Hi. Lots going on here in library-land. I made a GLBT display for the front entryway that has gone seemingly unnoticed [which is good in my community] but the books are disappearing. Let me know if you’d like a copy of my Lambda Awards flyer. Also saw my first patron looking at really raunchy porn yesterday. We have a “be cool” policy which means you’re free to look at pretty much whatever you want, but if other patrons complain, we may ask you to work towards wrapping it up. I find that while I’m pretty anti-filtering, and even pro-porn, I was a little embarassed sitting near this guy while at the reference desk and seeing people see what he was looking at, look at me to see if I saw, see that I saw, and then wait for the inevitable beatdown they expected me to give the patron, a beatdown that never came. If they had bothered to talk to me about it, we could have had a discussion about our Internet use policies and freedom to read etc. Instead, at least once, I felt like I got that look that said “We all know what you’re supposed to do now, right?” and that assumption, the assumption that we all think the same way, and all have the same standards of morality and the same values, is one that I’d like to work my way towards overcoming, for me and my patrons, even if it means looking at raunchy porn while I work
Month: June 2004
this needs no more snappy intro than the one it has already
librarian needed to throw out collection
Librarian needed for the Summer at the Lahey Clinic in Massachusetts. Your responsibilities? To purge the film library. update: according to a correspondent, the hospital designation “film librarian” bears little or no resemblance to the actual librarian positions we know and love, except perhaps for the low pay. And not to be confused with this fine web site: film librarian.
accessibility links
Library Web Chic collates some links about accessible web sites
patron confidentiality put to the test
Not a USAPA story but close to it, a real world example of cops coming to a library to try to obtain patron information and the library saying “no.” [thanks jonathan]