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Women need pink for reading comprehension

December 7th, 2014 by pladd

So here’s a book I found at the library:

Essential Car Care for Women!

Dudes, you don’t need this. You were born knowing how a four stroke combustion engine works. But ladies, in the name of equality, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Literally that’s how the back justifies itself:

Despite the many advances women have made since the internal combustion engine was invented, there is still one widely held belief that won’t seem to go away: “When it comes to cars, women should just leave it to the men.” In Essential Care Care for Women, ESPN NASCAR pit reporter Jamie Little and Discovery Channel “Turbo Expert” Danielle McCormick team up to dispel this myth once and for all

Because a special pink book for women really dispels the myth that they know fuck-all about cars and can never learn. Or maybe we just can’t learn without someone condescending to us! It’s true that I have trouble understanding text that’s not pink.

Finally someone understands my lady-needs

And yet, to my knowledge, this hasn’t made it on to any challenged book lists. I feel like debating this would be a better use of our time than freaking out about classical breasts on the cover of The Awakening.

Tagged: books, library

Posted in Library Tales |

Library Book Drop: A Magical Portal

September 4th, 2014 by pladd

Yesterday I was emptying the library’s outdoor book drop when I found a mysterious folded paper:

What could be inside?

I started to unfold it:

A promising beginning

And a little more:

Oh my god yes

Husky and Timber Wolf of Mine, come to me as a tiny pup. I summon my newborn companion creature SO MOTE IT BE.

I am ALL ABOUT this.

Some more deets on this “companion creature”

NAME: Atlas
Height: About 2 1/2 feet
What he eats: Sunlight; his fur absorbs the sun’s energy, turning it into food
Temperament: Playful
Personality: He is very friendly, yet brave; he is also very curious
Eye color: Light blue
Breed of wolf: Timber wolf and husky hybrid
Powers: his saliva can heal things very fast; he can fly w his wings; He can become a spirit so that no one can see him but me.

Timber husky hybrid that eats sunlight??? YES But the best part:

Someone worked way hard on this!

But why did I find this in the library book drop? Was it thrown in there by accident? Or did this hopeful wolf-hybrid-owner think that the best way to seal a ~mystical spell~ was to toss it in the library book drop? For all I know, it is, and she is even now cavorting with a flying wolf. You heard it here first: library book drops are magical portals to awesome.

Tagged: library

Posted in Library Tales |

Three Things I Learned Yesterday from Children’s Books

March 5th, 2013 by pladd

I’m currently doing science about access features in children’s non-fiction, which has me looking through about 200 books this week from every section of the Dewey Decimal System. This includes all the sections in which I’d normally not venture, and I’m pleased to say I’ve learned some things.

1. The Hays Code

This code of motion picture standards began in the 30s and was in effect in some form until 1968. I learned about it in a book about the fashion of the 1930s:

Which I wouldn’t normally check out but was actually full of awesome pictures

In a pop-out box about the burgeoning film industry, the book described the Hays Code as:

…prohibiting “scenes of passion”, unpunished acts of adultery or seduction, profane and vulgar language like the words guts and nuts, nudity, cruelty to animals and children or showing any representations of childbirth, the Hays Code also outlawed depictions of certain types of crime. Gangster films could no longer show machine guns or even allow the screen gangsters to talk about weapons. The code also insisted that law enforcement agents never be shown dying at the hands of criminals and that all criminal activities shown were duly punished.

So Golden Age Hollywood did not love a cheeky villain.

2. The Pony Express only lasted for 19 months

This sad dose of reality brought to me by:

A Dusty, Thankless Job You’d Rather Not Do

I actually really love the You Wouldn’t Want To Be… series, with such titles as “You Wouldn’t Want to be a Victorian School Child” and “You Wouldn’t Want to be Mary Queen of Scots”. I love its underlying premise of “Look how much history sucked, children.” Because, man, did it ever. The smell alone would probably kill me, and there are two separate books in this series just about pre-modern medical practices. A younger me probably could have benefited from reading “You Wouldn’t Want to Live in a Medieval Castle” or “You Wouldn’t Want to be a Samurai” because the media had given me the total wrong impression about how awesome things were, totally downplaying all the uncomfortable grossness of a time before sanitation and advil.

Anyway, this one was about the pony express and what was expected of the riders. They tried to downplay the fact that service only lasted for 19 months before telegraphs came in–and was interrupted for various conflicts with Native Americans–but it still crushed my mental image of what this was all about.

