Hi. In the interests of screen real estate, I’ve made the archives for month and category into pulldown menus and removed the counts from the category lists. If this breaks on any of your browsers, please let me know. The actual archival pages will still have the old lengthy list format.
Month: September 2004
two good articles from Library Juice
Library Juice has two very good articles this issue, a short outline of the Radical Reference project from last week’s DNC and. Even better, he has written a longer piece about the “librarian image” told from the personal point of view of someone who hits many of the librareotype bullet points [as I do, as many of us do] and doesn’t think it’s all bad.
In a sense, I am saying that we should embrace our stereotype in order to emphasize its positive aspects (without allowing ourselves to be reduced to that stereotype, as that would rob us of our individuality and diversity). The stereotype fits only a few of us perfectly, but anger over not being represented fairly by it shouldn’t lead us to deny the ways in which we do fit the traditional understanding of what a librarian is like, because there is much that is true and positive in that idea. We should be proud of being librarians according to what the word “librarian” is commonly understood to mean, and should assert our value on that basis – not on the basis that the public has misconceptions about us….
hi – 06sep
Hi. I just got back from my trip and boy did I see some lovely libraries. The ones I went into included the Haskell Free Library in Derby Line [free WiFi, even when the library is closed] which had a wonderful librarian with one of those ALA buttons who gave us a free tour of the opera house as she went through to turn off the lights. Also saw the Alice Ward Library in Canaan which has unusual architecture and historical society exhibits upstairs. I have some pictures, they’ll be online sometime soon. In the meantime, check out this little birthday web page that my Mom made me about the Monhegan Library on Monhegan Library in Maine.
why you can’t be unbiased AND comprehensive in your taxonomies
JOHO, the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, begins to look at the biases implicit and explicit in the Dewey Decimal System. Incidentally David Weinberger was one of the DNC bloggers as well as the writer of this article. We kept saying we’d get together to talk taxonomy and haven’t yet.
Why is the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system so embarrassingly behind the times? After all, its owners are fully modern, reasonable people, many with advanced library degrees, who report to work in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. How can they let their classification scheme get it so wrong? After all, if the US Census can finally, in 2000, acknowledge that many people don’t fit into a single racial bucket, surely the academics and intellectuals managing the nation’s standard library classification system can end its 130 years of religious bias. [stuff]
starting from the school level to make web sites accessible
IMLS gives grant to UB to create accessible web sites for libraries. The program will also try to recruit library students with disabilities to participate in this program, helping answer the question often asked “what about the librarians with disabilities?” [libwebchic]