"Reflecting on Reading"

First of all, I want to start off this week by saying that Pawley's article was DENSE! I fought my way through it and ultimately read the whole thing, but not without difficulty and likely not with the depth of understanding that I should have had. That being said, I very much enjoyed the Ross article (for the most part). My basic reactions to the article center on the final section, "Reflecting on Reading" (hence the title of this post). I did have some interesting recollections regarding the point Ross made about young readers needing to be encouraged to read, as I was quite the opposite. At the end of the school year every year in elementary school, teachers would encourage students to read over the summer, in hopes that they would maintain the skills that they had gained through the school year. I remember very distinctly my parents talking to my teachers after this speech, telling them "Please encourage John NOT to read!", mostly because I would spend hours upon hours reading, with absolutely no desire to be outside, even on the nicest of days. My parents finally came up with the plan that, if I was going to read, I had to be outside to do it. I hated them for that fact, because the indoor furniture was much more comfortable and didn't have as many bugs as the swing in the backyard or the picnic blanket that they set up for me under a peach tree. I still feel much the same way, that I would rather be indoors than out, and that I would much rather read than exercise a lot of the time. I do have to admit, though, that the requirements of reading for class have significantly dampened my love of reading, so that I often spend leisure time watching TV or browsing the Internet, though by no means has it been crushed altogether. So anyway, now that I've finished that tangent, my main point was that I've always had my own motivation for reading, so much so that my parents had to try to discourage me sometimes.

Now to respond to some of the questions posed in the final section. I find it very interesting and in fact a little disturbing that I actually can't identify my "earliest" reading memory. I think that's largely due to the fact that I've been reading for longer than I can remember, both reading along as my mom would read aloud to me and later by myself. I suppose my one significant reading memory was being allowed to pick books off the "sixth-grade shelf" while my classmates were only allowed to read at the "appropriate" second-grade level. Of course, it was around second grade that I discovered the Hardy Boys, which long remained as some of my favorite readings (fiction!? in a series!? the horror!). While fiction remains my strong preference in reading materials, with the great satisfaction of finishing a story, I have actually read a few nonfiction books (for pleasure) since I got to graduate school. Granted, they were mostly related to chemistry in one way or another, but nonfiction is a genre that I wouldn't have touched in my teenage years. Thus, I wouldn't say that my reading interests changed as an adolescent, but rather changed as I reached my 20s. I have trouble responding to several other questions in the list, too, such as a book/story that stands out in my memory. When asked my favorite book, I readily have the answer: "The Ruby in the Smoke" by Philip Pullman, which I first read in early eighth grade on the recommendation of my school librarian. Pullman quickly became my favorite author, but was replaced later by Diana Wynne Jones because Pullman doesn't write enough. Now ask me the plot. Well, it's about a girl named Sally Lockhart whose father has recently died. There is a large ruby that factors into the story (clearly, from the title), and the Smoke is that generated in the opium dens of 19th-century England. I know that there was something to do with the shipping industry in the Orient. I remember a line from the first page: "Her name was Sally Lockhart, and in fifteen minutes she was going to kill a man." Beyond that, I can tell you almost nothing about what happened. I was SO wrapped up in the story, reading it so fast, that I can't even remember half of the plot. It's that engagement that makes me love a story, the ability to "lose myself" in a story. So that kind of tells you something about me: books don't make a big impact on me, at least not in a sense that I can recount everything that happened. I'm much more likely to recount something from a book I hated, like "Walden", where Thoreau is quite hypocritical about his explanation of "isolation", where he lives alone but daily travels into town to catch up on the latest gossip. The worst part, and the icing on the hypocrisy cake, is that the then slips out the back way for fear of having to talk to some of the townspeople. That's just what gossiping is! But I digress. Either way, I think I've made my point about reading for me: it is a great pleasure for me, but specific books don't necessarily make an "impact" of affecting my life in any realizable way.

One last point to make before I wrap this up, responding to a bit of the Pawley article. It tells us that the reading habits of many 19th-century people can be tracked using their postal records. Does this not sound like a major invasion of privacy? In this day and age of fear about having our identities compromised, I find this to be an extremely hypocritical method of gaining information, even if it's long after the people in question are long dead.