3. Someone wrote a children’s book about the housing bubble

It told me everything I needed to know about my immediate past

This book is bizarre, and reading it is pretty surreal. My favorite parts were a picture of an aisle inside what is clearly a Whole Foods with the caption “Many Americans bought grocery items in bulk to save on food costs during the recession” and a picture of Bennigan’s explaining how chain restaurants closed in 2008 because more people were eating at home. Newsflash future child readers: Bennigan’s closed because it was Irish-themed terribleness and people still buy groceries in bulk because we are still poor. I guess that’s why it was so weird–it adopted the same tone as the pony express book, like it was explaining the strange and distant past to me, except that it was really just telling me about 2009. My life has not changed noticeably since 2009! I’m still buying groceries in bulk and complaining about the rising cost of fuel, stop using such definitive past tense.

Also, according to the big bold text at the end “The Great Recession officially lasted 18 months” which is even less time than the pony express operated, yet somehow this book is longer.

Back to the library science mines!

Tagged: facts, library science, lists, science

Posted in Library Tales, lists |

Dear Unknown Muggle: The Wizarding World Finally Reaches Out to Me

September 30th, 2011 by pladd

OMG YOU GUYS BEST LIBRARY FIND EVER! I was shelving books in the teen area when I picked up a folded piece of paper sitting on the edge of one of the shelves. Naturally, I opened it before recycling to see if it was filled with juicy gossip, but it was SO MUCH BETTER! Here is a scan:

Yes, that IS a rip in the paper labeled "Bloody Owl!"

I mean, I can’t say I’m surprised. Obviously if you’re going to take your magical family on a muggle vacation, you would end up at the Holly Springs Library. You can TELL this was written by an authentic English witch because she uses the word “bloody” TWICE and also “horrid”. My only point of confusion is that it is written in pencil on notebook paper instead of on parchment with a quill, but I assume it is all part of her undercover muggle disguise.

After years of picking up pieces of paper with chewed gum stuck to them in the stacks, I feel like this was the universe’s way of giving me a reward.

Tagged: harry potter, letters, library

Posted in Library Tales |

Secrets of the Librarian Universe

April 29th, 2011 by pladd

I make librarians out to be pretty awesome, and not just through my own awesome example. Last year’s NaNoWriMo revealed that all librarians are trained secretly from birth by the International Librarian Corps, given subject specializations and cool badges and maybe even the ability to travel through printed works by Dewey Decimal. In the script James and I are writing this month for Script Frenzy, my character reveals that librarians follow a strict Librarian Code:

A page after this, we're attacked by a Jane Chance monster

In the real world, librarians don’t fight epic battles with literature’s greatest villains or even have cool ILC badges. I know, it’s a total bummer. However, there are some ancient librarian secrets I can report back to you after becoming a MASTER of library science (I will always, always say it like that from this day forth; I assume that’s the whole point of calling it a “master’s degree”). Here are some true librarian facts that might shock you:

1. Librarians haven’t read every book ever
2. Librarians judge books by their covers ALL the time
3. Librarians don’t hate fun (your mileage on this one may vary depending on librarian/library)

The first of this list is probably the toughest to deal with because, of course, we want to appear knowledgeable about every book ever, even though it’s impossible for this to be the case. Here are some tricks librarians (including me) are using right now to fake you out:

GoodReads

GoodReads is amazing! It’s kind of like the facebook of books. You can keep track of all the books you’ve read and want to read, organizing them into any categories you want. Mine include “Books I Own”, “Favorites”, and “Books I Started But Couldn’t Finish”. You can assign them star ratings and write reviews, and see what your friends are reading. When I remembered it existed a few weeks ago, I went into a frenzy trying to remember every book I’ve ever read to properly record it. But you probably only have these OCD urges if you’re actually a librarian already. If you don’t have GoodReads, you should def check it out, and if you do, then we should be friends.

Favorite Book Montage!

WorldCat

WorldCat is like a library catalog, but it lets you search all libraries in the world at once! Okay, maybe not all libraries, but it certainly seems like it. Librarians use it all the time for things like Inter-Library Loan, but I mainly use it to see how far away I am from a given book at any time. Seriously. Search for a book, and the results will tell you roughly how far away you are from a library copy. For instance, if I search for my book I get:

Of course, it doesn’t know that I have boxes of them in my closet. It’s really great when someone asks for a book we don’t have at the library to be able to tell them “Wow, the nearest copy is 3000 miles away! And in ENGLAND!” It makes me look like some kind of book psychic!

What’s Next?

You know what’s annoying? Series. And not just because I’m always confused about what the plural should be. Especially annoying are ones like Warriors or Left Behind that are actually a bunch of different series all shelved together in a seething, confusing mass. Luckily, I don’t have to read all of them to untangle this confusing web of prequels and sequels and spin-offs and “companion books”. I have What’s Next, which is maintained by Kent District Libraries in Michigan. It’s super helpful when some kid wants to know “Which Magic Tree House book comes after the one with the dolphins?” or “I need Magic Tree House #15!” Because there are 45 books in that series! Not to mention the confusion of Erin Hunter’s six series within a series about tribes of warrior cats.

