One [Insert Entity], One-or-So Book(s)

As soon as the group presenting on One City-One Book (OCOB) mentioned that 48 states have had OCOB programs, I wanted to know which two states haven't had similar programs. Upon asking one of the group members the same question, my suspicions were confirmed: West Virginia was one of those two states (Arizona being the other, as far as the group member could remember). Not surprising to me at all. In what is traditionally ranked as the 50th-least-literate state/District of Columbia out of 51 (we have a saying in West Virginia, "Thank God for Mississippi"), I'm not at all surprised that a literacy-promoting program has not been instituted there. And yet West Virginia managed to produce some of my favorite librarians of all times, the public and school librarians who inspired my love of reading through pre-school and elementary school times, on through middle school (probably my favorite librarian content-wise, because she knew exactly what types of books I liked and used that to introduce me to new books, including my now-favorite author) and even the grandmother of one of my best friends who was my high school librarian. But anyway, I digress for the sake of lauding some of my librarians, in contrast to the abysmal lack of literacy programs and even of literacy itself in West Virginia.

So how do I feel about OCOB programs? I'm not a huge fan, to be honest. I think the concept behind them is pretty good, to encourage discourse amongst community members, based in a common experience. But having participated in two years' worth of them here on campus, I have yet to experience that heightened sense of engagement. I mean, I may have enjoyed Henrietta Lacks because it was a pleasant read, significantly less academic than the rest of the stuff I was reading. And I may have felt passionately about Michael Pollen's In Defense of Food (I was the one on Wednesday night who rather loudly whispered "That books sucked!" when the OCOB group mentioned it. I don't like being told that everything I do is wrong, particularly when it comes to the love of my life, food.). But the extent of my discourse about that book was with my roommate, who thinks that Michael Pollen is a god (perhaps she thinks he is God? No, she's an atheist, but I think she believes he's as close as it gets), when I complained about his abrasive manner of presenting his arguments. And the extent of my HeLa discourse was limited to in class. I find this one more surprising, because with a science background, I would expect myself to engage more passionately in these discussions, but assigned readings just really don't do it for me.

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.

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