Librarian Reads Entire YA Collection

To those of you who have the curmudgeonly attitude that librarians don’t have time to read… meet Karen Yingling.

In just over 9 years, Middle School librarian Karen Yingling read all 6,000 hardcover fiction books kept in the library.

“I wanted to make sure that all the books were good,” she said.

Her journey began in 2002, when she cracked open The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

In the years since she tore through three or four young adult novels daily, reading for three hours each night after work.

“The kids ask me how I can do it, and I tell them that I’m like a marathon runner of reading,” she said. “It shows them that the more you read, the more you develop those reading muscles.”

Last Wednesday, Feb. 16, she crossed the finish line, reading Roots in the Outfield by Jane Zirpoli.

I’m in awe. That averages out to nearly 2 books per day. I’m a huge fan of YA literature, and wish I could churn out books like this in addition to work and my course load. My goal for 2011 is 150 books, and I am well on my way to meeting it.

But I think what I love most of all about this story is that Yingling found a creative way to engage her students.

Yingling prides herself on her ability to help students find a book that won’t put them to sleep during daily silent reading sessions.

“When the kids get the right book, they’re not going to struggle, and they won’t have to keep reading the same pages over and over,” she said. “A lot of kids say they don’t like reading … until just the right book hits.”

She doesn’t put a new book on the shelves without reading it first. This woman knows her stuff.

I would have loved a librarian like her way back when I was in middle school.

 

Libraries Will Survive

The Annoyed Librarian really hates this video (and others like it), but I like them.

She laments:

Instead of videos showing how silly librarians can be, why not make some videos showing how truly helpful they can be? And I don’t mean helping people get a videogame or an episode of Star Trek, but helpful for more serious purposes. Don’t any normal people use libraries? Doesn’t anyone who’s not either crazy or poor ever use them? Why don’t we get that video?

Are librarians all so desperate for affection? So compliant about budget cuts and poor working conditions? Aren’t there librarians out there who stand up for themselves? Why aren’t they making videos?

I wish librarians would declare a moratorium on making any more cutesy videos of themselves, so that the public wouldn’t have the impression that all librarians are like this.  And anyone who liked the video should keep one more thing in mind. That woman who sang, “I will survive, I will survive” – whatever happened to her?

What a curmudgeonly attitude! I actually find myself disagreeing with nearly every post by the Annoyed Librarian, but this one just takes the cake.

Librarians are allowed to have fun. Librarians are allowed to make fun of themselves. Librarians are allowed to be silly and break stereotypes. Librarians, while definitely professional, don’t have to be professional 100% of the time.

What about the youth librarian who dyed her hair pink and dressed like a pirate to promote reading? It worked! But wait… she was acting too silly, and we musn’t do that.

I hope you join me in celebrating the librarians who don’t take themselves too seriously!

Check Out E-Readers from the Library

This is a really neat idea:

The Norwalk Public Library will have a variety of e-readers available for circulation as of Monday, September 20th. Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s E-reader, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook will all be available for a one week checkout from the main library at 1 Belden Avenue and from the South Norwalk Branch Library at 10 Washington St.

The purpose of circulating the E-readers is to give library patrons a chance to try out different readers before making a commitment to buy one for home use. The library is looking to eventually offer a database of E-book titles available for download, but is launching into the E-book fray this fall with the E-readers.

The same five titles from the bestsellers’ list have been loaded on each of the E-readers: Postcard Killers, Spider Bones, The Help, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, andOutliers. The E readers also have dictionaries and user’s guides loaded on them.

IPads are also available to try out at both libraries, but for will be for in-house use only.

For more info, contact Chris Bradley at 203-899-2780 ext. 126 or cbradley@norwalkpubliclibrary.org.

The Norwalk Public Library, 1 Belden Avenue, Norwalk, CT 203-899-2780. Corner of Mott Avenue and Belden Avenue. http://www.norwalkpubliclibrary.org and the South Norwalk Branch Library, 10 Washington Street, South Norwalk, CT 203-899-2790.