Don't laugh, if you were born 12 years earlier you'd be into it too. Apparently.

Novelist

Library grad school is ALL ABOUT Novelist, but my experience is that real librarians don’t use it to fake you out as much as you might think, just because it takes awhile to load. It’s a huge database full of books and recommendations for other books. Chances are, you can access it too through your local library, although you probably don’t know it. If you search for a book, you get a brief description including quick one-word descriptions of the genre, pacing, tone, and writing style, plus the reading level and any reviews from “real” sources. Then on the side bar it recommends books like that one, and lets you customize a search for them by giving you check boxes with that book’s characteristics.

This one is from the book I'm reading with Steven right now, Museum of Thieves

So I can easily find other books with 12-year-old girl thieves, but maybe not museums. Of course, there’s no guarantee your library will own any of these books. And you can’t search by cover design, which would be the single most important librarian tool if someone would just invent it.

Bonus Library Secret: Custom Book Lists

This is possibly only a librarian secret in that I don’t think it’s advertised very well. At the library I work at right now, if you fill out an online form about what kinds of books and movies you like, they’ll email you a detailed book list just for you about a week or two later! The form is way detailed with lots of check boxes for preferred genres and sub-genres, setting, main characters, relationships, or tone, and the book list you end up getting is usually very thorough (and pretty!). They don’t ask for your library card number either, which means anyone can take advantage of it!

Tagged: librarians, libraries

Posted in Library Tales, lists |

Weird Library Encounters: Existential Crisis Guy

March 25th, 2011 by pladd

Some people (like my professors) think that working at a library reference desk means answering questions as myriad and unique as there are people in the world.

Or historical inaccuracies in 300

In reality, it’s usually just a lot of “Where are the mysteries?” and “Where can I find a book that’s exactly like Harry Potter but not Harry Potter?” Sometimes, though, there are those bright stars of individuality who do something so bizarre that I remember them after my shift is over, that I end up telling Steven about so many times they earn a nickname. “Nancy Drew Drunk Lady”, “Star Wars Quote Yelling Boy”, and “Angry Divorcing Mom” are but a few. This week I got to add another perfect, special butterfly to this rare and interesting collection with “Existential Crisis Guy”.

Existential Crisis Guy is maybe the weirdest encounter I have ever had at the library (which, if you’ll take a moment to think about it, is REALLY saying something). But also one of the most polite and uplifting, something I would never think about, say, Nancy Drew Drunk Lady. He came in asking for books about “basic virtues”, which, since we were in the children’s section, I assumed were for his kid. We have a lot of books about things like Responsibility and Caring for the preschool/early elementary crowd, so I showed him where they were. He took one of every single title we had in the section, even doubling up on some of the virtues if more than one series covered it. My first assumption was that he maybe had the most badly behaved child in the world, and that kid was about to get such a reading to.

Then he told me that the books were actually for him. He admitted that he wasn’t the strongest reader (which is a very brave thing to admit! Sometimes people understandably dance around the issue and it’s awkward) and also that he was “having a hard time”. He mentioned losing money, realizing that money can’t buy happiness, and that he is now desperately searching for inner peace. He turned to me with pleading eyes and asked, “Which is the book I can read to tell me how to be happy? How can I find inner peace?”

My first thought was, “Wow, out of the eight librarians on desks right now you thought I was the best person to ask this of?” I guess because on most days I feel so far away from inner peace–or, really, any kind of peace. I told him that there are lots of books about that, and all of them say something different. He seemed pretty bummed that there wasn’t one answer I could just hand him. I showed him the section on feelings and he seemed moderately happy with a book titled something like Being the Best Me I Can Be. I also kind of hesitantly showed him the religion section just in case, but he was having none of that, telling me that religion is not the same as inner peace, that he wanted spiritual happiness. Then he thanked me profusely, said he would be back after he finished “learning these basic morals”, and left.

For a long time after this encounter, I was pretty much freaking out. But the more I thought about it, the happier I got. Here was someone who was clearly in emotional distress. And he chose to come to the library for help. The library, you guys!

I was trying to think of other places people might go to with this sort of problem. Obviously many people, certainly in the past but still today, might turn to a church or religious counsel of some kind. Except when I tried to offer him this he seemed adamant that religion was not the kind of help he needed, that it had nothing to do with “spiritual happiness”.

