Snowflakes

1. I need to blog more often.

2. I share a birthday with a book character, win.

3. Dave Lankes now refers to me a "poli-sci"? I approve ahahahaha

Snowflakes, yes snowflakes, I have a story about snowflakes for you. This past Monday, I was hanging out at my library back home, helping hang up Christmas decorations, when my ex-co-worker-yet-still-gossip-buddy told me and C (protecting identity) to make snowflakes to decorate the library. Shenanigans ensue, the highlight is that I fail at cutting up snowflakes 2 out of 4 times....so yeah, 50% of the time I mess up my snowflake. 

Anyways! While C and I were making these snowflakes, we had a family e-spy us doing this super-fun activity (it was not hard to find us, we took up the entire check-out desk) and volunteered their services. Let me tell you the daughter in that family? Can totally school anyone who says they are good at snowflake making, she made snowflakes that had Christmas tree shapes and snowmen. She was about 10 and she is an expert snowflake maker. Her dad even made us some snowflakes, he is an engineer, so he made awesome snowflakes as well using his engineering skills. 

While this girl was schooling us in snowflake crafting,another family can to watch us doing so fun crafting, they wanted in on the fun too! A little girl about 5-6 made a snowflake and I wish you could have seen this girl's face when we gave her snowflake a hanging place of honour near the computers, she was so excited that she got to help decorate her library! Her dad even made a snowflake!!! The two families that helped us make the snowflakes had a great time helping to decorate their library. They told us that they were going to bring their friends to the library to show them the snowflakes they made, they were so proud and excited!

What started out as a a project for C and me turned into an epic snowflake making party at the library! We all had so much fun making snowflakes and talking about different cutting techniques to use and our past experience making snowflakes (harking back to our days in elementary school with safety scissors). The one mother was astonished by the fact that they were actually having fun at the library. I told her to tell her friends about how much fun she had and that libraries can be a fun Fun FUN place to hang out. 

This little anecdote just brings home the fact that spontaneous fun parties can happen at your local library, it just depends on how fantastic your patrons are :) Patrons love their libraries and giving them an outlet to help decorate or just make a part of the library their own, they will gladly help out. Patrons like to be proud of their libraries and will help make them a great public space it you only let them. Patrons can be our own little army....er workers who make the library as fantastic as they can be!

May the odds be always in your favor.

The fun I thing I thought about during class

Fun fact of today's blog: watching Conan O'Brien...Go CoCo!

Fun fact about me: I love books and I will own up to that fact to anyone and everyone.

Today's blog:

Meg Backus is my new favorite Librarian superhero and I think that I will be able to use my background in political science for the good of the people.

So yeah, if I get to work in a public library and people feel comfortable in the safe and open environment that I help to facilitate? well, I hope they bring me the troubles they find in their communities and I will assist them in finding the ways to fix them by working within the system in the most high-impact way possible. Who needs the Anarchist Cookbook when they have a helpful Librarian with political know-how and a winning attitude? I will be able to assist my community members in kick-starting grass-root political movements that are informed  and effective.

My years as a political science undergrad led to deep cynicism, apathy toward my political system, and a general feeling that the whole world is set on a implosion course that will devastate the world's citizens. However, after listening to Meg Backus, I realize that the public library can be a center for political change by the people for the people, which is just fantastic and how it should be.

I think working in a public library and working behind the scenes to...adjust....our country's political system would be an excellent use of my political science background and would help me deal with my apathy and depression towards politics in general. I think I would gain hope from those who make use of my public library and want to change their society for the better.

So yeah, I think I have hope for the future and that I can help change what's wrong with politics, win.

Paranoia vs the easiness of Piracy

Fun Highlight of today's Blog: currently watching Jurassic Park...win!

Best Quote so far in Lankes class: "Information Organization is the crack cocaine of librarianship" 

Reflections from Tuesday's class: Piracy is bad, but it is very easy. People become pirates because a) it is cool to be a pirate, I mean you get to wear an eye-patch and pillage other sea-faring vessels b) it is easier to download a song from an illegal site than jump through hoops to buy it from iTunes or heaven forbid driving to the store and purchasing a physical copy. Although, you don't actually BUY a song from iTunes...you LICENSE it...if Apple fails there go your songs.