Marginalized Groups and Libraries

After my rant late last week about Roma Harris's awful article, I progressively worked my way through the rest of this week's articles, which seemed much better researched, presented, and in general much better academically. I was particularly interested to find a reference to Hope Olson in Christine Pawley's article, which is not altogether surprising, as Hope Olson was a graduate of SLIS a few years ago and is now Interim Dean and Professor in UW-Milwaukee's School of Information Studies. Hope Olson was the main contributor to my project for 451 last year, about marginalized groups and their representation in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Hope became our standard go-to whenever we couldn't find any more articles on a given subject: we would look at one of her articles, find one of the keywords she used, and be off on a new search.

But anyway, enough about the wonderful Hope Olson. Another line in Pawley's article (on page 157) reminded me of something a friend of mine posted on facebook recently: "In the post-civil-rights era, despite the legislative gains of the 1960s, racism has persisted through continuing residential segregation..." A man named Bill Rankin took the 2000 US Census and made a map showing the racial distribution in Chicago. The results were either very surprising or very unsurprising, depending on how segregated you think Chicago really is. I won't post here the map of Chicago; but another man named Eric Fischer took up Rankin's original task and started making maps of various metropolitan areas and their racial distribution. I include here links to the maps for Madison and Milwaukee, as two examples that I assume most people in the class will be most interested to see. Madison is rather unsurprising in its distribution: largely white, with pockets of Asians in Eagle Heights and a racially-diverse neighborhood on the south end of town. Milwaukee was rather shocking to me, because I'm not terribly familiar with the area, but it is definitely very residentially segregated. This all calls back to racial segregation of libraries: people visit their local libraries, which means that certain branches of a library are going to have a more racially-diverse clientele than others. Does that mean that we should tailor our book selections to those particular races? I won't even attempt to answer that question here.

On a completely different subject, after reading the Radford and Radford article about Party Girl, I felt the need to watch the movie, which is partly why I'm posting this so much later than I'm supposed to (whoops). I was most fascinated with the aunt's character, who only portrayed a portion of the stereotype that we all know so well. When she was dealing with Mary (Parker Posey's character), she was always very unfriendly and unhelpful, characteristics that I would say we hope do not represent a librarian. I suppose I did have some experiences in my childhood with that kind of librarian, such as one library that I begged my parents not to take me to, partly because they had so few books that I was interested in (how can a public library operate without a good children's section!?!?) and partly because the librarian (the one male librarian I ever had real experience with) was SO unfriendly. That story follows with the librarian at my high school prior to my stint there, who my mom quotes as saying "But if the students check out my books, they won't be on my shelves!" I'm not sure where these two librarians got their ideas of patron-oriented service, but I at least have exemplars of what NOT to do once I become a librarian.

I'm not sure that I've really addressed any of the pertinent topics for this week's readings (I find that's often the case, that the things I want to talk about after reading don't match whatsoever with the popular opinion/intention behind the readings), but as I said in Friday's post, I'm really through with these discrimination articles. No matter how well they're written (which thankfully some of this week's articles were), there's only so many times you can hear the same thing before you become numb to the information. With that being said, I as always welcome comments.

West Virginia Libraries

Libraries in West Virginia seem to be doing pretty well for themselves, despite the possible negative consequences of the economy. After some frustrating attempts at searching various West Virginia newspapers (In particular I refer to The Dominion Post, a newspaper in Morgantown, WV, the home of West Virginia University, which makes its newspaper archives accessible by subscription only. This is the same newspaper that I had the misfortune of growing up with, because the journalistic quality is often poor at best, and now they keep it behind Internet lock-and-key. As a result, I had to resort to other methods to get information on academic libraries in West Virginia.), I found some good information about a variety of types of libraries in the Mountain State. So, since I’ve already mentioned academic libraries, I think I might as well go ahead and discuss those. West Virginia University (WVU) is the state university of the state of West Virginia, so it makes sense that I was able to find the most information about their libraries. Currently, it appears that there is a big push toward technology in the WVU libraries. WVU libraries have worked in the past year to improve their eReserve services; to allow access to library services from smartphones; to introduce E-ZBorrow, a “self-serve version of interlibrary loan”; and to introduce the Naxos Music Library, an online music library. More tangibly, WVU finished a renovation of its Evansdale Library earlier this year, introducing a new color scheme (in the school colors of blue and gold), access to a snack area, and the addition of eleven more computers for student access. I consider all of this to be rather impressive, especially the renovation of one of the campus libraries, in light of all the current talk of downsizing libraries. I suppose what one must still ask is, what was sacrificed in order to provide all these new services? Were jobs eliminated? Unfortunately, I didn’t find any articles discussing library jobs one way or the other, and as such I can only remain skeptical about the funding sources for these new services.

