Paul Auster is My Homeboy

I love Paul Auster. I do. At least I loved the New York Trilogy because it blew my mind.

I came home from volunteering at the library tonight (which is also blowing my mind with awesomeness) with a stack of books including Paul Auster's latest novel 'Man in the Dark'. Outside of the 'trilogy', Auster can be a bit...melodramatic? Is that the word? But I always pick up anything I see by him. Anyway, here is a tease from the inside jacket

"I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the Great American Wilderness." (Oh my, how thouroughly existential)

So begins Paul Auster's brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. (I love devastating, go on...)

blah, blah blah, an old man and what I'm sure are crucial plot points

...Passionate shocking, Man in the Dark, is a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence. (well, I'm sold)

Seriously, that's how it happened as I was restocking the new book display tonight. It's kind of why I'm a freak, I guess, and neither my husband or my Mom can understand why I like some of the books I like.

And I'll be honest, I'll probably get to page 40 while Max finishes up his radio shift here at the radio station, and then become enamored with another 'devastating' book. Oh, I finish books, but not even a third of all of the ones I bring home from the library. I think I like mostly the idea of books, or rather the ideas in the books. I like to take them home and own the ideas for a while, think about the implications and scope of what I'm sure lies between the two covers...while not always actually reading them.

I am appreciating the luxuriant reading of a book more and more, but I'm still an ideas girl. If it sounds conflicting and thought provoking and 'devastating' - 'forcing me to confront' the complexities of the world I live in and celebrating the beauty and joy that is also there - hand it over.

I have found, however, that sometimes big ideas fall a bit short of their potential. I am currently reading "The Archivist: A Novel" which is about a librarian who watches over a sealed collection of letters that T.S. Eliot wrote to a woman named Emily. Eliot donated the letters with the instruction that they not be opened until the year 2012. A widower of 15 or so years, our protagonist is intrigued when a young, passionate graduate student tries to gain access to both the letters and his closely gaurded personal life. There is all this jazz about identity and privacy and relationships, and a pretty interesting look into the complex histories of both his wife and new interest's Jewishness. Take a librarian (awesome), some sweet special collection materials, lots of T.S. Eliot references, issues of loss and trust mixed in with a tortured self- perception rooted in The Hollocaust and the Jewish Identity and you've got a great read, right?
Great until about page 135. I haven't given up, but I'm just not entirely committed to the deceased wife's 50 or so page journal rants she wrote from an institution before she committed suicide. I"ll report back.

Did I just ramble into a corner?

Access as Warning?

ALA president, Jim Retting, had an interesting article about access in November's American Libraries Magazine. (Which you can now read online without being an ALA member - way to put your money where your mouth is ALA.) The article, Access for All, iss about the idea of access to information and how it requires a certain level of transparency in government.

Retting specifically mentioned the annual Crimea Conference, a library conference for Russian librarians, where access to information and government related information was discussed

"... [access to information] improved after the collapse of the Soviet Union but in recent years has reverted"

What? huh? Did you catch that? We've been hearing rumblings out of Russia for a while now and the relationship with our former cold war nemesis is starting to re-frost. Stories of political assassinations have led us to question their human rights stance, and, George Bush's ability to see into Putins 'good' soul through his Russian peepers not withstanding, Russia is scaring the West more than it has for some time.

Russia's political strangle hold on expression, denial of human rights, and many other nefarious doings are echoed in their attitude towards public access to information - or maybe the latter is one of the reasons they are allowed to continue with the aforementioned deeds.

In relation to oppressive countries' precedent of denying access to information Retting points out that "Most Westerners know about Tianenmen Square from the student movement but most Chinese don't know about that." That sounds bizarre to us, but that's because we live in a country with a robust press and the right to information. While I don't think that right was enumerated in the Bill of Rights, I think it should be at the forefront of any discussion of citizen empowerment and democracy. Citizens make better decisions when they have access to accurate information and governments are held more accountable when their doings are recorded, catalogued, and made available to their constituents.

When we go about determining who is in our new 'connect four' of evil, perhaps we should look not just at their nuclear arms proliferation, hostile public rhetoric, and alleged human rights abuses, but also how they deny access to information. Maybe examining trends regarding access to information, or the denial of such, could alert us of possible dangers before other, harder evidence is available.

