I finished finishing a book recently. That is, I completed a draft of a mystery ages ago, let it sit in a quiet place for a while to ripen, and then took it out and decided it needed some fairly significant changes. Then it had to sit in a quiet place again. I made more changes, and I thought it was done but as soon as I uploaded the chapters and saw it through a different layout (funny how that works) I discovered a dozen missing words, duplicate phrases, etc. –small mistakes that had hidden in plain sight, so I went through it all again. And when that was done, I made a cover, switched the setting to “public,” and uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive. Though I’m sure there are still some glitches, and possibly some glaring errors, it’s out there now, free for anyone who feels like reading a mystery.
Category: personal
Earth Day 2020
What a bittersweet Earth Day. As the day of protest turns 50, humankind has retreated indoors and nature is cautiously advancing into territory we claimed for Progress. You can see the mountains again from Los Angeles. You can see fish in the canals of Venice. Goats munch garden hedges in Llandudno as they venture into the empty streets.
Odds & Beginnings
I started to type “odds and ends” as a title for this post, and then had to make a pun. Forgive me, but this is my first post-IHE entry. It has been odd to not have a weekly deadline breathing down my neck, having been blogging for food since 2009. But it has also been freeing and I just have to get used to that freedom and use it for good. Here are some things I’m doing and reading.
So, this is happening – I get to go back to ER&L, a gathering of technically-inclined and savvy librarians in my long-ago stomping ground of Austin, Texas this March. I get to talk about the Project Information Literacy study I’ve been working on with researcher extraordinaire and PI Alison Head and Twitter maven and all-around-wordsmith-and-scholar Margy MacMillan. This is what I promised to talk about:
How prepared are librarians, and the students they serve, to navigate technologies that are fundamentally changing how we encounter, evaluate, and create information? In the past decade, a handful of platforms have become powerful information intermediaries that help us search and connect but also are tools to foment disinformation, amplify hate, increase polarization, and compile details of our lives as raw material for persuasion and control. We no longer have to seek information; it seeks us. Project Information Literacy has revealed college students’ lived experience through a series of large-scale research studies. To cap a decade of findings, we conducted a qualitative study that asked students, and faculty who teach them, what they know and how they learn about our current information environment. This talk explores what students have taught us, where education falls short, why it matters, and how time-tested library values – privacy, equity, social responsibility, and education for democracy – can provide a blueprint for creating a socio-technical infrastructure that is more just and equitable in the age of algorithms.
So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish*
For ten years, I was an Inside Higher Ed blogger. I was a bit stunned and sad to get the call to tell me it was over, but after ten years I may have worn out my welcome. (Ever since the days of sharing my opinions on library Listservs in the 1990s I have always imagined eyes rolling as my name pops up: not that woman again! I’m sure hearing too much from one Librarian With Opinions gets old.)
I’ll carry on blogging here, though without deadlines and a paycheck I suspect I will be a bit more ad hoc about when I post. A more relaxed schedule will give me time to work on that book project that I’ve pushed aside for too long. (It’s about libraries as proof-of-concept for information as a public good, the values Silicon Valley lacks, and what we should do about it.)
how I became a librarian
As the year finishes and the library becomes quiet, I find myself thinking about how I became a librarian.
It wasn’t a well-planned career move. When I was in college I fell in love with a major that let me read big fat novels for credit. As I neared graduation, I bristled when my mother suggested, “why don’t you go to library school?” As a child of the Great Depression she had a practical bent, and she knew my chosen major wouldn’t be able to support me in a long-term relationship. “Something to fall back on,” she added, which only made it worse. I loved being in libraries, I even worked in one, but it was the life of the mind that swept me off my feet. The kind of work I imagined librarians did – safe, boring, routine – nope, not for me. I had dreams.
it’s (almost) a wrap
My life goes by the academic calendar, which means the year is just about over. One big meeting, one more reference shift, clearing up a bunch of odds and ends. I thought I should probably update my blogging presence here, so why not note a few things I’ve been up to and things I plan to do?
the things we forget
Reposted from Inside Higher Ed; photo of a protest, 1970, courtesy of the Library of Congress via Washington Area Spark.
We’ve been watching the new documentary series on the Vietnam War, which is excellent but also exhausting and upsetting and full of sparks of memory: Oh, that guy! I remember him. Wait, this thing is about to happen. Look how skinny those soldiers are, carrying all that equipment, just like those guys we knew. It also fills in gaps in memory. I never knew much about the Vietnamese experience. I didn’t realize how many Americans were opposed to the anti-war movement, even after the Kent State killings. A poll at the time found over half of Americans thought the dead students had it coming. I suppose that included the two students shot dead at Jackson State University eleven days later, though they didn’t get as much attention.
summer time
I’m sitting in a mostly dark room on a summer night watching lightning flare in the distance. This is a good thing; it’s too dry and rain would be welcome, even if it comes with some weather drama. Normally it would still be light in the sky at 9:00 pm, one of the things I love about northern summers. But lighting shimmering behind dark clouds is worth the view.
The summer solstice is past and days are already growing shorter and though my summer’s less than half over that childhood dread is inevitable. It’s almost over! Which is odd because I was invariably bored, but it was my boredom to do whatever I wanted with. Childhood doesn’t work that way anymore, but I still feel a weird clutch of panic. Almost over! So much I still want to do!