What about the Internet? That great leveler of libraries that most of my professors are not-so-secretly afraid of? Why didn’t he just type “How can I be happy” into Google? There could be lots of reasons (including not having Internet access at home, for which you would also need to come to the library), but I think one of the main ones is that he needed to talk to another human. Especially with these kinds of problems, there’s little comfort in an algorithm, however well designed. Plus, do a search for “How can I be happy?” You get 1,320,000,000 results! And most of them are trite little tips about “spending time outside”. How are you supposed to sort through that? How are you supposed to find some kind of meaning in that? For some people and for some things, I think the library is the only place to go, whether they know it or not.

And it’s not like I can just tell you the answer. But neither can google, when it comes down to it. What I can do is show you how to maybe find an answer, which in the end, will probably help you more in the long run, when you come up with other questions, anyway.

Sometimes (okay, all the time) grad school gets me down for being a pointless waste of time. Sometimes I let the gloomsayers all around me affect my own attitude, question my own sense of purpose. The day before I met Existential Crisis Guy I had even been thinking things like, “Maybe people really don’t need libraries. Maybe they will disappear and I’ll have to find a different, less awesome job.” I know it’s not really on par with what Existential Crisis Guy was going through, but meeting him definitely helped me get over it. I can tell you with 100% surety that we NEED libraries. Maybe not for little things anymore, like looking up how tall giraffes get, but for big things, things where you need answers but also community.

So, thank you, Existential Crisis Guy. I hope I can help you as much as you’ve helped me.

Tagged: libraries

Posted in Library Tales |

Library Receptionist?

January 16th, 2011 by pladd

So this is a quote from my Field Experience Blog, which I am treating way more like a blog and less like the academic assignment it actually is. Hopefully my advisor won’t regret his choice of formats because of my rambling nature. It is normally not that exciting–I mostly just report what non-fiction questions I answer and collection maintenance I do–but this happened today and I couldn’t not write about it:

“Then close to my time to leave, something small happened that I’ve been thinking about almost constantly since. This woman was asking me if anyone had turned in her thumb drive, which she had apparently lost at the library at some point. She seemed really annoyed that I didn’t immediately understand the situation from the statement “Has anyone seen my USB?” She complained that, “A librarian assured me that she would send an email around to all of you library receptionists!” As an intern, I don’t have a Wake County email address, so sometimes I am out of the loop on these things. I checked the lost and found for her, but no one had turned in her thumb drive. She left, and I thought about the phrase “library receptionist” for the rest of the night.

Most people assume that if you’re sitting behind a desk in the library, you’re a librarian, which is totally fair. How are they supposed to know the actual professional requirements of the term “librarian”? To them, a librarian is someone who sits at a desk at the library and can help them find books. And any library assistant or unpaid intern can do that, master’s degree in progress or no. I’ve never had anyone assume that, because I’m sitting behind a desk at the front of the library, I’m a receptionist. I guess it makes sense; at plenty of offices or businesses that’s what it would mean. Plus, I am awesome at typing and answering the phone. But I’m not a receptionist. I’m not going to grad school to be a receptionist. I don’t spend almost all of my free time reading children’s books to be a better receptionist. But is that how people see us? No wonder we are always explaining that Yes, you DO need a master’s degree for that. No wonder we’re so defensive as a profession, sometimes to our detriment. It used to really bother me when librarians I worked with would make their master’s degree such a big deal or try to pull rank with it, when I’ve known amazing library assistants with years of experience who could do anything they could, a lot of times better. I still think, even after almost earning mine, that the master’s degree is overrated; experience is still the best teacher. But I’m beginning to see why people defend it so much: because we do so much work that people consistently undervalue or don’t notice, and a master’s degree is at least an outward sign of that.

But, like a good writer, we need to show rather than tell. I think we need to stop whining in class or on our field experience blogs that we’re professionals, that we deserve to be recognized for being more than just receptionists, and show people that we are. We need to stop insisting to each other that we’re relevant and do something to make other people believe it. I don’t know what that something is yet–it’s probably more than one thing–but I’ll get back to you.”

Tagged: librarians, rants

Posted in Library Tales |

Strange Library Sightings: “Naked Rampage”

November 12th, 2010 by pladd

One of my coworkers who goes to NC State showed me this news report today at work about, as she put it “some guy running through the library (voice drops to a whisper) IN THE BUFF”. The headline “Naked Rampage” confused me at first until I saw the video and how he was wildly throwing books off the shelves. So maybe it should be retitled “Naked Book Rampage”, which sounds like a fun time.

But maybe that’s just because I, too, am really stressed about finals. I feel your pain, Seth Pace.

Tagged: library, naked, video

Posted in Library Tales |