Better Know a Library: Cerritos Library...I've Died

...and gone to Heaven! I'm not sure if I can legally post pictures from this library directly on my blog, but I would like everyone who reads this (all 3 of you) to go to their link and prepare to salivate.

What the money!? What the allocation of resources!? What the commitment!? What the wealthy community!? I nearly shed a tear tonight. This is amazing. The children's section is out of this world. Who wouldn't want to spend every waking hour here?

I don't love the "mall" concept I can see happening in some pictures, but it looks really sharp. I'm truly speechless.

Get Back on the Saddle

Well, I just applied to work in the Library of Congress. A girl can dream, can't she? I've been pretty discouraged lately because I haven't gotten several sweet library jobs I've applied for. It's like crack and I'm having withdrawals...ok, working in a library isn't like crack at all. But I'm having withdrawals all
the same.

But yesterday when I was working on my homework I said "No, Corky", I've got to keep in library land whether or not I am currently employed by one. I've got my trusty subscription to ALA and I'm on a few email lists, not to mention library school itself. SO, I'm going to try and blog more frequently about the goings on I read about in the land of library.

Here is something awesome I read in my Web Design class last week. We were talking about web security and the idea of copyright and my teacher cited this awesome bit.


There is the humorous example of Presidential candidate Senator
John McCain's Web site using a graphic that they liked by linking
to that graphic on another person's Web site without permission.
Evidently, the person who controlled the Web site (and the graphic image)
didn't particularly care for John McCain. He changed his graphic
to display text that the showed the Senator had changed his position
on a prominent social issue in a very unexpected way! :-D

Needless to say, the McCain Web site people changed their Web site very quickly!


I already had several reason for not voting for MCcain and while this one might seem stupid to many, it's not to me. Not only did the Mccain campaign not CARE about copyright and getting permission (as evidence by the Campaign's insistence on using artists' songs on the campaign trail long after they demanded they stop-HEART and VAN HALEN no the least among them), but they didn't appear to KNOW about issues like these. I can accept if MCcain himself doesn't know the intricacies of the internets or how copyright works...but that'ts what you hire experts for!!!

I just have to add that one of my favorite things about Obama is that he has surrounded himself with experts. The way he has used technology in his Campaign is amazing. I feel like he represents a 'return of the expert' to the White House, after a long winter of "my college buddies youngest grandson who knows a little something about stuff".

Then I'll Bring the Library to Me!

I got a new job and while its a fine job, it's not a library so I feel this kind of identity loss that I don't know how to deal with. I didn't realize how much being a "librarian" defined who I was. Maybe it's a good thing that I have to regrow my independence, but all the same I miss the library!

I work at the Mountainland Head Start central office in Provo and in the basement of the building is a library for the teachers. It was a little spot o' heaven when I found out about it. Whenever I close the basement down at night I walk through it just to get some library in me. Because of my interest in libraries my boss is letting me catalog all of the "new" books for the library. Most of them are old donated books, but either way I'm loving it. My co-workers keep saying things like "Why are they making you do that? " and "Oh! That must be awful". They just don't understand.

There are almost 1000 books that need to be cataloged, the library database is beyond arcane and unreliable, and the actual library itself could use some serious TLC. SOOO I've been hatching a plan about writing a grant to get things in shape! (And I just happen to be taking a class that teaches grant writing!) I want to see if I can write grant to either get new materials for the library or that will pay me to work in it for a while and get it usable. I'm not exactly sure what I need to do, or if it's even possible, but danget that place needs a librarian! The Headstart library needs some new resources and the existing ones aren't being used because of the lack of organization. To be fair, it's not really their fault. The library has been so neglected because the program in general is underfunded. They can hardly pay the staff they have to keep up with their overflowing work loads, let alone create a new position for the library.

So, I've emailed my professor to see if she can set me in the right direction and all I have to do now is work up the chutzpah to talk to my boss and the director about it at some point...