So establish that Piracy is bad check, but it does have some interesting applications. Take e-books, they are digital copies...easily exploited and downloadable. Soon we might not have to pay for e-books because we could just download...illegally. *Insert gasps of shock* How could I imagine doing such a crude and vile thing.....quite easily. I borrow books from the library instead of buying them in the store... the author missed out on a purchase. I buy books from used bookstores...it is rare for me to pay full price for a book. How could pirating a digital e-book be any different? Would the author be losing out on a sale if I would borrow it from the library anyways then months later buy it cheap at a used bookstore? So I could cut out the middle man/men (woman/women?) and just download the book and read it instantly ( or however long it takes to download).

Oooohhhh I just convinced myself to pirate e-books in the future, bad Jessica. Ahem, not that I would do something illegal or something that would threaten the book industry....sheeet! I don't want to book industry to be attacked like the music industry has, so rude! AHHH DILEMMA! Well this will need further soul-probing and cost-benefit analysis.

Anyways, recap: Piracy bad, though it would be cool to say "argh" and be on a boat ( with my flippy floppys),   Piracy will emerge in the e-book market, could I do it without murdering my conscience? This leads me (by no means through normal lateral thinking or writing) to the part of this post about paranoia. I am afraid that with the advent of the digital book that it will become much easier for corporations/governments/crazy parents/what-have-you to censor books and what books people will be allowed to access. It will be easier to monitor what people are buying, because the option of purchasing an e-book in cash is not available (if it ever will). I just keep having flashbacks to George Orwell's 1984 and it is not pretty the height of panic I can attain by worrying about this problem. People can try to placate me as well as they are able, but not being able to access a physical book to purchase/lend/liberate from evil dictator to spread to the masses just does not sit well with me. Or how Amazon took back people's copy of 1984 from their Kindles because they had violated a copyright.What's to stop these companies from going into our e-readers and erasing books from our libraries? It is much harder for someone to break into my house and steal my copy of the Communist Manifesto or my awesome Bible (seriously my Bible is awesome it has footnotes that discuss literary elements in the text and relevant historical information...makes for entertaining reading), or any of my politics and religion filled books (of which there are many because HELLO political science major with a minor of religious studies thrown in to make life interesting).

So, I have a Nook and will continue to read it, but it will not be used for my favorite authors or my serious, question inducing books that I sporadically read. I would not entrust my only source of Harry Potter to be an e-book or the Chronicles of Narnia or Rules for Radicals. Those books will be bought as  physical copies which no one will attempt to take away from me for inappropriate content or political ideologies that are not in line with the current political regime without a severe confrontation. Someday we will regret turning physical books into solely digital copies....geez could I get anymore paranoid and cryptic? Sadly yes..... digital books are not the "Big Bad" as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would say, but I don't think that they are absolutely fantastic,they will lead to piracy in a new industry and easier censorship.

SPAAAACE and community

#1. Listening to Pandora while blogging is highly recommended. There aren't anymore opinions that need to be numbered, I just really wanted to share blogging + Pandora= smiles.

So, Radical Militant Librarians UNITE! We should probably look into  making t-shirts and bookmarks to disseminate amoungst our ranks. Subject headings should be included along with QR formulas so that the world knows what it is in for. This should probably been #2 looking back in the hindsight of the last minute...but it is more amusing for RML Unite! (lookee we already have an abbreviation!) to have its own paragraph.

Serious business now. Last class there was a whole bunch-load and oodles of discussion on the idea of space; having spaces in your library for meetings and activities along with the library becoming that 3rd Place dealing with Ray Oldenburg's (yes sociology comes up in librarianship classes, along with politics  and other such social   fields) theory. First off, I think it is immensely important that libraries have an area/s that are designed for meetings of all types to occur, which means movable furniture!