As for school libraries in West Virginia, one of the stories that I found was similar to those I found about WVU libraries, whereas the other was a bit more dismal in its report. Addressing the bad news first, the St. Albans high school library has had to face a problem that could hit any library: mold. Due to a faulty heating and cooling system, too much humid outside air was getting pumped into the library, where it encouraged the growth of mold. Workers are trying to combat the mold with bleach and water, but I think we all know how well bleach, water, and books interact. This news follows at least two other reports of mold in school libraries in the past two years, one coming from Lakewood Elementary School, also in St. Albans, and another from Andrew Jackson Middle School in nearby Cross Lanes.

As for the much happier news, just like WVU’s Evansdale Library, Philip Barbour High School has undergone recent renovations. These renovations purposefully incorporated student suggestions in order to provide students with a library that they would like to use. One student referred to the new library as “Starbucks without coffee”, a description that appeals to high school students in West Virginia. After the county superintendent asked the students for input on how to make the library a friendlier environment, she had them make a presentation to the county school board, which was approved. The board then provided $21,000 to supplement a technology grant, which together went to both renovating the library and providing a big screen TV and video cameras for use in student projects. I found this all particularly impressive, because St. Albans is in a traditionally more affluent area of the state (just outside the state capitol of Charleston), whereas Philip Barbour High School in Philippi is located 45 minutes to an hour away from the nearest large town, Clarksburg.

Public libraries in West Virginia seem to be succumbing to the economy more than the other types of libraries I looked into for this project. One article I found on public libraries addressed the fact that they are becoming more technology-focused, providing Internet access to many residents who would otherwise not have access to Internet or often not even to computers. The director of the Bridgeport Public Library even says “We’re getting less and less books nowadays”, because many patrons choose instead to get materials online. However, this turn toward technology hasn’t come without a price. Due to budget cuts and the reallocation of funds, West Virginia libraries are having to look into cutting staff and/or services, something that the librarians say will most hurt those residents who are the most in need of said staff and services, including people without access to computers or the Internet, students without the resources to complete school assignments at home, parents who bring children to the library for reading programs, and sight-impaired people who need access to large-print books. So all said, while some libraries are remaining successful in the current economic situation, others are suffering, and in turn causing difficulties for some patrons.

Lastly, an interesting bit of news I came across, was that the world’s only digital bookmobile visited Huntington in late 2009. The materials available through the digital bookmobile cater to a wide range of users, from “elementary children downloading a Dr. Seuss book onto their iPods [to] someone…blind and unable to read a regular book”. The focus of the digital bookmobile is on downloadable audio books, and it travels around the US and Canada, “bringing enlightenment and education” about this new trend.

All-in-all, it appears that West Virginia libraries are doing fairly well for themselves, including several remodels and innovations. However, the public libraries do seem to be suffering more than any of the other types of libraries that I looked into, a fact that is already proving detrimental to those who are most in need of the services that public libraries provide.

Links:

Cutting library services to hurt residents most in need

Internet transforming modern-day libraries

Students can make a difference

Mold invades St. Albans High library

Digital bookmobile visits Cabell County Public Library

Evansdale Library renovations impress students

E-ZBorrow upgrade coming

Streaming music to your desktop

Library resources now available on phone

Improved eReserve services launched

The Girl Who Cried She-Wolf

I'm sure I'm not going to make any friends with this post, but here it goes anyway. I'm tired of reading articles that try to make excuses out of women vs. men in the job market. Roma Harris's "Information technology and the de-skilling of librarians; or the erosion of a woman's profession" is just one such article, that makes a few valid arguments about library jobs, or the "de-skilling" of such jobs, as she establishes in her title. The title of this article itself has implications regarding the content of the article: she had to use two titles in one, just as she wrote two articles in one! One of the articles dealt with the de-skilling of library jobs and another one that actually detracted from her main article, railing against men who choose to work in tech jobs and as such happen to take jobs in libraries.