Personnel is Policy

The other day Barton Gellman was being interviewed on NPR about his new book, Angler, about Dick Cheney's role in the Bush administration and he talked about how Cheney's hiring practices were informed by this maxim: Personnel is Policy. If you just get the right people in the right positions you won't have to be a micro-manager and you won't have to fuss with copious amounts of policy aimed at getting employees to act a certain way.

At first I understood it as an excuse for cronyism, but as I thought about it don't you want to hire people who share the vision of your corporation and thus will act in what you see is its best interest, not just because of policy, but because of who they are? I think maybe (maybe?) I'm giving Cheney too much credit, ESPECIALLY considering that his 'corporation' was a "non-partisan" government not supposed to be aimed at furthering a party, but at managing our nation. Maybe that's when this kind of thinking turns horrible - when it is used to further one particular, highly controversial, vision of what the organization should be transformed into instead of the agreed upon mission statement of company.

I guess I'm thinking about this because I am job searching my heart out. Well, I'm searching, but it hard to be pumped about anything other than the few jobs I really want (I'll keep you posted on that). I'm a sucker of an idealist. For the job back at the library (though in a different department) I just want to say "If you knew how much I love this library, and its mission, and its role in the community you would know that I would be the best option for this job." I would work with enthusiastic accordance with the policies of the library because I believe in the vision of the library whole heartedly. Personnel as policy?

ps - And I'm fungible! I'm so fungible! I can do lots of stuff well! Thomas Freidmans says that is the number one attribute people in today's workplace need to exhibit. But how do you sell that to an employer?

What I Did Instead

I'm trying to get back in the swing of things as far as homework goes. This is my second time on campus today - nevermind that the first was only for an hour, an hour in which I met and chatted with two of my friends. I'm waiting for Max to get out of his night class and somehow my studying has turned into this:








Taking pictures of myself with my computer. However, I am taking a web design class and so far I'm really enjoying it...contrary to what these pictures may suggest.

It pays to be a nerd...or at least it discounts your insurance

Yesterday I was on the phone with Geico getting our insurance re-instated so that Max could drive our wee green car back to Provo and the nice lady on the phone, Diane, asked "Do you belong to any organizations that are sponsored by Geico and might get you further discounts on your rates?"

"Um..I don't think...well, I am a Member of ALA.  The American Library Association."

"They are on a our list, we will further discount your insurance."  

I save 10 bucks a month! Awesome.  

I read quite a few articles on the benefits of belonging to professional library associations in one of my classes last semester and NO ONE brought up that you get discounts on your car insurance.  They should push that more at ALA.  

Is it REALLY about reading?

Max forwarded me this article entitled "Two-Make that Three cheers for the Chain Bookstores!"and here is a particularly interesting part:

Although there is some reality in the image of the chains as predators (ours is a capitalist economy, after all), it is not the whole truth or even, perhaps, the most important part. The emotional drive behind the anti-chain crusade is an understandable mistrust of big corporations allied with the knee-jerk snobbery that is never far from the surface in American cultural life. "I am a reader," the interior litany goes, "therefore I belong to a privileged minority; I patronize exclusive bookstores known only to me and my intellectual peers." With the chains, which target a wider public and make the process of book buying unthreatening to the relatively less educated, the exclusivity factor disappears.[...]

Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are)...the fact is that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a sad gap in America's smaller cities and suburbs—the places, in fact, where most of the American population actually lives. Books-A-Million's 202 stores, for instance, are almost all located in the Southeast. Borders has from the beginning targeted another underserved market, the suburbs, and as a result the quality of life in American suburbia has radically changed over the past decade. This is a point that the urban intelligentsia, which loves to characterize the suburbs as a cultural wasteland, seems to have missed, or at least to have taken no interest in.

I love a cozy bookstore as much as anyone, but if I really care about improving the reading habits of the general public, and the dissemination of knowledge as i so fervently claim to, doesn't this make sense?

Who Loves Lists?

Well, I guess I do. Who knew? Not only have I turned into a list maniac about Jordan and our Europe plans (you should see the spreadsheets), my school life has turned into listmania too! I have been working on the last big group project for my Information Retrieval class and I'll just tell you a little bit about what we have to do.