Yes, you read that right, movable furniture is a must in a meeting type place or a place that fosters collaboration. Giant signs should be place in the room and throughout the library proclaiming that space as a space where you can Feng shui to your hearts content. I mean who wouldn't like having rolling chairs and movable couches? Sure, it might cut into the meetings minutes or such, but it would be a great thrill to set up the room any old way you wanted it. You could even have a dunce corner!  Milne Library at my undergrad school did not foster this idea of movable furniture in a general meeting/collaboration and I think that the library could benefit from having a place in which the students are able to make their own space. Having square tables lined up in straight rows (giving off the message that the tables are in that place for a symmetrical reason and should be moved only at your own risk), generally limiting the table space to about four people, larger groups need not apply. To be fair the library was a popular meeting place...but there was not great joy in the meeting...it was just convenient. I think more people would have been in the library because they really wanted to meet there, not just because it was convenient.

In any library that I hope to work at (if indeed I do work in a library for as we are learning in class, books aka artifacts do not make the librarian) , I would love to see a meeting/collaboration space that has movable furniture and smart boards for the benefit of the group to work with. I also see homemade fresh cookies being available for hard workers with a hot beverage of choice. I would love to make cookies for the hard working collaborators using the free moving furniture workplace, but that might be a little more harder to swing, so I will settle for movable furniture with smart boards for now (at my hypothetical job). However, some day....there will be fresh cookies for my lovely members/patrons/users. Yummmm

Secondly, thirdly?, well whichever, I don't need labels for my paragraphs..or do I? I should start using Subject headings in my blogs....maybe throw in some Dewey or LOC. Anyways, Ray Oldenburg and his 3rd space, which is a place that is not your home and not your work, but somewhere you can meet to talk about home, work, and life. A library is a lovely example of this 3rd space. At the Boston Free Libray, where I used to work and still pretend to whenever I visit (the members are gracious enough to humour me and let me pretend that I still work there, they are so GREAT!), there is always a sense of community hanging in the air. Members and the staff are mostly all on a first name basis and there is always a conversation going on the library that deals with the community; schools, families, town politics, you name it. There are also some really awesome regulars who come in every week the same night and oft times they bring us food and the new juiciest piece of town gossip...errr I mean latest factual news of the community.

I live in a town that does not have a library (don't be horrified, Colden is a ridiculously tiny town with probably more deer than people and there are two libraries less than ten minutes away) and so the 3rd place shows up in the town's bars. I am not saying that everyone is a lush but if you go to the Hotel or up into the hills to Colden Lakes you will hear a lot community discussions going on. Ofttimes politics are the main thrust of the conversation and  a lot of community business probably goes on there, along with the required shop talk and town gossip...uh I mean factual news of the community). So even though my fellow Coldenites and I are not alcoholics, we probably would benefit from a library with an enticing meeting place for people to hang out and discuss things that is not at a bar...though it would be difficult to bring people in because I don't know if libraries can get a beer and liquor license.....

On that note, Libraries = good place to have meetings, collaborations, and catch up on town factual news.

This is what is bothered me during class...

Last night was a great class yet again. Full of copyright and contract laws and judicial precedent (it was fun for people to learn that sometimes a branch of government which the public voter has no control over and doesn't vote into office can make laws....ummm democratic much?!?!.....the government can be so rude sometimes) and talking about missions and how we will improve society with SCIENCE... of the library persuasion. However, the thing that kept turning over and over in my mind is that companies which license e-books to libraries only allow the library have that license for 26 reads before they must purchase a new license because 26 is the amount of times that a book of the physical realm can be checked out before dying a biblio death.

TWENTY SIX TIMES! A book only has a life span of 26 reads?! I couldn't believe it, byet it made a sick sort of sense. I have probably read my favorite book every year since I first bought it ( yes I reread books, they get better each and every time) in 2003, meaning I have probably read it 8 times....and it shows. I immediately had a little panic frenzy in my head worrying about my beautiful library at home and how they will not last 26 reads. I want to be able to reread my books my entire life but if they die what will I do? In the future maybe a copy of my book won't exist because it did not get turned into an e-book and I will never be able to read that story ever again! Ok...I need to rein this in.

