"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"

Yesterday's Division of Libraries All Staff Meeting was a great reminder, I thought, of our libary's mission and our place in helping that mission to succeed. We all get so bogged down in our individual work that these reminders are vital.

On that note, here is one of the animated short films that's been nominated for an Academy Award this year. It's described by its creators as "a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor."

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore Trailer from Moonbot Studios.

At the All Staff meeting, Dean Mandel touched on the concept of the library as a place, how that powerful iconography still speaks to people even in the context of the modern information age. Although as a research library, we are mostly hosting users engaged in scholarly pursuits and not reading for pleasure or escape, of course our concept of the book as object remains equally powerful. Thus, this fanciful short film might also help remind many of us just why we wanted to work in libraries in the first place.

I hope it will inspire you as we go forward with our new Strategic Plan!

Bonus confession: I totally teared up at the end.


via PhiliBiblos

"Our Super Technological Future"? Here's Hoping Not!

Recently, I came across this video of a presentation by Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell, given at D.I.C.E. 2010.

Schell spends the first part of the talk discussing the surprising success of certain technology and games over the past year, and trying to explain that success, but then he spends the last part projecting a near-future world which will emerge from this "Facebook Games" era in which we find ourselves. He argues that all aspects of our lives could soon be governed by (primarily) corporate technology that will monitor quite literally everything we do, in order that we may earn various points and rewards.

You can find the entire talk posted on various websites, but this excerpt contains the scariest part:



At the 7:11 minute mark, he brings up something that hits especially close to home - the tracking of our reading habits. Here is a transcript:

"You sit down with your new Kindle 3.0, which, of course, has the eye-tracking sensor in it that can tell what you've read and how much you've read of the book. And it's important to read the whole book because, then, if you leave a review on Amazon, you'll get super bonus points if it knows you read the whole book through. As you finish the book [...] you get an achievement unlocked. This thing has been tracking you for 20 Years. You finished 500 novels, this is like a big achievement. You are thinking, "I'm really embarrassed that my 500th novel was this dumb Star Trek novel that I'm reading, because, like, I'm going to remember that forever". And then you start thinking about all these achievements and points and things and realizing that, you know, you have no idea what books your grandparents read or where they went on their daily basis. But these sensors that we're going to have on us and all around us and everywhere are going to be tracking, watching what we're doing forever. Our grandchildren will know every book that we read. That legacy will be there, will be remembered. And you get to thinking about how, wow, is it possible maybe that -- since all this stuff is being watched and measured and judged, that maybe I should change my behavior a little bit and be a little better than I would have been? So it could be that these systems are all crass commercialization and it's terrible. But it's possible that they will inspire us to be better people [...]"


So here's what I thought when I heard this, in approximate order:

1) What is wrong with Star Trek novels?!
2) Dude is actually saying that this will cause us to self-consciously police our own reading lists and this is a good thing?!
3) Didn't librarians win acclaim for, you know, not revealing users' reading histories when faced with the Patriot Act? Why on earth would people entrust their reading histories with corporations instead?
4) OMG, I have a Kindle. Big Brother is watching me right now...


Setting aside the fact that it would indeed be interesting to know what our grandparents read, it is a little bit narcissistic to assume that our grandchildren will wish the same about us. (Personally, I would be thrilled to discover that my grandmother was reading Star Trek novels!) And setting aside that concern about narcissism, I must admit that it's still a boon to anthropologists of the future that we are leaving behind such a huge amount of information about ourselves already.

But! And this is a really big BUT. I fail to see how reading, not reading, or secretly reading particular kinds of books is an accurate measure of a person's worth, intellectual or otherwise. And I also fail to see how any corporate interests collecting our reading histories would always use their powers for good.

Technology, books, privacy and libraries - this is far too much to unpack in a simple blog post.
But after seeing Schell's presentation, I am even happier to be part of a profession that helps people to read whatever they want, without fear of commercial enterprise, or the Thought Police.

The Librarian Stereotype... on the Big Screen and Beyond

I've been thinking a lot, as I often do, about the topics that Jen raised in her last post, on Librarians, Stereotypes, Professionalism, and Pop Culture.

Then earlier today, I came across a new piece on a feminist blog and magazine to which I subscribe:

From the Library: The Librarian Stereotype on the Big Screen

Here, librarian and blogger Ashley McAllister looks at librarian characters in a few famous films through the ages (with clips!), and concludes: "When we see librarians in the movies, they are usually fulfilling the role of a very narrow stereotype."

In my professional experience, the Real World Workplace of the large university library has not had a majority of female staff-members, but has been pretty evenly split. However, most popular stereotypes about librarians and library workers tend to portray them first and foremost as women.

As a well-read feminist, it is hard for me not to get deep into the long and complex history of why that may be the case, or of the general history of Women in Libraries, but I will say that I believe it is very important to debunk these kinds of stereotypes.

How to go about doing so?
That's a whole different story: the story at the heart of Jen's post.

However, where Jen mentions the argument made by some people that "librarians shouldn't complain 'about the deprofessionalization of librarianship... and then do things like this [funny video] and still expect to be taken seriously'", I can't help but point out that in our culture it is most often women who have trouble being taken seriously as professionals in general, and that most of the library professionals in that video also happen to be women.

For me, questions about library work, stereotypes, professionalism, and pop culture are always bound up in questions about gender and sexism. And of course this effects everybody, not just women!

I don't have any answers. Just more food for thought.

Librarians, Stereotypes, Professionalism, and Pop Culture

A little bird (one of the students working in ILL) recently sent me a link to a YouTube video featuring students and faculty at the University of Washington's Information School (teaching Library and information Science) doing their rendition of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." Less than a week later, I saw the link to this video posted on one of our library's internal list servs (lib-all, I think).

In the video, the students and faculty librarians at UWash changed the lyrics to relate to libraries; the chorus lets the world know that they "can use my, can use my, you can use my catalog (don't forget the databases)."



The video is certainly entertaining and good for a laugh. What I found interesting were a couple of comments posted on New York Magazine's website in reaction to the video.

One comment says that librarians shouldn't complain "about the deprofessionalization of librarianship (i.e. people who don't have a library science degree doing 'professional' library jobs) and then do things like this and still expect to be taken seriously."

A self-identified library student then replied to this comment, stating that there's difference between professionalism and having a sense of humor.

In my library school classes, we talk a lot about the level of professionalism in the field of librarianship. There is a drive to publish scholarly articles and make the profession comparable to other professional occupations in law (lawyers), medicine (doctors), etc. I think, though, that the professionalism of librarianship need not confine itself to the standards set by other long-established professional occupations.

Librarians work with a whole host of people in the library, not just "professionals" with Master's degrees. It is the total group, consisting of library student assistants, staff, administrators, professionals and faculty, that projects whatever level of professionalism they wish for their library. We do so by helping patrons and giving them a sense of how we do business, how we treat them, and how we demonstrate to them that we have specialized knowledge that will help them use the library.

What do you think of this video? What do you think patrons at this library would think of this video? What would they think about their library after seeing this video?

Also, should we make a video?