My group has to read 15 articles and create a searchable database to house them and records to represent them and vocabularies to search them by. The searchable part is what is difficult. We each read a few articles and then we had to create what are called pre-coordinated vocabularies and post-coordinated vocabularies for the concepts in the articles. The Vocabularies are the terms that you would search for in a library catalog or database. So we have to determine what the concepts of the article are and guess what terms would most likely be searched to put on our record. Each term or term phrase is associated with an article (or sometimes several articles).

The Pre-coordinated terms are the hardest I think because we have to combine several terms that represent the articles. Example: If the article were talking about how to train poodles we would create a subject heading string that looked like this "Dogs-training-poodles". But perhaps several more until we had adequately covered the article We have to anticipate the users search methods and make sure that the terms are enough the same (aggregation) and enough different (discrimination). (There may be many articles about Dogs, but as we start to descriminate the terms, training, poodles, it becomes more specific - make sense?)

Anyway, working as a group has also been challenging. One persons terms say "User Interfaces" and the other says "Patron Interfaces". They may mean exactly the same thing but trying to combine 5 people's different terms that use the same words for the same thing has been a tasky tootle. I volunteered for this part, and it has taken more time than I thought. It's not "hard", but it is time consuming.

All that being said, I have enjoyed them mental excersize of breaking information into its largest concepts on down to its smallest. There is something about disecting information that way that is soothing to me, like those little sand boxes that you rake through with a tiny fork. Call me crazy.

Nice German Man Says...

Nice German Patron: These kids with earrings and painted hair – Hitler wouldn’t have stood for it. I’m a survivor of Nazi Germany and Hitler was a better man than most of our politicians. He never lied about what he was doing. He was a poor uneducated fellow who never could have gotten into power by himself. It was the wealthy bankers who put him in power and they are responsible for what he did.

You know the bankers would take over this country, but they are afraid of the people who have guns. They are trying to destroy America, the constitution. Did you know that president Bush can tap your phone line if you say certain things? If you say “president bush” or “nazi” or “communism” a machine will record your conversation.

huh?

Not a Lie

Me: What can I help you with today?

Patron: You know, I used to be able to move things with my mind when I was a child, but I have kind of forgotten. Can you help me find some books that will help teach me again?

Me without even blinking: Oh sure, here is the call number for our books about telekenisis

I've really entered another dimension. What's the best is that it doesn't even phase me. I love this job.

That's a Reference Question

This is exactly what happened on an actual phone call at the library the other day


Patron: "Well, are you LDS?"
Brooke: "I prefer not to answer personal questions"
Patron: "Well, I just need to know if you think I can be forgiven for my sins"
Brooke: (internal galsp) "You know, I just don't feel comfortable advising you on this issue, I would suggest you contact a religious or spiritual leader"

Technology - who needs it?

We do! That's the answer. We, as librarians, certainly do. I have been pretty surprised at the aversion and downright ----- expressed about technology by many of my classmates...who are earning their masters degree in a technological science...via the internet. I love books just like the next librarian and bibliophile, but if there are technologies that will make our libraries better let's use them danget.

On a similar note, I had this idea the other day that I think would be awesome for a public library to implement. Keep in mind that I have no idea what kind of cost or man power or equipment this might require, it's just pie in the sky at this point. So, you know how you can personalize your google account and when you log in it will not only look like you want it to (personalized skins and what not) it will display information in a way that you want? If not try it out, it's awesome. Or how Amazon gives book recommendations when you log in based on your previous purchases?

What if you could log onto your library account and it would would display all of your hold information, RSS feeds about your favorite authors and their latest projects, personalized reading recommendations from librarians, "shelfs" that you could create "to read" lists on that could actually link to the catalog, the list is endless. Anyway, the more I think about it, the more awesome I think it would be. I'll keep working on it.

The Secret Russian Mafia Spy's One Eyed Baby's Scandalous Nanny

These are a couple of sweet romance Titles from the “Harlequin Presents” romance series. We all owe a big thank you to Wal-Mart for keeping these titles in stock!