The more relevant reason to life and class why I don't like the idea of a library book having a life span of 26 reads is that I think library books can last longer than that. At my former job at the Boston Free Library I often gave books a second chance at life...fixing broken bindings, cleaning covers that are covered in mysterious sticky glue (goo gone is one of the best inventions ever), reinforcing paperback books so that the covers won't rip or the spines be broken as quickly as they could be. If a book fell apart, I could and would fix it.

Books can last through the ages if we take care of them....heck in my Special Collections class I am working with a book that is several centuries old! I am not saying that library books need to last centuries, but I think it is possible to care for a book and to extend its life span past 26 reads.

Companies or what have you, that license out e-books just want to make more money by making libraries purchase a new license for an ebook every 26 reads. The point of ebooks is that they don't wear out, they don't get hot chocolate spilled on them, or show water damage, or the wear and tears of the years...they are an electronic copy that can't be harmed by the woes that befall books.

Dear companies, I am sorry you made a product that doesn't die after 26 reads... and now you have to find sneaky, nefarious ways to make money. Maybe the print industry knows something that you don't...for example, how to keep people coming back for more.

It might be that I am being silly wanting books to last longer, I mean there are ebooks and nooks with which to read them....but I don't like the idea of being denied reading a book because my battery died or because I read it too many times and need to "buy" it again. That's just mean.

Hasta la vista amigos!

Well....this is weird

I've never blogged before so this is a new experience, but I guess I am looking forward to it? So it's a place to ramble and rant about all the lovely wonderful topics that come up in class and out and my life as an aspiring librarian...cool.

I love going to class and I absolutely love that I am going to school to be a librarian because, let's face it, being a librarian is one of THE best things to pursue in life because, we're awesome. No holds barred, we are pretty fantastic. I can't wait to go to class and listen to our professors and everyone else in class because everyone has great ideas and points of view and it is so...kicking.

For example last week in class with prof Lankes he talked about us (his attentive students) wanting to change society for the better and that's why we want to be librarians...and I was all, excuse me, I am not that altruistic and gung-ho looking to change the world through librarianship. I mean, I live to read books and hang out with my friends....not much society changing action going on there. But then I started thinking about it, cause obviously prof Lankes knows what he's talking about, I mean he wrote a book and everything, so it's not like it's something he spontaneously came up with on the spot during class and said gee that's a good idea ( I mean I guess it was a spontaneous idea at some point but not during that specific class cause it's in the book....and yeah I need not to go on a tangent about this). And when I was thinking...I started to realize that yeah....I kinda want to change things for the better, not through grand giant actions and new political ideologies ( ugh politics...makes me shiver in despair and cynicism) but through the little things that happen at libraries. I want to help people find the exact bit of information they're looking for or that one book that they will absolutely love...which will put a smile on their face and make their day. Or blow someone's mind about all the services that are available at the library. Creating a positive, encouraging center in  a community is part of what libraries do and I want to help create that center, become a part of the lifeblood of a community, whether in a public library in small town in the middle of no-where ( which I've done) or in an academic library at a college or what have you. I want to make my community a better place and help other people.....so yeah....change society, put it in the check column of my life.

phew....that was a lot....maybe meaningful...maybe not... mostly rambling thoughts that happen after class lol.

So, I dipped my toes in the blogosphere.....and that's that. more to come as thoughts start bouncing and ricocheting around my gray matter. or it is grey?

Oh and I love big words that you have to look up in dictionaries so if anyone has a totally awesome word you'd like to share please do....here's one for you, susurrus means quiet rustling/noises/murmurs in the background

OH OH and if you don't know what abibliophobia is it means to be afraid of not having enough reading material....good thing I plan on working with endless amounts of information that I can read!

peace out girlscouts ( and boyscouts so not to be sexist)