useful when it is missing five volumes, including the index? Ah, government documents. Those are all online, right? Not necessarily in great formats, but the person who wants to read the County General Plan 2020 Hearings Commercial and Industrial Uses and Special Study Areas is willing to slog through much, no?

Our "gov docs" section makes me particularly crazy because we have shelves filled with binders filled with all kind environmental impact reports, quasi-governmental agency reports, and utility company stuff. And people actually do come in and want to review these, I kid you not. The local design review board sends them, a completely appropriate action on their part. Maybe they could design me some more space? Nevermind. Maybe I can figure out a way to shift that empty shelf over by over-sized books to the reference area? OK, it's across the aisle, which is a challenge, but I like a challenge, and it would mean like 48 inches of beautiful space!

Complete side track: I also need to reweed adult fiction, which I also pruned back to dead wood last year. My community reads a lot. I defy you to find a fiction title in the collection that has less than 10 circulations in the last two years. So so much for weeding criteria. I am convinced that some of my adult fiction customers borrow every title I buy, and then borrow it again six months later. And I do mean every title--they are not even genre-specific--catholic in their tastes, to say the least. Though we cannot have too many Westerns (who knew those were still being written?), or any flavor of mystery.

...OK, sorry to vent...Nobody said librarianing would be easy .

I feel bad about...

When I saw the new Nora Ephron come in as one of our one-week loan express books, I thought, "Oh that might be entertaining." I didn't give it a good hard look, except to note the call number was Dewey 814.54. A quick glance around the first Dewey Decimal Classification examples on the web I come across, and I find: "Errant essays", "You can fool all the people all the time", "Maybe maybe not second thoughts from a secret life", and other intriguing titles. Thank you Lucy A. Phillips Library, Snow College, Ephraim, UT. (I know, I say I won't get all caught up in subject headings so much, and now I am carrying on about classification...forgive me. I truly can't help it.)

I glanced at the title and cover, and thought I saw a pill bottle. Since staff may not borrow express books (a terrific policy if you ask me), when I saw it again around December, I put a reserve on it. I think I was 86 of 86 on the list. But that was ok. I like to get reserves in as little surprise presents. The serendipity of the timing appeals to me. I don't think there anything in Ranganathan, but I think the right books come to me at the right time. That's about as new age as I will get about library science.

I brought it home with me just before I came down with the creeping crud a week ago. Perfect, right? I'd read Crazy Salad and Heartburn before the last Ice Age. I knew about Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. Plus I'd read some Dan Greenberg. I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 80s, so it was like reading romans á clef about the neighbors.

To be completely fair, maybe there wasn't a book on the planet that I would have found funny this last week. I wanted a book about neck pain, something I know and think about often. That probably wouldn't have tickled my funny bone either. Krikey, it takes me pages, but I wake up. She's talking about wrinkles! Maybe when I am over fifty, this will have import? Then I started ruminating about being what I call "the bottom of the boom." I am ten-fifteen years younger than the first intrepid boomers. Since I am ten years younger than my eldest siblings (twins, so the plural is correct), that difference inside the boom has always been clear to me.

Every school I ever attended was in terrible physical shape, and had more space than was used. That was because the Boom had been there. But the Boom was ebbing rapidly. When a sibling seven years older than I went to a bus stop in high school, it had thirty kids at it every morning. When my brother went to the same stop three years later, there was maybe fifteen kids. When I started four years later, there were seven. We discovered that the elementary school buses didn't stop there anymore. After we graduated, it wouldn't be a bus stop.

When I left elementary school, they renovated the school on an "open classroom" plan. (The main thing I noticed was that the library got moved from the ground floor to very spacious digs on the first floor.) Sometime in the following fifteen years, the school closed. It is now a Ukrainian community center. After I graduated junior high, that building was remodeled extensively. Then it was bull-dozed to make room for an extended-care facility. Do I have to tell you about the two high school buildings I attended? Guess what happened to my college after I graduated? Actually, it is still there, but when I saw it last year, only four buildings seemed familiar.

