putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999
A very nice obit about Allen Smith, Simmons library school professor.
Allen was a fan of Webster’s Second (the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, published in 1934), bow ties, motorcycles, and sailing. He abhorred exclamation points (one quote I have written in my notes from his class reads “If you were born before 1960, you have three exclamation points to use in your life; if born after 1960, you have six, because of inflation”).
That’s what it looks like to me from reading this news article. Even though I’m not thrilled about that, I don’t see anything in the library’s policies that woud prevent this from happening. Does your library have a privacy policy? Some more discussion on Slashdot.
A List Apart, the ne plus ultra site and community for people who make websites is doing an annual survey to learn more about the people in the larger web community. If you make websites, please take their survey.
I’ve been sitting on this link for a while but I figure it’s worth tossing out here. Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known what authors should know about how most (not all) publishers work.
I thought this blog post containing a librarian’s response to a challenge to the book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding — an easy reader book that has a gay wedding in it — to be a model of responsiveness and informativeness and, at the same time, upholding the policies and procedurs of the library with politeness and compassion.
Finally, then, I conclude that “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding†is a children’s book, appropriately categorized and shelved in our children’s picture book area. I fully appreciate that you, and some of your friends, strongly disagree with its viewpoint. But if the library is doing its job, there are lots of books in our collection that people won’t agree with; there are certainly many that I object to. Library collections don’t imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life.
There’s a lively discussion going on in the comments sections as well as on MetaFilter which is where I first read about it. Nicely done, Jamie Larue.