The Mediterranean Billionaire’s Secret Baby
Claiming His Pregnant Wife (who knew being pregnant was this sexy?)
Aristides’ Convenient Wife
The Desert King’s Virgin Bride
Innocent on Her Wedding Night
Willingly Bedded: Forcibly Wedded (I’m not making this up)
The Brazilian Boss’s Innocent Mistress
The Greek Billionaire’s Baby Revenge

I have nothing else to say. It’s too easy, and it’s too depressing

For the Love of Food @ Your Library

So tonight is the first night of a new program that the Provo City Library is doing called "For the Love of Food @ Your Library". A woman from the Utah State extension center is coming in to give classes about food prep and stretching your food budget. When we talked about maybe doing it in programming meeting I was most excited about it, so they put me in charge of setting it up. So I arranged the program with USU and made all of the flyers (which was such a rush) and now we'll just see.

I guess the library has tried this in the past without a lot of success, so we just hope someone shows up. It's really exciting to have planned something and then see if come to fruition...or not as tonight will tell. Scary.

My Dirty LIttle Secret

Ok, so I’m confessing something here that is truly embarrassing…I buy for the Romance section of my library. I know, I know, I already know that I’m perpetuating all kinds of unhealthy relationship expectations and facilitating down right crap, but it’s my job. In fact, It’s one of (if not the) largest circulating collections at the library, so when they asked me to buy for it I was really flattered. I should tell you that when they asked me if I would buy for it they said “Now, you don’t have to read them… but would you buy for romance? Funny. It’s also funny to note that Romance is the highest circulating collection… in Provo? Huh.

One of the perks of buying for Romance is that I get to see ALL KINDS of ridiculous things aimed at Romance Readers and Romance Writer hopefuls (as most romance readers are). I mean really, sometimes I am horrified, sometimes outraged, and others I just can’t stop laughing. My favorite most recent one was when I came across an article on how to write better “love” scenes in your books without being cheesy or pornographic. The Irony! They always call them “love” scenes…and then fill the book with casual sex…Anyway, that’s a rant for another day. I usually give Max and earful when I get home about what new psychological conundrum I’ve discovered in the Romance World, but maybe if I post them here his ears can get a break and more people can share in my disgust, I mean laughter, I mean rage…

Yucky Romance Writer Quote of the Day

"In essence, I want to feel smart, not actually be smart."


Quoth a young Romance Writer/Romance Agent. She is referencing the type of reading she likes to do that will "teach her something...but not really"

She goes on to say "Take Grisham’s books, for example. Specifically, THE FIRM. That was an incredibly easy book to read, but he never spoke down to the reader. Grisham made people feel smart. As if they were “in the know.” A door was opened, and it was very welcoming. We could feel smart about lawyer stuff without having to have gone through any of that time consuming and headache inducing law school business." you know...learning something for real.

Snarky Snark Snark, I know. I'm all about easy access books, but not for the purpose of making someone "feel smart" but not have to actually deal with that pesky burden of learning something and actually "be(ing) smart". Awesome.

Oh my land. I just read this in the same article. Is this the height of stupidity?

"Often what makes me feel smart when reading is when I’m given tiny little pieces of insider language. {fair enough says brooke...go on } I don’t even need to understand the word or words, oddly enough, but if well-written and I get the meaning from the context, I feel smarter because I could actually use those words-I-don’t-understand in a sentence! {oh no she didn't} I could make other people feel dumb for not knowing those words! YeeHaaa! (Oh, sorry, did I type that last bit out loud?)" Yuck Yuck Yuck and double Yuck. It's an awful combination of vanity and idiotness - yes, that's a word.

User. Content. Context.

So I started my Master's program today and there is something so invigorating about being in school again. Granted the setting is much different - library full of young republicans looking for dates vs. soft lamp light and my own bed - but pursuing a course of study to a specific end (an A) feels really nice. Today I read a few chapters from "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" and I think this will be my favorite book this semester. What is Information Architecture I hear you ask. Well, in so many words it is the idea of structuring, organizing, and labeling information in such a way that it is easily findable and manageable.

Example: I organized my closet yesterday for the 90th time, but I really think this one will stick. I have it organized and labeled in ways that make sense to me (white t's, black t's, and colored t's on different shelves) and they are all easily accessible, and not over crowded, so that everything won't end up in a pile on the floor like last time. Think of information architecture like organizing your closet to minimize the time you spend searching for things. I'm excited that this course is focused on the web info with a splash of graphic design. Fun stuff.