LibraryTechtonics

OK, so I’m a bit stuck on this issue of the Improper Bostonian.

Mopsy Strange Kennedy highlighted The Book Club Cookbook, which pairs good books with good recipes. Perhaps books and concepts like this will help stem the tide of concern over reading on the decline by encouraging people to form book groups — maybe even at their libraries — read books, and talk about them while they eat together.

The current issue of the Improper Bostonian includes their 13th annual “best of” lists for Boston. One of the most fabulous listings was for Newtonville Books in Newton, MA, where they have an even they call “Books and Brews“.

What is the “Books & Brews” author event series?
The Books & Brews series are events which are cohosted by Newtonville Books and a local restaurant. After the reading and signing at the bookstore, patrons are invited to stroll down the street to a local restaurant with the author to enjoy free appetizers and a free drink. It is a wonderful social event for mixing and mingling with writers, friends and other bibliophiles.

When I was at Wesleyan, my house (Alpha Delta Phi Literary Society) offered a similar programming called Faculty Fellows, where faculty would give a lecture or talk about their work, their research, recent publications, or current topics in their field. Then, we would retire to the eating club in our house to have dinner with the faculty. It was awesome for business, and all the lecture attendees had a positive experience in our house, and would return for other events.

Yes, I imagine some libraries would have a problem with promoting the consumption of alcohol. But really, how best to encourage young, hip, newly-minted taxpayers that the library is where it’s at than by promoting an event they would be really interested in attending? Have the book reading in the library, then patronize local establishments. Heck, if you wanted to include the non-drinking set, offer “Books and [Coffee] Brews”, or something like that. Or even have local eateries bring food to the library, and charge a small fee for a small, snack-sized buffet or something. Excellent for library traffice and local business, and it breeds the “libraries are cool places” feeling in patrons.

My project for Our Lady of Presentation, a parochial elementary school in Brighton, has taken an excellent turn.

This is a great example of how networking can get you what you need, and how spiffy cool it is for the profession for librarians to be talking to other librarians just in general.

As I mentioned, I taught my last workshop at Watertown last night, and after the workshop, I was chatting with the YA librarian about my progress in my job search. That led in to my work on this volunteer project to help overhaul this school library, and how I’m researching an option to lease the reference items we need. Turns out Watertown is preparing for a major renovation, and moving to a temporary location, just as they are weeding in different departments, including YA. She proceeded to show me the weed cart, and all the stuff she’s basically been giving away, with all the leftovers going to the library book sale.

I am getting a World Book set, 2003 edition, and a bunch of other fabulous reference sets and items for *free*. This is just too cool. I told the project director about the score, and she’s *stoked*. This not only helps us achieve our September deadline of having a basic library in place for the new school year, but gives us more time to think about our collection development policy and options more carefully.

Yay!

Patron Calls Cops on Web Surfer at Palm Beach Library
[c/o Library Journal 29 jul '04]

Part of why I can’t work in a public library is because I don’t know how I would handle this situation, but it certainly be the way a library board of trustees would want me to. The person who reported the guy looking at little boys in their underwear had genuine concerns, but this is a situation where librarians are unfairly stuck in the middle with no good answer.

See, for me, as a librarian, to be adamant about free access for everyone, including young adults, and then say someone can’t look at whatever they want on the web is hypocritical. It’s a tough call for a librarian, and while saying “It’s unfiltered access and me stopping that patron is infringing on his rights” on one hand is a suboptimal response in such an extreme situation, watching from a distance and saying “There’s nothing wrong” feels dirty.

Librarians are continually stuck in this catch-22 situation where action on one hand sets a bad precedent and infringes on individual rights, or on the other hand makes the librarian look like the bad, passive, not-my-problem person. We are trained and degreed facilitators of information, and we are charged, on a level, to be impartial. We can’t just wander up to someone at a computer while we’re on shift and say “That’s dirty, stop it”, about little naked boys, or an anime web site, or Planned Parenthood information sites, or whatever we don’t care for people to be looking at, as if we should be looking at all.

It goes back to the moral fiber issue, where we can help people determine the authoritativeness of information, or teach them how to find information, but we are not here to judge what they do with it. That’s not what I got into this profession for, really, and I don’t think it’s our job to stitch the moral fiber of the community together when it’s broken. We are simply here to give them the tools to do it.

Librarians are not babysitters, not for kids, not for grownups. But no matter where the librarians went on this, it was going to be a bad call. I’d like to know more about the librarians’ side of this, to know just what they saw and how much. The article makes it sound like a very defensive sort of “we don’t see anything” reaction, which I hope isn’t the case. I’d rather a librarian own up to what the patron is looking at and still say it’s a private transaction than lie and say they don’t see the kiddie porn. That just makes us all look and sound like passive-aggressive liars.

The patron did the right thing, I think. The patron looked out for the kids, in lieu, unfortunately, of the children’s parents. I also think this would make an *excellent* case study for a library management or reference class.

Last night was my last workshop at Watertown Free Public Library, teaching kids about the basics of web development, and at the same time a bit about layout and design.

Backup for Background: I was a web developer in a past life, which means that designers, who understood color, design, layout, composition, all that sort of professional designer stuff, gave me layered Photoshop files, and I basically built HTML code from the pretty pictures, and cut image files to plug in to the code. I, however, am not a pretty pictures gal (note the simple layout and design of my blog). I’m big on less is more, partly because my design kung fu is not pro, and partly because I only use design elements as appropriate.

However, understanding using the right tool for the job — design element appropriateness — is inextricably attached to learning good HTML and XHTML coding. Sure, you could have the craziest, most beautiful Escher drawing you’ve ever seen as a background image, because you can use an image as the background to your site, but it may not make the page very legible, and therefore pretty much unusable. So I had a lot of fun sneaking little bits of “just because you know how to do it doesn’t mean it really *works*” into the workshop. And the coolest part is that the kids were getting it, telling me about examples of bad design they’ve seen on the web, asking me “how do they get like that” and how to avoid doing that themselves.

The other fun thing about last night was the style of the workshop. We only had two kids last night, and it was nice to be back in the tech lab style of teaching, where everything is based on what the students already know, really want to learn, and more individualized question answering. I had a rough lesson plan for each workshop, but with young adults, or with anyone for that matter, keeping it flexible when it comes to teaching hands-on tech really makes it easier and more fun. The best way of learning HTML in particular, I find, is learning by doing. One hour was not really enough time, but most of what we covered was very much the “try it and see what it does” approach, focusing on having the kids really think about the code, and what it does, and asking them questions that made them logically think about how to modify the code to do other things. Subversive training in critical thinking. It was quite spiffy.

Overall, I think we covered a lot more than blogs and web design in the classes I taught. The first blog workshop covered how to create a blog, but also how to keep your information private on the web, and the concept of current information as key to site freshness. We covered some search concepts, as well as the fact that blogs can be searched for information of interest, and how to use the free Bloglines aggregator to do both. Kids then applied some of the search skills in looking for images for their web sites in the third workshop on setting up a simple web site, and we covered a little copyright without sounding too boring. Last night was heavy hands-on with the code, but included many of these elements in the notion of planning before you build, finding the information you need, and knowing what to do with it on your site.

I love it when things converge so conveniently. In information, it often does.