But I have to wonder what kind of precautions they’ve taken against damage. And are you only allowed to check out the e-reader once, since it’s really only to evaluate the device?

The Academic Librarian

From The Atlantic:

Donna Reed in the nightmare portion of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” be-spectacled, bunned, and timid, seems still to be the exemplar in people’s head when they think of a librarian.  And, although we have a country full of college graduates, a librarian is still conceived of as the matronly local public librarian, stamping cards and finding interesting books for tweens.

But librarianship is both more rigorous and less self-important than people think.  My colleagues and I have advanced scholarly degrees (I have a BA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from NYU, an MA and an M.Phil. in medieval history from here at Columbia, and an MLIS from Rutgers).  We know how to do research better than most faculty, as professors often don’t adapt to new methodologies or technology, preferring the tried-and-true (not all, but oh, so very many).  But we are treated as service personnel by the majority of faculty and as punch-lines by those outside academia altogether.

At the same time, we are gregarious and resourceful.  I tend to feel that my bartending experience was as important as my scholarly training: it taught me how to multi-task, to handle difficult people tactfully, and gave me an ethos of customer service.  We are sympathetic, supportive, and often silly (when it works best, as in undergrad orientations).  We are au courant with technological developments (like the porn industry, we are aggressive at adapting new technologies to our own ends).

In other words, we are well-rounded human beings, not figures of fun.  It would be nice if more people realized that.

Library Volunteers

The NYTimes has the answer to a question: Should volunteers re-consider if FT employees lose their jobs to those volunteers?

Google’s Book Search

I am one of the people who tend to assume that Google knows everything there is to know about information storage and retrieval; it is, after all, what they do.

But this article written last year by Geoffrey Nunberg proves otherwise.

Start with publication dates. To take Google’s word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, Stephen King’s Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few. And while there may be particular reasons why 1899 comes up so often, such misdatings are spread out across the centuries. A book on Peter F. Drucker is dated 1905, four years before the management consultant was even born; a book of Virginia Woolf’s letters is dated 1900, when she would have been 8 years old. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.

Of course, there are bound to be occasional howlers in a corpus as extensive as Google’s book search, but these errors are endemic. A search on “Internet” in books published before 1950 produces 527 results; “Medicare” for the same period gets almost 1,600. Or you can simply enter the names of famous writers or public figures and restrict your search to works published before the year of their birth. “Charles Dickens” turns up 182 results for publications before 1812, the vast majority of them referring to the writer. The same type of search turns up 81 hits for Rudyard Kipling, 115 for Greta Garbo, 325 for Woody Allen, and 29 for Barack Obama. (Or maybe that was another Barack Obama.)

It seems to me that there is only one explanation for such egregious errors: carelessness. Based on the information in the article, Google tries to place the blame on the folks they got the information from.

But here’s the thing: don’t put information in your database if you don’t know what information is there.

It’s pretty simple.

Not sure if this huge file is going to be a mess? Take a small sample and see what your system does with it. If it spits out gibberish (and folks, 19k+ returns on “Internet” found in books published before 1957 is gibberish) then you don’t put it in.

The information you pull out of any system is only as good as the information you put into it. I live by this rule on a daily basis.

When I saw that this article had been published a year ago, I very nearly decided not to post about it. Surely they’ve come a long way in correcting the mess in a year! But… no. I ran some searches myself and found more problems than were reported a year ago. It seems the errors are getting worse with time, not better.

I understand that it’s a huge undertaking to manually go in and fix these errors, but it must be done. Otherwise, Google Book Search becomes virtually useless as anything other than another e-book reader.

Library Book Dominoes

I’m a little behind the times on this, but wow.

Except for some scratches, no one was seriously hurt Wednesday when a few rows of bookshelves came tumbling down, domino-style, on the second floor of Indiana State University’s Cunningham Memorial Library.

But the incident resulted in the closure of the library for the remainder of Wednesday and Thursday, and now 25,000 books need to be put back in order and reshelved.

I’m so glad *I* don’t have to reshelve all of those books!!!