Now, I chose the title for this blog post for a reason: as a student in a private liberal arts college for undergrad with a plurality of feminist professor, I frequently had to read similar articles about women earning less than men and holding lower positions than men. We even "fondly" dubbed our Foundations of Liberal Arts (freshmen writing) course "Hate yourself for being a straight, white, middle-classed male 101", because we could easily split the course into four units, one featuring articles about men oppressing women, another about gays not having the same rights as straights, a third about middle-class privilege, and a fourth about whites' oppression of blacks. We read SO many of those articles that I began to get information overload and ultimately have become almost completely desensitized to the arguments. It's a classic case of the boy who cried wolf, or in this case, a girl crying she-wolf.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand the fact that women do indeed earn less money than men. That men tend to hold higher positions than women. But the journals are absolutely flooded with articles about it! They begin to lose their oomph! Journal articles in general don't get published unless they have some new viewpoint to bring to the table or new information to publish. Therein, to me, appears to be the reason Harris managed to get this article published: she did indeed draw together some good information about the "de-skilling" of the librarian profession, but she unfortunately didn't bother to give complete or even, sometimes, good arguments as to why these positions are becoming de-skilled or why men are holding some of the better positions.

I think my best example of a case in which she gives a complete lack of argument is in her section on "New Labels for Library Work". In her sixth paragraph, she cites Cimbala (1987), who claimed that one of the impediments to uniting university libraries and computing centers was the resistance of male computing staff members "to be labelled [as] librarians". REALLY?!? The whole reason something can't happen is that people are resisting a job title!?!? I highly doubt that any good dean or university president would be willing to let "resistance" to a job title be a reason not to combine two sectors. I am highly skeptical of Cimbala's research, and would really love to read the article to see if Cimbala indeed made these assertions, or whether Harris was extracting just a tiny bit of information out of a much more comprehensive study.

I have a few other reasons I dislike this article, which I'd be more than happy to share if anyone cares to listen. The article did have a few good points, which I would also be happy to share, but I feel like the good points were overwhelmingly drowned in the irrelevant points about men and how they claim all the good jobs.

Now, for your entertainment, a video to complement my title:
She Wolf

Readings for 9-15-10

I had a few thoughts about this week's readings, and I suppose I'll start with the most over-arching. I think I read these articles in the wrong order. The Saracevic article was definitely the most general, and background-like, of all the articles we read for today. I felt like it addressed a lot of the issues that we addressed in 451 last year, while also adding further insight into many more aspects of "information science". While I didn't completely like her style (I've never heard the word leitmotif, and she used it twice), she definitely presented some good information.

But anyway, about reading in the wrong order. I think after reading Saracevic, I think it would have been useful to read Pawley and Rusch-Feja, and then lastly (if at all), read McKemmish. Which this brings me to a point that I wanted to make about McKemmish: I was lacking context. Her article was published in an archives journal, apparently one that relates to everyday life/society, but that still doesn't really give me much context for the article. Perhaps an amusing anecdote, wouldn't that mean that this article wasn't given the fourth dimension of records keeping, because it wasn't brought into a framework for me? Lastly, even within the article, I felt like the author was scrounging to find any real relevance between the topics she chose, those of archiving and of the "Children Overboard". Clearly the removal of the captions from the photographs made things less clear, but I don't believe I've ever heard of an archivist purposely removing information from an item; and in fact, we had eyewitnesses who properly could put the photograph back in context, even if the information had become separated from it at some point.

So enough about the article I felt was completely out of place and out of context for this week; more about the others. I had a strange revelation as I was reading Pawley's article: what would have been different for me if I had had interlibrary loan and the ability to search and access all the libraries in my area or even around the world available to me as a child reader? As it was, I only had access to a very small public library in rural West Virginia (and a school library, but the books there were probably from the original collection when the town was founded in the 1930s as the first New Deal Colony and were of very little interest to a child of the '90s), with a decent children's and young adults' section, but with many of my favorite series missing books or only small selections by my favorite authors. I was required to branch out, to read books by a wide range of authors, on a wide range of young adult topics. But if I had had access to interlibrary loan, I doubt I would have tried most of those new authors! I would have been dead-set on finishing all the series I started (I was successful in the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Goosebumps, but my library only had spotty coverage on the Boxcar Children and a few others), which would have limited the amount of reading I did out of my local library.

I realize that the last paragraph was mostly unrelated to this week's readings, but it really gave me some perspective regarding the awe I feel these days that I have access to anything, anywhere, almost anytime. I was amazed a few months ago to find out that UW-Platteville had a copy of a book that my great-uncle wrote as a semi-autobiographical book about hobos, but I readily took the opportunity to borrow it and read it. I receive journal articles within two days of requesting them, often sooner. Perhaps it leads a little to information overload, a term that seems to be thrown around a lot these days, but moreover I think it leads me to miss some of the great things available to me in my local library, be that Madison Public Library or even Memorial Library (which it turns out has almost the complete series following a book I discovered in seventh grade, The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is well worth the read even now as an adult), something that I was fortunate not to have happen to me as a child.