This is not Nora Ephron's fault! But sometime in the last twenty years, I had the thought, "At least once the Baby Boomers start aging, that too will become cool/attractive/admirable." Because, it's been all about them for most of my life--their music, movies, books (explaining why I've read both From the Terrace and Peyton Place), clothes, protests, life styles, diets, dysfunctions...I am not saying this resentfully, though I fear it sounds that way. I am thankful for the trail-blazing. I have noticed that people with grey hair now can be seen in ads and commercials looking all that. Great! I think it's long past the time we need to worship the cult of youth... Let's do it boomers, let's act our age!

Now, about my neck. It is made of spun sugar. The least little thing upsets it. Because I am a mean, bitter person, this morning while I was teaching PC Basics for Seniors before we opened, it took matters into it's own nerve endings and spasmed. Ouch! And still ouch six hours later. I feel very bad about it. I will even give Nora some credit for exposing the real truth about our purses, if that will help. (I have not said a word about people who live in rent-controlled apartments in the Apthorp getting what they deserve. Why am I so in love with that convention? I must myself grow up.)

So maybe Nora didn't make me laugh, and probably this post won't make anyone laugh. It's just more in my reader's-experience-subjectivity vein. If anyone can come up with a short tag for that, let me know!

Jingle jangle

Thank goodness (over and over) for the Wayback Machine. Saving my blog jewelry is not their raison d'etre, but what a help!

Of course, I couldn't resist looking up pages I authored in 1994 and 1995 while I was there. One of which crashed my browser and lost the first version of this post. I blame Anthony, the poor little recent high-school graduate who first got me started on the web. I am thrilled that Philanthropy News Digest is still going, with archives back to 1995, an RSS feed (not that I am subscribing), chat, commentary. Incredible. I used to call it Current Deaths, and it was a weekly nightmare--if you've ever photocopied newspaper articles en masse, you know what I mean. I was the hunter, gatherer, table of contentser for a weekly photocopied Current Awareness service. Then, at an SLA conference, I heard a speaker talk about doing a digital CA. I was immediately hooked, even if it did take two years to implement, and Anthony told me I was crazy when I said we should base it on a database. I got hooked on library conferences the, too. Let me tell you, SLA freebies should never be shunned.

OK, I've wrestled the new, user-friendly, intuitive Blogger interface to the mat for now...so being home sick for a week has been of some use...really, I need to eat lunch and spend some time on TitleSource 3. Too bad none of you can help me with my February carts!

Resistance is futile

Web 2.0, the machine is using us, form is no longer related to content...

My very first YouTube link. Welcome to last year, again. A little scary, this video by an anthropology professor, but fairly interesting ideas, even if some of them have been around far longer than 2.0 ideas.

Nowhere near as scary as Blogger insisting I change over to one of my gmail accounts for log in and to change over to their new, no longer beta Blogger. But I held my breath and did it. So far, it's not all that different. Being able to add tags is the biggest change I've noticed. Let's see if I can index my own posts with any consistancy or logic! I muddled around in the template a little, but didn't make many changes. It looks like they still expect me to put on my html hat ocassionally. Unfortunately, it's stuffed all the way at the back of the closet, wrinkled, dusty, faded, sad indeed. As I endlessly tell my PC Basics students, use it or lose it.

Agh, I've lost all my blog jewelry! Blogger swore they would save it. Now to find it and bring it home!

I did dust off LibraryThing a little. I still have some resistance to adding library books to "my library", but I still want some kind of a way to keep track! Now I swear I am going through all the 2006 posts so I can finally compile my "best of" list, just in time for the Grammys? Oh found a new-to-me blog via Rochelle, I think. May even add it to my blogroll is the dust on my Bloglines doesn't set off too much digital asthma.

Or picture this...

I had two MRIs on Thursday. I found these images Thursday morning via Utne Web Watch, which I skim on an inconsistent basis. But this article about an artist who makes art with MRI scans really helped me get through two hours in the tube with all the really loud noise. The technician was really impressed by how still I stayed. Imagine being willing to do MRIs to create art. Then I wondered who paid for the MRIs. I told the technician about the article, and she gave me her email address so I could send it. It is pretty amazing. The artist must be absolutely tiny, or maybe she had open MRI? In any case, the human body and the human mind are both incredible.