TILT #72 — Gone to the Movies
Finally finished this book! It was the greatest. John Szabo, and everyone else at LAPL, you do us all proud.
I should return it. Amazingly, no one is waiting for it.
I got to give a talk this week about maybe my favorite subject: the weird libraries of Vermont and my goofy quest to try to visit all of them. This is a slide where I explain one of the things that encouraged me to become a librarian. You can read the entire talk here, or just see the slides and notes here.
I gave another talk at the local senior living facility, more of a “Here are some main points now let’s talk about them” talk, about avoiding online scams. You can have this talk and give it yourself if you’d like to, slides and notes are here.
Like many librarians, I like being at home with a good book a lot of the time. I had an opportunity this weekend to go to not one, but two librarian movies. I hemmed and hawed a little bit — I rarely go to a movie a month much less two in a weekend. But I had the time free, the weather is improving, and honestly if there was ever a reason to go see two movies, The Public and Change the Subject are reasons one and two.
Seriously, go see these two movies. The Public you have probably heard about or seen at a conference, about a subset of Cincinnati’s homeless population deciding to stay in the library overnight instead of going out to the streets during a terrible cold snap. But it’s more complicated than that, and I was surprised and impressed. It’s also great to see it in a theater full of hooting and hollering librarians.
Change The Subject is newer, a documentary about the Dartmouth-student-inspired push to change the Library of Congress subject heading illegal aliens to something less crappy. Again, a great film and if you can see it in a packed theater full of librarians, you should.
A very linky newsletter this time around. Lots of good stuff out there particularly around National Library Week. I hope you enjoyed yours.
Activisty things you should know about:
- TurboTax has been caught deliberately hiding their free file options from search engines. Librarians may need to step up and help people not just get to tax filing online, but the low-cost site that people qualify to use.
- Libraries often commemorate holidays or historical anniversaries. We should take care to frame these so they’re not just serving a propaganda role for existing suboptimal narratives.
- Speaking of, Wayne and Shirley Wiegand have won the Gleason Book Award for their book The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism. Does anyone have a free-to-use photo of Wayne I could put on his Wikipedia page?
- I get a lot of good intel from the Twitter feed of Alan S. Inouye, the policy guy and lobbyist at ALA. He did an AMA (“ask me anything”) at Reddit and it’s good reading.
- Joanna Black, writing for SAA’s issues and advocacy section, characterizes her work as “…my drive to correct the wrongs of the past by amplifying experiences of the historically silenced.” I think many of us can relate.
- Extremists use this thing called “data voids” (i.e. blank spaces in search results) to make their crappy messages easier to find. We should understand how this works.
Things I learned:
- The Sims have libraries in their universe where they can learn skills. People have even modded their games to make a Carnegie library.
- Christopher Columbus’s son Hernando Colón was something of a bibliophile and had a huge library much of which has been lost, but the book about the books (ooooh metadata!) was recently rediscovered
- Through the Pack Memorial Library (NC) 52 Weeks, 52 Communities series, I got to learn about the Broad River Community Library, just 12 feet square. Thanks to this excellent blog feature, now you can too.
Two library stories about Texas:
- Still Buffering: Rural libraries fill the void for residents without broadband by Erin Mansfield, who comes from Vermont so she knows broadband issues!
- No snakes at the anti-prom, an amusing newspaper library typo goes viral after a funny follow-up facebook post.
A few how-to-find posts:
- Maybe nothing new to librarians but The Verge put together a post telling readers how to find stuff to read online, from bookstores, the library, fan fiction archives and experimental projects. I learned some things.
- A post on Ask MetaFilter looking for good mystery/crime fiction with Asian protagonists or predominantly Asian casts of characters.
- Mukurtu is an online free, mobile, open source system that aims to help Indigenous communities conserve their digital archives. Learn more about how it’s being used in Australia.
Grab bag fun section:
- Tweets from authors of ALA’s 11 most challenged books. It sucks that so many books get challenge especially for GLBTQ reasons, but good that people can also laugh about it.
- This library has a pirate ship.
Absolutely forgot my “what I’m reading” segment last time. This is basically me.
Books are so much the water I am living in, I forget sometimes to talk about them specifically. Here’s the latest.
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s available in more-accessible format your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
Movie icon by Hanna Elise Haugerød from the Noun Project
Library card image by Sarah on Flickr
