One of my favorite colleagues during my brief tenure as a VISTA volunteer at Seattle Public was Tracie Hall who now directs ALA’s office for Diversity. She’s full of spirit and good ideas. Their office now has a bulletin, Versed, available on the website [bad URL, good content] that comes out five times a year and discusses best practices and skillsharing in library-diversity work.
Month: March 2004
card catalogs for sale in seattle
Watch library history get sold to the highest bidder. More card catalogs for sale at UW Seattle [sorry, link no longer working, here’s a Google cache]. At some level I’m sure we know it’s a bit dorky to be in love with our furniture, but I like to think it’s the little designer in all of us. Sure we make noxious flyers with MS Publisher and recycle clip art until it’s fuzzy around the edges, but we keep our CDs in oak boxes that are 100 years old and steeped with history, and we know that literacy never goes out of style. [thanks leep]
shush, shush
If you keep up with the conservative librarian movement, there’s a good chance that you may not be a frequent reader here and vice-versa, so you might have missed Rory Litwin’s pretty interesting email on the subject of progressive librarianship that he posted in response to the anti-progressive posts going on over at shush.ws.
“Unlike the average mainstream liberals, progressives are strongly motivated by some of the same values that motivate you: honesty, integrity, human dignity, a view of the world as fallen and in need of salvation, a suspicion of commercialism and its influence, etc.”
hi – 18mar
Hi. Last month at the library I taught an email class and 25 people showed up. This month my email class netted three people, two of whom had been at the last class. The vagaries of the library world still mystify me some days.
the library visit/review thing
I expect to be able to use the MT blog categories to bring back my library reviews one of these days, but not yet. So, here is a list of the libraries I went to on this trip:
- NYPL: Morningside Heights branch [busy and confusing, good booksale]
- Yale’s Sterling Library [Jen and Tom’s place of business]
- Columbia’s Watson Library [fancy reception, food in the library!]
- Brooklyn Public’s Central Library [got a card]
- Bank Street College Library [Carol works there]
- Barnard Library [Jenna works there]
I also went to The Strand which, while not a library, is one hell of a bookstore.